Andrea D’Aquino/Eater
New books by Sohla El-Waylly, J.J. Johnson, Molly Baz, and more provide plenty of inspiration to return to the kitchen
In France, this time of year is called “la rentrée,” a term that translates to both “the return” and “back to school.” I think of it in terms of returning to the kitchen; although many of us never left, the promise of cooler temperatures, however distant, makes the idea of spending real time in proximity to an oven not only palatable but desirable. Cookbook publishers know this: Each year, they wait until the fall to roll out their biggest and brightest titles, the ones that will inspire us to restock our pantries or spend 48 hours dry-brining animal protein.
This fall is no exception: There are dozens of excellent new cookbooks on the horizon, and choosing a mere 16 to spotlight was no easy task. Each is notable in its own way, but all are united by their passion, verve, and ability to transform cooking from a task into an illuminating adventure. Here, West African cooking gets its due, a game-changing Indian cookbook celebrates its 50th anniversary, baking is rendered ever more accessible, the foods of Taiwan underscore the island’s stance on sovereignty, and two erstwhile Bon Appétit stars put their distinctive stamps on home cooking. Above all, there is an abundance of food to make and love and return to again and again, throughout the fall, winter, and beyond. — Rebecca Flint Marx
Shabbat: Recipes and Rituals From My Table to Yours
Adeena Sussman
Avery, out now
Shabbat is a state of mind. It’s a weekly Jewish ritual, yes — a period of rest and contemplation that, for some, also entails a strict set of rules as commanded by God — but as cookbook author Adeena Sussman explains, Shabbat is also a vibe. Sussman’s first solo book, the acclaimed 2019 Sababa, focused on another vibe: the titular everything-is-great state of being found in her adopted homeland of Israel. In this more pointedly Jewish cookbook, she lays out 100-plus recipes with roots across the Middle East and North Africa that channel a similar feeling that many of us — Jewish or not — strive to capture: a sense of settling, of celebrating the week that was, and of kicking off the restful weekend to come.
And as it turns out, Shabbat cooking is very now, as people look for simple meals that can be repurposed later in the week. Because rabbinic law traditionally forbids cooking past sundown on Shabbat, the dishes by their very nature can’t be too fussy and must be able to hold up and sustain as leftovers the next day. Shabbat foods are designed to feel just special enough to create a sense of ceremony while easy enough to repeat week in and week out. All of this just so happens to fit very neatly into the kind of cooking we all want to be doing: simple, special, enduring.
We get that here in the form of sweet and tart eggplant salad, sweet potatoes with miso tahini butter, one-skillet chicken and herby rice, and spring beef stew. There’s challah, of course, but also Ethiopian dabo bread. There are four styles of kugel but also Libya’s risotto-like p’titim. Most recipes are a tidy one page, and Sussman does a wonderful job of creating intros and special chapters that provide context, history, and an all-around good read. Her recipes feel like small, tasty celebrations of the everyday — exactly what Shabbat is about. — Lesley Suter
The Simple Art of Rice: Recipes From Around the World for the Heart of Your Table
J.J. Johnson and Danica Novgorodoff
Flatiron Books, out now
On its face, a lengthy book about an oft-undersung culinary staple could be boring, filled with meandering paragraphs and historical asides that amount to little more than hyper-specific bar trivia. But J.J. Johnson’s latest book isn’t interested in facades.
Instead of merely treating its titular ingredient as a passive or sterile canvas for flavor, The Simple Art of Rice seeks to reintroduce home cooks to a global staple they likely don’t appreciate enough. Johnson and his co-author, Danica Novgorodoff, carefully pace out an exhilarating journey through many different cultural takes on rice, from the celebratory Dominican sancocho and soul food staple Hoppin’ John to the glutenous Filipino sweet rice cake biko, which comes topped with black sesame and crispy, flaky coconut curds.
