Review: House of Smoke
A national bestseller about growing up in a house wrecked by violence and a South haunted by racism, and how the search for home led through food.
Reviews
Review: Eat Bitter
A Hakka memoir structured around eight recipes, where fermentation and foraging become a philosophy for enduring the ordinary hardships that do not make for dramatic plot points.
Five Heavy-Hitting Irish Cookbooks
Five Irish cookbooks that know where the food comes from — and who made it. From Jp McMahon's 10,000-year reclamation to a pastry chef carrying forward Myrtle Allen's legacy to an emigrant cooking his mother's recipes in Hackney, these are the books that name their people.
Review: The Evin Prison Bakers' Club
Sixteen recipes from inside Iran’s most notorious prisons, where baking scones and madeleines under surveillance becomes an act of defiance too ordinary to confiscate.
Who Cooked The Book
Spring Council started assembling takeout boxes at her grandfather's Bar-B-Q as a tween. By the time she was baking pies at Mama Dip's Kitchen, she was deep into the family business of feeding people. This spring's best cookbooks insist that a recipe is a document — and the cook is the story.
Review: Bite by Bite
Short lyrical essays about shave ice, lumpia, rambutan, and the way a single taste can return you to a place you thought you had forgotten.
Review: Cooking Con Omi
A hundred Puerto Rican recipes from a cook who rebuilt her connection to the island one dish at a time, with the crush of garlic in a pilón as the opening statement.
Review: Eating on a Mountain at the End of the World
A food ethics memoir from Appalachia with the rare quality of not having already decided what it thinks.
Review: Eating with the Sun
Memoir, cultural history, and nutritional philosophy braided through the phases of the Chinese lunisolar calendar.
Review: Food Is a Feeling
Sixty-five recipes cooked in the aftermath of a twenty-four-year marriage, where the kitchen becomes the one room where transformation is still possible.
Review: How to Boil an Egg
Eighty-four indispensable egg recipes from the founder of Rose Bakery, reissued with new botanical paintings.
Review: I Sleep in My Kitchen
A hundred recipes spanning Palestinian heritage and American improvisation, where cheese fatayer and smash burgers share the counter.
Review: Lunch at the Shop
More than fifty recipes from a Seattle bookshop where lunch is made every day without a formal kitchen.
Review: Nothing Matters But Delicious
Seventy-five recipes built on the premise that most of what fine dining asks of you does not actually make food taste better.
Review: Odette: Terroir to Table, Heart to Plate
Over eighty recipes from the three-Michelin-starred restaurant named after the chef’s grandmother.
Review: On Eating
A memoir between Long Island and San Juan, between oysters and plantains, asking whether you can eat for joy and justice simultaneously.