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The Joy of CookbooksGift ideas for the foodie on your list, from notable chefs, food writers, and more.


Posted Wednesday, Dec. 12, 2007, at 6:17 PM ET

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I long wondered what happened to my mother's copy. Then, about 10 years ago while browsing in a secondhand book store, Anyone Can Bake popped up to stun me. Never have I better spent $2. I pored over it as though it were a batch of old love letters. I still have not tried to make the Easter Bunny Cake, but perhaps I will next year, for my granddaughter's sixth birthday.

Only one question haunts me: Could the copy I found possibly have been my mother's? That chocolate fingerprint on the brownie page looks spookily familiar …

Why We Eat What We Eat

Chris Schlesinger, owner and chef of East Coast Grill
Two books are required reading for all of our staff at the East Coast Grill. Together they form the framework and perspective that guides the creation of our food.

One is Raymond Sokolov's: Why We Eat What We Eat, which explores how Columbus' travels affected cuisine and culture. Imagine Columbus' delight as he encountered a whole new pantry of ingredients, and then the ensuing meals that naturally occurred.

The next is Elizabeth Rozin's: The Flavor-Principle Cookbook, which attempts to define different cultures' flavor footprints in terms of a trio of ingredients, such as tomato, garlic, and olive oil for Italy, or lime, ginger, and chilies for Thai food. I love how it explains the how and why of basic flavor combinations and their origins.

Bonnie Slotnick, owner, Bonnie Slotnick Cookbooks
The Country Kitchen by Della Thompson Lutes, published in 1936, is an indispensable book at this time of year (and all other times, too). In this memoir of family life on a Michigan farm in the 1880s, you'll find a handful of "rules"—for corn-meal mush, chicken pie, sour-cream cookies. I cherish the book, though, not for its recipes but for its respite. Lutes' words take me away from city life and 12-hour workdays to a cozy, cheerful, food-centered world where each season brought its harvests and feasts, where household harmony hinged on Mother's "friedcakes," where the merits of various pie fillings—pieplant (rhubarb), Crawford peaches, Spitzenberg apples, the novel "pie punkin' "—were topics of intense interest to all.

Della Lutes worked as a women's magazine editor and went on to write sophisticated books on etiquette, entertaining, and bridge-party food, but these tales from the farmhouse kitchen— bound in red-and-white gingham covers—tell us who she really was.

Start right now with the last chapter, "A Simple Christmas," and ease your way into 2008 with Chapter 1, "The New Year." Read a chapter a month (if you're that disciplined) and start all over again in '09. It will be a sweet year.

Asian Ingredients

Ming Tsai, host/executive producer of Simply Ming and chef/owner of Blue Ginger
Bruce Cost's Asian Ingredients is fantastic. His willingness to catalog practically every Asian ingredient known to man helps us all. In it, you'll find ingredients organized by category—herbs, roots, etc.—which allows you to easily track down the name of that obscure Asian legume you want to use. Alternate names are also noted for each ingredient, in addition to a short informative paragraph detailing what part of Asia it's used in and how to cook with it. You'll also find basic recipes to get you started. The best way to use it, I think, is to take this book with you when you go to the grocery store. There's a clear photo of every exotic ingredient, which takes the guesswork out of shopping. It was originally published in 1988 and then republished in 2000—not only do I have both copies, but I have one set at my restaurant, Blue Ginger, and another set at home. This book is indispensable for anyone wanting to learn about Asian cuisine.

On Food and Cooking

Nach Waxman, owner, Kitchen Arts & Letters
As cooking in America grows year by year, it is becoming less a mechanism for preparing the foods with which we sustain ourselves and more a form of recreation and cultural expression. Many cooks, seeking more knowledge of their food, have begun to explore the nature of the ingredients they use and what happens to them during the cooking process.

Harold McGee's superb book, On Food and Cooking, which pioneered this significant move toward knowledge and control, was published in 1984 and revised extensively in 2004. It remains valuable as a rich, readable examination of the way cooking works, explaining how foodstuffs are altered as ingredients are handled and processed in the kitchen; what happens to their flavors, textures, colors, nutrient qualities, and other characteristics; what makes some foods go together and others not. On Food and Cooking is a giant, 884-page, wide-ranging introduction to taking charge of our cooking through scientific knowledge. Accessible and highly authoritative, it examines foods, from eggs and meat to dairy products and vegetables, from sauces and emulsions to bakery products and confectionery. The single all-time best seller at Kitchen Arts & Letters, McGee's book is an absolute necessity for the cook who wants to know.

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