But before they get too into the weeds of the recipes, Johnson and Novgorodoff devote the book’s first section to giving credit to the many people responsible for spreading the cultivation of rice, while highlighting how much we’re still learning about its origins. Through a collection of incredibly useful charts, guides, and explanations of grain varietals and their applications, the book’s first section leaves any home cook more than well-equipped to tackle the extensive collection of iconic rice dishes, many of which Johnson and Novgorodoff append with anecdotes about the individuals who brought them to their attention.
With its photos, histories, and technical know-how, The Simple Art of Rice is a feat whose greatest strength is its core principle: celebrating the many people who have and continue to grow, eat, and love rice in whatever form it may take at any moment in our lives. — Jesse Sparks
Made in Taiwan: Recipes and Stories from the Island Nation
Clarissa Wei with Ivy Chen
Simon Element, September 19
“Over the years, I’ve come to realize that the very act of being Taiwanese is a constant fight against unrelenting Chinese state attempts to obliterate our identity,” journalist (and Eater contributor) Clarissa Wei writes in the introduction of her debut cookbook. With Made in Taiwan, Wei offers a rebuke to the trite and overused phrase “food is political.” She uses the underestimated medium of the cookbook to stand firm in Taiwanese sovereignty (an “island nation,” the cover states) and trace how centuries of political tensions and foreign involvement have given rise to modern Taiwanese cuisine.
Food does not necessarily unite: With Taiwanese cuisine often “conflated with Chinese food,” Wei argues that the division of cuisine and identity matter. “As the world sees an alarming rise in autocracy and affronts to democracy, it’s more important than ever to remember what makes us different,” she writes. Made in Taiwan delves into the distinctness of Taiwanese cuisine to create a record of modern Taiwan “before it’s too late.” To properly capture these nuances, Wei, who lives in Taiwan but spent most of her life in the United States, tapped Taiwan-based cooking instructor Ivy Chen, food stylist Yen Wei, and photographer Ryan Chen.
Much of Made in Taiwan is what we might call project cooking: To make the beef roll, you first make scallion pancakes and then braise a beef shank; to make the crystal meatballs, you have to work carefully with sticky dough to make a pudgy dumpling wrapper. But shortcuts would miss the point: “There were numerous times when, faced with a particularly difficult set of instructions, I impatiently wanted to delete an ingredient or a couple of steps, but Ivy resisted, believing that if we diluted the progression of a dish, we would lose out on its story,” Wei writes. Instead, use the process as time to ruminate: As Wei reminds us, food is never just food. — Bettina Makalintal
Simply West African: Easy, Joyful Recipes for Every Kitchen
Pierre Thiam with Lisa Katayama
Clarkson Potter, September 19
It can be tricky to (re)introduce readers to some of the West African diaspora’s most notable — and underappreciated — foods, histories, and technical culinary traditions while still capturing the tenderness at their core. That may be why many books get bogged down in overcomplicated techniques or ingredients that have little to no use or place in most home cooks’ kitchens.
Pierre Thiam and Lisa Katayama’s Simply West African isn’t that kind of book. Instead, it’s a sprawling work of adoration for the cooking and cultures of West Africa condensed into 80 recipes that feel both accessible and penetratingly sincere.
The book begins with a reminder that much of Western media has gone far too long without fully appreciating the culinary intricacies and practices of the regions that Thiam highlights within. But rather than conveying these truths and histories in long lectures or chiding reminders, Thiam’s approach channels the comfort of a quick catch-up with a friend that turns into an hours-long conversation in the blink of an eye.
Thiam’s goal is for you to spend time cooking the foods of a region he adores (he founded a fonio company to preach the gospel of the super grain for a reason) but also apply his lessons to your everyday cooking. Thiam guides home cooks through West African mother sauces and ingredients with ease and reminds them to bask in the sensory pleasures of his cooking, whether it’s the heat of bird’s eye chilies in his piri-piri sauce or the magic of watching fibrous, hardy greens turn to silk in his aunt’s sauce feuille, a beef stew rife with collards.
