The Best Cookbooks of the Century So Far

Here are some great cookbooks from the Dineread review team.

“Franklin Barbecue: A Meat-Smoking Manifesto,” by Aaron Franklin and Jordan Mackay (2015)

A handful of conventional recipes in this book are a few sauces, a coleslaw, some beef ribs, and your usual barbecue accoutrements. But the big one in “Franklin Barbecue,” the singular one this book exists to document, is the one for the Austin pitmaster’s legendary smoked brisket. The actual brisket recipe fills eight pages late in the book, but the two hundred or so pages that come before are arguably essential to the process. Aaron Franklin delivers an almost comically sweeping exercise in obsession and precision with the respectful intensity of the true believer: if you want to make Franklin Barbecue–quality barbecue, you can’t just buy a hunk of meat and light a fire. You need to build a smoker and learn how to make it purr; you need a wood guy; you need to learn how to manipulate flames and air. The great lie of most restaurant cookbooks is the promise that you and I can do it at home. Like Chang’s frozen foie-gras torchon, Franklin’s barbecue comes with a hard truth: you probably can’t. But if you wanted to—if you wanted to—he’s here to show you every single thing you need to know to pull it off.

“The Jemima Code: Two Centuries of African-American Cookbooks,” by Toni Tipton-Martin (2015)

Early in her career, the food writer and editor Toni Tipton-Martin noticed that black cooks wrote virtually none of the cookbooks she encountered in professional kitchens. Over decades, she read and researched hundreds of rare and often forgotten works of the African-American culinary record. “The Jemima Code” is a chronicle of her learning, an annotated catalogue of some hundred and sixty volumes, many from Tipton-Martin’s library, spanning from the days of slavery to just a few years ago. Whether writing about a brief recipe pamphlet or a dense guide to household management, Tipton-Martin gives each book a helpful page or more of comment, limning the authors’ biographies and celebrating their accomplishments. It’s a beautiful and essential corrective to the ongoing erasure of generations of black American culinary and its indelible influence on American cuisine writ large. (“Jubilee,” Tipton-Martin’s more conventional cookbook, compiling recipes from the books in this collection, is publishing this fall.)

“Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat: Mastering the Elements of Good Cooking,” by Samin Nosrat (2017)

Reference books, almost by definition, aren’t meant to be read straight through; they’re index-driven, drily instructive knowledge-delivery mechanisms. They’re indeed not supposed to do what “Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat” does: just flat-out teach you, from the ground up, how to be a good cook. The title’s four words refer to the central pillars of cooking; the book explains how mastering them will transform everyday cooking from rote recipe-following to something more intuitive, jazz-like. The lush, four-episode Netflix series inspired by this book might be the trebuchet that launched Samin Nosrat to household-name status. However, it’s her book that we’ll still be reaching for decades from now as a guide for beginners in need of essential egg-scrambling techniques or experienced cooks looking to burnish their confidence and bolster their skills.

“Feast: Food of the Islamic World,” by Anissa Helou (2018)

Anissa Helou, who grew up in Beirut, made her name with lyrical Mediterranean cookbooks that make ideal celebratory dinners. “Feast” maintains her crisp, evocative prose and approachable recipe writing. Still, it shifts its boundaries from the geographic to the religious, chronicling Muslim culinary traditions across Asia, Africa, and the Middle East. The book’s three hundred recipes trace Islam’s path from its seventh-century origins in present-day Saudi Arabia to Senegal’s vibrant Muslim communities, India, Indonesia, China’s Xinjiang province, and more. The food itself is phenomenal—bread, salads, stews, curries, sticky-sweet desserts—but even more illuminating is Helou’s decision to include blocks of different recipes for a single dish. At first, they seem redundant: half a dozen simple flatbreads or innumerable variations on ground spiced meat formed into kebabs. In fact, in outlining their minute differences side by side, Helou reveals the habits, rituals, and histories that make up a vast and heterogeneous religious culture and cuisine.

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