The Internet really ought to have killed cookbooks. Recipes—tidy, self-contained packets of information that for centuries were individually swapped and shared, indexed and catalogued—are ideally suited for digital transmission. As they migrated online, liberated from the printed and bound, multiplying giddily, the thousand-recipe doorstops and easy-weeknight omnibus editions that had, for so long, stood in hardcover at the end of the shelf closest to the stove were rendered obsolete. And that should have been the end of it.
Yet somehow cookbooks stuck around. In fact, as the rest of the book industry found itself in a post-millennial free fall, cookbooks were selling better than ever. This is because, coinciding with the rise of the Internet, cookbooks reinvented themselves. What once were primarily vehicles for recipes became anything but: the recipes still mattered, but now they existed in service of something more—a mood, a place, a technique, a voice. Cookbooks of the pre-Internet age remain essential, of course. (What would any kitchen be without the guiding voices of Madhur Jaffrey, Julia Child, Edna Lewis, Harold McGee, and a hundred others?) But, to my mind, the best cookbooks of the twenty-first century are among the very best ever written.
What follows is a list of my personal favorites from the beginning of the new millennium to the present. It’s a list that’s shaped by the particulars of how I eat, how I cook, and how I read, and its ten volumes—which include a profanity-filled restaurant scrapbook, a historiological cookbook of cookbooks, and a multi-thousand-page set of culinary lab notes—may not be the same that populate the Top Ten of any other cook. But what compels and delights me about my particular catalogue is that each book is, at heart, a text that teaches rather than dictates, that emphasizes cooking as a practice rather than as merely a means to a meal. They’re books that not only have great recipes and gorgeous images but take exuberant advantage of their form—subverting, reconsidering, and reframing the rules and limits of cookbook writing. If I’m stuck on what to make for dinner, I have only to Google some variation of “salmon arugula cast-iron easy.” For proof of what an extraordinary object a cookbook can be, I turn again and again to these.
“The River Cottage Cookbook,” by Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall (2001)
Changing one’s relationship with food “involves no sacrifice, no hardship or discomfort,” Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall writes, in his poetic ode to the hands-on, homestead-ish life. His prescription is simple: get in there and do it yourself—grow your own food, meet your meat, learn the colors and patterns of the landscape around you through all its seasons. Years before “farm to table” was a buzzword and Michael Pollan a household name, Fearnley-Whittingstall was urging readers to move away from industrial food systems and reacquaint themselves with lo-fi self-sufficiency: he will teach you how to cultivate your own berry brambles, trap your own eels (this is a very British book), and raise (and slaughter) your own pigs. The idea that pastoral practices can be pleasurable instead of burdensome is old news for the many home cooks today who know how to spot ramps in the wild and whip up D.I.Y. ricotta. But “The River Cottage Cookbook”’s ideas (and straightforward, elegant recipes) remain striking reminders that what we eat isn’t just food on a plate but part of a thrilling natural cycle, our human lives brushing up against countless others, plant and animal alike.
“The Zuni Café Cookbook,” by Judy Rodgers (2002)
Since its introduction, in the late nineteen-eighties, the roast chicken served at San Francisco’s Zuni Café has earned a reputation as the best roast chicken in the world—crisp-skinned, impossibly juicy, served atop a salad of torn bread and bitter greens whose tart vinaigrette blends with the rich, golden drippings. That recipe alone would land this book on any list of the great and essential, but the rest of the volume has a magic, as well. Judy Rodgers got her culinary footing in France, living for a year with the family of the chef Jean Troisgros, and in Berkeley, where she cooked at Chez Panisse, and this five-hundred-page manifesto draws on those threads of experience (and others). The result is a remarkable collection of emphatic culinary opinions, several hundred of which are disguised as recipes: the merits of some soft cheeses over others, the precise way to dress a salad, the nonnegotiable importance of salting raw beef and fowl a day or more before it’s cooked. The book’s magnificent opening chapter, “What to Think About Before You Start, & While You Are Cooking,” lays out the philosophical blueprint for every New American and California-casual cookbook that followed.
“Baking: From My Home to Yours,” by Dorie Greenspan (2006)
It’s true, unfortunately, that the art of baking is more rigid and exacting than that of stovetop cooking. The whims of a search-engine algorithm won’t cut it if you want your biscuits perfectly fluffy, your cakes precisely lofty yet moist, and your cookies angelic; a baker, more than any other cook, needs a recipe writer she can truly trust. To my mind, there is none more reliable than Dorie Greenspan, a lapsed academic who found her calling in cakes and pastries and built a career writing uncommonly precise road maps for replicating her success. With her as a guide, there is no room for self-destructive improvisation: her stylish, rigorous, cheerful recipes work because she tells her reader exactly how to make them work, anticipating our errors and our questions, building contingencies, alternatives, and solutions right into the text, and evincing a soothing flexibility. (If the ganache at the bottom of a layered pudding spills up the sides of the cup, “it’s pretty; if it doesn't, the chocolate will be a surprise.”) And if you only have one Greenspan book, it should be this one, a masterwork spanning breakfast to midnight snacks—not to mention her famous World Peace Cookies.
“Momof*cku,” by David Chang and Peter Meehan (2009)
For many accomplished restaurant chefs, authoring a cookbook is just another checkbox on the to-do list of culinary celebrity, something to fit in after headlining a charity auction but before doing a stint on reality TV. Accordingly, countless celebrity-chef cookbooks consist of little more than dinner-party recipes sprinkled with pleasantly superficial biography. David Chang, whose Momof*cku restaurants blew up American restaurant culture and then rebuilt it again in a decidedly hipper, more global, more postmodern form, did something similarly upending with his Momof*cku book. Co-written with Peter Meehan, who later became Chang’s collaborator on the now-defunct food magazine Lucky Peach, the book is sometimes brilliantly cookable—see the dazzlingly effective method for cast-iron ribeye, or the near-instant ginger-scallion sauce, which tastes good on almost anything. Other times, by design, it is absolutely impossible, outlining finicky and complex recipes that are best suited for a brigade of swaggering line cooks. (I love the headline for the frozen foie-gras torchon, which advises you not to make the dish.) Throughout the volume, Chang spends time grappling with what was, at the time, the central drama of his career: initially the proud outsider, devoted to rejecting the restaurant world’s stodgy establishment, Momof*cku’s culinary subversion was so forceful (and so appealing) that it became an establishment of its own.