The book’s wealth of information is an achievement in itself. But its greatest success lies in its constant reminders that no matter how far removed from the rest of the globe your kitchen may be, you’re never truly far from a new world of inspiration. — JS
For the Culture: Phenomenal Black Women and Femmes in Food: Interviews, Inspiration, and Recipes
Klancy Miller
Harvest, September 19
When Klancy Miller founded For the Culture magazine in 2019, she wanted to create a space for chronicling and celebrating the culinary work and knowledge of Black women, whose monumental contributions to food history have too often been ignored, belittled, or entirely co-opted. When she first started working in the food world, Miller wished she had known what the career paths of people who looked like her entailed. “I wanted to make (this book) for my twenty-one-year-old self,” she writes, “a person interested in food but completely unaware of all the ways to participate in this space” — and all the Black people who have shaped, and continue to shape, the world’s food culture.
For the Culture consists of interviews with 66 Black food professionals, mostly women, about their lives and careers, with recipes from each. Adrian Lipscombe, founder of the 40 Acres & a Mule Project, speaks about sustaining Black farmers and the importance of archiving Black foodways and offers a recipe for persimmon baked chicken wings. Salimatu Amabebe, founder of Black Feast, talks about the details and difficulties of running a pop-up and shares a recipe for vegan red palm nut cheesecake. The subjects discuss both practical advice and the overall philosophies that shape their work. There are also profiles of trailblazers like Lena Richard, the first Black woman to have her own cooking show (before Julia Child), and Vertamae Smart-Grosvenor, the author and culinary anthropologist who reshaped what modern food writing looks like.
The results are totally inspiring and reveal many ways to make food a part of one’s life beyond being a chef. It’ll make you want to cook and rethink your career trajectory at the same time. — Jaya Saxena
The Secret of Cooking: Recipes for an Easier Life in the Kitchen
Bee Wilson
W.W. Norton & Company, September 26
Fans of Ruby Tandoh’s Cook As You Are, Tamar Adler’s An Everlasting Meal, and Laurie Colwin’s Home Cooking will find kinship in Bee Wilson’s earnest and accommodating The Secret of Cooking. Like these compatriots, Wilson is less concerned with cooking as aspiration than cooking as reality. She acknowledges that it’s not always a source of pleasure or passion, and she encourages readers to bend it to our wills to find the joy in it. She scraps prescriptivism in favor of “finding the ways of cooking that work for you, no matter how anyone else does things.”
The secret of cooking is finding and maintaining the spark, Wilson writes. To that end, she suggests small things to help the process along, such as little perspective tweaks. “You know you have got the right amount of ‘garnishing acid’ right when you taste something and instead of thinking: ‘This tastes lemony,’ you simply think: ‘This doesn’t need anything more,’” she writes. Still, Wilson is clear that her instructions are there to take or leave. “This is how I personally would do it, but you might have your own way,” she mentions with a recipe for carrot pickle.
