My Top 5 Modern Cookbooks
I have a rather large cookbook collection, especially if you include all the digital cookbooks I have amassed for pennies in the last few years. While I have many that I love, there are few modern cookbooks that sit at the top of my favorites list.
My top 5 (okay, 6) modern cookbooks are below with short descriptions. I have favorite vintage cookbooks, too, but I’ll save those for another post.
Each of these cookbooks speaks to a different piece of my cooking soul. You might decide I have split food personalities altogether, and I’m fine with that!
1. Outlander Cookbooks
If you’re a fan of the Outlander book series by Diana Gabaldon and love to explore new food, then you must check out Outlander Kitchen: The Official Outlander Companion Cookbook. Outlander Kitchen creator Theresa Carle-Sanders takes you on your own journey through Claire’s world with recipes inspired by Claire and later Jamie’s time in Scotland and France.
Then you’ll have to get a copy of the new Outlander Kitchen: To the New World and Back Again. You’ll follow Claire and Jamie to their journeys after Claire travels back again… and on into the early American colonies. You’ll even get a taste of Lord John Grey, so to speak.
2. Essential Pépin
Early on during this pandemic we find ourselves in, I was spending a lot of time watching food videos. I did this partly for work and partly for play, but I discovered a variety of chefs taking their talents to Facebook. Jacques Pépin’s short cooking demos on Facebook have been highlights in an otherwise dreary place of food and cooking show reruns.
I fell in love with him all over again and decided I’d treat myself to Essential Pépin: More Than 700 All-Time Favorites from My Life in Food. I was smitten in the first few pages. This is a monster of a cookbook but it holds within its pages everything great that Pépin has done. Bonus… it comes with a DVD that I discovered upon receiving the cookbook (I hadn’t paid that much attention to the details when I bought the book). So you get recipes and demonstrations!
3. Cooking Scrappy
A few years ago, while searching through channels to find something to watch on a rainy day, I discovered a new show. It was all about how to use every part of food to not waste any part. I was fascinated. I learned new things and saw things that my mom and grandma had done their whole lives.
Then I searched out the cookbook. Cooking Scrappy: 100 Recipes to Help You Stop Wasting Food, Save Money, and Love What You Eat is a great primer for “waste not, want not”.
Joel Gamoran takes you on a ride in his red 1963 VW bus showing you how to use things you would normally pitch. Stems and skins are turned into soups and scrambles. Bacon grease gets well deserved love and mango pits get jammy with it.
4. Alton Brown
Alton Brown speaks to my inner geek. I’ve been watching Good Eats since season one in 1999. AB taught me a lot about food science and why various cooking methods work like they do. I never liked science until AB used food to explain it in a way that was relatable. I was hooked instantly and wished I had paid more attention in high school chemistry.
Fast forward to 2016 with a few cookbooks under his apron and AB releases Alton Brown: EveryDayCook. It’s part food science, part cooking school, and all AB… casual, laid back AB. I’m a fan. He shot all the photos with his iPhone – a rather unpretentious move that speaks to the “laid backness” of the book. Recipes for overnight oats and fried chicken speak to the home cook and push us to cook something every day. Please, cook something every day. Even if it’s just a fried egg sandwich.
5. Easy Chinese Recipes
Bee Yinn Low is a food blogger who created Rasa Malaysia. I don’t even remember now how I found her blog and cookbook. What I do remember is falling in love with her story. She’s been blogging about Asian cuisine nearly as long as our modern day blogs have been around. She started in 2006 and grew a small little food empire for herself.
I won’t spoil her story, though, because she tells it in her cookbook Easy Chinese Recipes: Family Favorites From Dim Sum to Kung Pao. As the title states, her recipes are easy. I’ve made many of them repeatedly and they beat Chinese takeout any day of the week. She covers favorites like hot and sour soup and shumai (Siu Mai) and lays out the basics of cooking her Asian dishes.
Let me know in the comments what YOUR favorite cookbooks are… I have an urge to add some to my collection!
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