Though Secret is her first cookbook, Wilson has written many books. Her literary background comes through as she seamlessly references Friends, the work of texture scientists, and even Greek philosophy. Accordingly, Secret is heavily text-focused, with most recipes formatted in conversational paragraphs and interspersed with thoughtful essays; the photographs are more of an aside, meant to break up the text. It’s no surprise that Secret is as much a joy to curl up with as it is to cook from; you’ll be reminded of Wilson’s endearing prose every time you peel a carrot or reach for a metal spider. — BM
Diner: Day for Night
Andrew Tarlow
Ten Speed Press, September 26
For more than two decades, Diner has been a staple of Brooklyn’s dining scene. The first establishment opened by restaurateur Andrew Tarlow, it was instrumental in popularizing deeply seasonal farm-to-table dining in New York City, and it still endures as both a damn good restaurant and a reminder of how far the city’s dining has come. Diner reads like a scene report from the restaurant. It’s an oral history with recollections from the players who knew it best, including chef Caroline Fidanza, who contributes a stunning essay on her first night in the restaurant in 1998. Although the book is arguably best for Diner devotees, who will likely find plenty of their own memories in these pages, the book still inspires major FOMO for those of us who weren’t there. Its 48 recipes, tucked toward the back, initially feel like an afterthought yet manage to convey the particular magic of the restaurant’s food. If you live too far away to enjoy Diner’s famed brick chicken or beautiful green tomatoes with mozzarella, you can still make your home kitchen feel a little bit like the restaurant’s — and create your own stunning memories in the process. — Amy McCarthy
More Is More: Get Loose in the Kitchen
Molly Baz
Clarkson Potter, October 10
In her first book, Cook This Book, former Bon Appétit test kitchen star Molly Baz set out to make cooking more accessible in a decidedly unique way. With a battery of QR codes, her trademark abbreviations (Cae Sal, anyone?), and so many herbs, Baz builds on that ethos in More Is More, a book that solidifies the assertive, herbaceous, specifically Baz approach to cooking while serving up recipes that will soon, inevitably, be all over your Instagram feed. Expect to crank up the heat and add the whole bunch of herbs (stems and all) and plenty of salt as you make miso-braised chicken with leeks, fried “morty d” sandwiches (that’s mortadella, for those not fluent in Baz’s lingo), and peach halva bostock. There is a natural ease to the way Baz approaches both cooking and recipe writing — with intuitive directions and useful ingredient explanations — that makes both experienced cooks and newbies feel comfortable with trying to cook like her. And for those who are still not the most confident in the kitchen, Baz’s second book also includes tons of QR codes with video and audio tutorials so you can cook along with her; it will be as if she was right next to you, teaching you how to make a perfect hoagie or oeufs Caesar in her own kitchen. — AM
My Everyday Lagos: Nigerian Cooking at Home and in the Diaspora
Yewande Komolafe
Ten Speed Press, October 24
I sometimes take cookbooks for granted. “What can this teach me that I can’t infer?” I scoff with hubris.I skim lists of familiar ingredients and ignore the specifics of the written steps in favor of my own assumptions. Yet that is not how I felt about Yewande Komolafe’s My Everyday Lagos, a book that reminds me of how valuable and transportive a good cookbook can be and how much I can learn if I actually let someone else take the reins.
Komolafe, a columnist at the New York Times, writes that she hasn’t always seen herself reflected in her work in food media. My Everyday Lagos corrects this. It makes space for the food Komolafe has missed while living in the United States and brings the reader home with her to the city in which she was raised. Her affectionate writing makes it easy to sense the cool quench of tigernut milk on a humid day, the sound of pestles pounding cassava, and the buzzing energy of Lagos.
The book traces Nigerian cuisine first through pantry staples and condiments (like agoyin sauce, a chile oil spiked with crayfish) and then through breakfast foods, small chops and street food, the buka menu (“the closest thing to a home-cooked meal that can be had while out and about”), celebratory foods, and, finally, sweets. What Komolafe says about food media is true: Ingredients like irú (fermented locust beans) and categories of dishes like swallows (cooked, pounded starchy vegetables and grains) are undersung in American cookbooks and magazines, though Komolafe has done a lot at the Times to change this. For those of us unfamiliar, Komolafe provides a solid and delicious foundation for bringing these ingredients, flavors, and techniques into our culinary repertoires. This is what a good cookbook does: It inspires you to put your trust in the author. — BM
Make It Japanese: Simple Recipes for Everyone
Rie McClenny with Sanaë Lemoine
Clarkson Potter, October 24
As someone who’s not an expert on Japanese cuisine, I find navigating the aisles of an Asian grocery a bit overwhelming. But armed with some pantry-list suggestions from Rie McClenny’s Make It Japanese, I felt confident that I had at least the basic building blocks to re-create the food I loved so much on a recent trip to Japan. Using quality ingredients is crucial regardless of cuisine, but it makes a particular difference in Japanese cooking, where the flavor of dashi or the texture of the rice is critical to the expression of flavors in a dish.
McClenny, a former BuzzFeed recipe developer who was raised in Japan, teaches readers how to re-create homestyle meals via the foundations of Japanese cuisine, namely dashi and rice. These key ingredients are then incorporated repeatedly into recipes that include satisfying bowls of kitsune udon with homemade awase dashi and snacks like onigiri prepared five ways.
McClenny writes that she herself struggled a bit to re-create the home comforts that now fill her debut cookbook. Her late mother, Yoko, is a major presence throughout its pages; it was Yoko’s recipes, such as eggplant with miso sauce and tonkatsu prepared with tenderloin, that McClenny sought to use as a cure for her homesickness when she moved to the U.S. But the author also injects her own personal innovations into the pages: Taco rice — as in leftover taco filling with rice — sits snugly beside recipes for omurice and katsu don.
At home with mostly the right ingredients, I was impressed with how easily things came together following McClenny’s instructions. Suddenly, I was capable of composing several Japanese dishes with maybe not ease but competence, and that’s what home cooking is all about. — Brenna Houck
Veg-Table: Recipes, Techniques, and Plant Science for Big-Flavored, Vegetable-Focused Meals
Nik Sharma
Chronicle Books, October 24
One of a recent raft of cookbooks about vegetables without being vegetarian, Nik Sharma’s third book displays the same scientific rigor that its author, a former molecular biologist, applied to his previous titles. It’s an approach that works particularly well here: For all the words that have been spilled exhorting people to eat more vegetables, there remains a good deal of misunderstanding about not only how to cook them but also, on some fundamental level, what they are. “The definition of a vegetable changes depending on who is defining it,” Sharma points out. “The concept of a vegetable is fluid.”
Sharma begins his book with a world map of cultivated plant origins and then offers a series of charts categorizing vegetables by their preferred growing seasons, weight, parts we eat, and so on. He organizes his chapters by seed plant family; you’ll find recipes for beets, chard, and spinach (the Amaranth family) in one, bamboo and corn (the grass family) in another. Each chapter is prefaced with information about origin, storage, and cooking and usage tips that rewards close reading; did you know, for example, that roasting sweet potatoes produces at least 17 different flavor molecules that aren’t produced by boiling or microwaving?
Sharma’s recipes, accompanied by his own beautiful photographs, demonstrate his gift for marrying the scientific with the sensual. A cucumber and roasted peanut salad is a deceptively simple study in texture and refreshment, while a recipe for muhammara, which uses peanuts in place of the more typical walnuts, is employed as a silky, sublime spread for an egg sandwich. Sharma lists ingredients and their quantities within recipe steps, an approach that streamlines the instructions without sacrificing their clarity. Such clarity is one of his book’s chief virtues and a boon for any cook guided as much by curiosity as appetite. — RFM
Start Here: Instructions for Becoming a Better Cook
Sohla El-Waylly
Knopf, October 31
Chef and former Bon Appétit cooking video star Sohla El-Waylly makes her cookbook debut with a foundational behemoth of a book (656 pages!) in the school of J. Kenji López-Alt’s The Food Lab and Samin Nosrat’s Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat. While beginner cooks might be an obvious audience for Start Here, the pursuit of “better” cooking extends to all. Indeed, El-Waylly’s guidance will benefit anyone who wants to become more creative and autonomous in the kitchen.
Sure, you can flip to any recipe simply because it looks delicious (broiled oysters with tomato butter, cauliflower korma, a burnished tahdig — yes, please). But the book shines with a close, sequential read, as every section is structured around a foundational element of cooking, each building on the last. El-Waylly starts with salads as a way of developing your palate, explaining not only when to taste but also for what: “The dressing will taste aggressively acidic at first, but add a pinch of salt at a time, toss, and taste,” she writes of her bravas potato salad.
Once you’ve learned how to taste, El-Waylly then explains how to harness heat using eggs and how to work with water using grains, beans, and pasta. Those lessons are layered into braising, poaching, and broiling. And lest savory steal all the attention, El-Waylly devotes the book’s second half to baking and pastry, beginning with a section on how to use butter and continuing onto whipped eggs and cream, custard and pudding, syrup and caramel, dough and cake.
Start Here ends with a section that more cookbooks should really consider employing: El-Waylly assembles her recipes into game plans for full meals, complete with tips on when to prep and how to multitask to ensure as efficient a spread as possible. Every home cook will find something to learn in Start Here — so long as you’ve got the shelf space for it. — BM
Snacking Bakes: Simple Recipes for Cookies, Bars, Brownies, Cakes, and More
Yossy Arefi
Clarkson Potter, November 7
Five years ago, a “snacking cake” wasn’t a thing in the U.S. Cakes were for weddings and birthdays or dinner parties. They were a way to mark a special occasion, not just for having around. But the 2020 publication of Yossy Arefi’s Snacking Cakes helped change that. At a time when everyone’s pandemic brain had them making elaborate buttercream roses just to feel alive, Snacking Cakes was a necessary reminder that cakes don’t have to be fussy to be good or make any moment feel a little more celebratory — and they’re as easy to make as boxed brownies.
With Snacking Bakes, Arefi takes a similarly no-frills approach to a wider world of baked goods. “It was clear that the promise of simple, anytime recipes should extend well beyond cakes,” she writes. “Don’t we deserve a bite of rich, fudgy brownie or warm, out-of-the-oven chocolate chip cookie just as easily?” Of course, cookies and lemon bars are already snackable in the country’s imagination, but Arefi manages to remove any lingering anxiety from the prospect of baking them. There’s a matrix for triangulating what to make based on the flavors you’re craving, whether it’s rich malted chocolate cookies, fruity blueberry swirl blondies, or simple coconut cookie bark, which bakes into a single, monster cookie you can break apart to whatever size you need. And, of course, there is a cake chapter, continuing Arefi’s knack for easy cakes with recipes like strawberry lime almond cake and a vegan mocha banana cake.
The book is also full of straightforward baking tips, like how to brown butter, store your bakes, or riff on the recipes to create even more. It’s a great guide for the creative amateur bakers in your life or for anyone who needs a reminder that they can have brownies in half an hour if they wanted to. — Jaya Saxena
Bake Smart: Sweets and Secrets From My Oven to Yours
Samantha Seneviratne
Harvest, November 7
Like many contemporary baking books, Bake Smart proceeds from the premise that baking can be intimidating to people but shouldn’t be — after all, as Samantha Seneviratne points out in its introduction, cooking has rules, too! And not only can baking be improvised, she writes, “it should be.”
This, Seneviratne’s fourth cookbook, is not, as she clarifies, a how-to-bake book. Instead, it’s designed to give readers enough essential knowledge to choose their own adventure, dessert-wise, with lots of tips and asides on why baking works the way it does. This information is both laid out separately and woven into the recipes; when you’re making Seneviratne’s (exemplary) chocolate, banana, and oat cookies, for example, you’ll learn that you should save the liquid from thawed frozen bananas because it will provide even more flavor. Elsewhere, Seneviratne expounds upon topics as varied as the general unfitness of chocolate chips, which contain added soy lecithin and thus do not melt properly when baked; the pitfalls of over-creaming butter and sugar (it will make your cakes crumbly); and the benefits of owning a candy thermometer (co-sign).
Seneviratne’s book, which she divides into chapters organized by highlighted ingredient (Butter, Sugar, Eggs, Flours, Nuts & Cocoa, Yeast), could have just as easily been called Bake Sale, given its abundance of alluring recipes for cookies, brownies, bars, and snack cakes. (There are also “core” recipes for basics like pie dough and laminated pastry, as well as an impressive selection of tarts and galettes.) The stuffed s’more cookies have already become a favorite in my household: Made by shaping a graham cracker crumb-enriched dough around a quantity of chocolate ganache and marshmallow, they’re a perfect case-in-point illustration of Seneviratne’s contention that while baking takes time (both the dough and ganache chill for two hours), it doesn’t have to be hard. And that, above all, baking is about pleasure. — RFM
Juke Joints, Jazz Clubs, and Juice: Cocktails From Two Centuries of African American Cookbooks
Toni Tipton-Martin
Clarkson Potter, November 14
With cocktail recipes spanning from an 1827 “strong anise-seed water” to a Snoop Dogg-inspired “gin and juice 3.0,” historian and food journalist Toni Tipton-Martin showcases 200 years of Black mixology. As she did for Jubilee and The Jemima Code, Tipton-Martin draws on her collection of African American cookbooks, citing more than 80 of them within the pages of Juke Joints. She resurfaces old-school drinks and concoctions such as muscadine wine, cordials, and festive punches, and she dedicates an entire section to layered drinks including the rainbow-colored “pousse café” and “angel’s tip,” in which cream floats on stripes of creme de violette and anisette liqueur. Those two particular drinks lean heavily on recipes published by Julian Anderson and Tom Bullock in the early 1900s, the era of the Colored Mixologists Club, an organization of professional bartenders working in private clubs and bars.
But Juke Joints isn’t simply a recitation of history. Tipton-Martin makes each drink her own, each recipe headnote a dialogue across time and place with the Black caterers, bartenders, home cooks, socialites, and others who came before her. See, for example, her hibiscus gin rickey: The cocktail, a gin and soda tinged with bright-red sorrel syrup, draws inspiration not only from Bullock but also Sarah Helen Mahammitt, who published Recipes and Domestic Service: The Mahammitt School of Cookery in 1939, and Matthew Raiford’s 2021 Bress ’n’ Nyam: Gullah Geechee Recipes from a Sixth-Generation Farmer. Many of the drinks in Juke Joints exist in the American classic cocktail canon, but Tipton-Martin reinserts the Black voices often excluded from it while inviting you to mix your own drink and join the conversation. — Martha Cheng
An Invitation to Indian Cooking: 50th Anniversary Edition
Madhur Jaffrey
Knopf, November 21
In the new introduction to Madhur Jaffrey’s canonical first cookbook, she writes of trying to become a food writer. She approached an editor at the New Yorker, a friend of a friend, saying she was interested in covering New York’s new Japanese, Korean, and regional Chinese and Indian restaurants, which no one else was paying much attention to. She argued that she could bring context and expertise to these cuisines and, in fact, they deserved to be taken seriously. “Dear, the only good food is French food,” the editor scoffed. “What else is there?”
It’s hard to understate the role Jaffrey has played in making that sentiment sound foolish to modern ears. An Invitation to Indian Cooking was many people’s first foray into cooking Indian cuisine. But what has made it last is Jaffrey’s graceful writing, both in explaining the history of dishes like lamb do pyaza and including her own concoctions like “pork chops a la Jaffrey,” which, she writes, are “unlikely to be served in any Indian home other than mine.” She is an authority without being authoritative, speaking only from her own vast experience. She’s casual, she’s friendly, and it’s with that tone that she has made Indian cooking — and the development of an appreciation for Indian food — accessible for so many people who previously thought it began and ended with curry powder.
Rereading An Invitation to Indian Cooking, you can see how far the conversation has come. Ingredients like “Chinese parsley” would be easily written as “cilantro” now, and a recipe for dal makes the quaint assumption that there is just one kind of “dry lentils bought in an American supermarket.” But the recipes are as flavorful as ever, an incredible survey of North Indian home cooking. If you’ve somehow managed to avoid having a copy in your kitchen for all these years, now’s the time to remedy that. — Jaya Saxena
Andrea D’Aquino is an illustrator and author based in New York City.
