Best Cooking & Food Books

Anthony Bourdain's legendary memoir of twenty-five years in professional kitchens — the drug use, the violence, the camaraderie, and the obsessive craft of restaurant cooking.

Yotam Ottolenghi's most accessible cookbook — recipes designed to be simple without sacrificing the bold flavours and ingredient combinations that define his cooking.

The comprehensive American cooking bible — first published in 1931, continuously revised ever since, and still the most trusted and comprehensive home cooking reference ever produced.

The comprehensive reference guide to flavor pairings and culinary creativity — which ingredients work together and why, used by professional chefs worldwide.

London chefs Yotam Ottolenghi and Sami Tamimi — one Jewish Israeli, one Palestinian Muslim — grew up on opposite sides of Jerusalem and share a profound love for the same city's food. Their cookbook is both a culinary journey and a remarkable act of cultural bridge-building.

The definitive guide to natural leavened country bread from the legendary San Francisco bakery — the book that ignited the sourdough revival and taught a generation to bake with wild yeast.

Ottolenghi's groundbreaking vegetable cookbook that transformed how the culinary world thinks about vegetables — not as sides or afterthoughts but as the full expression of a meal.

Tamar Adler's extraordinary collection of essays on cooking with economy, intelligence, and pleasure — a book about cooking philosophy as much as cooking technique.

New Yorker editor Bill Buford quits his job to apprentice in Mario Batali's chaotic Babbo kitchen, then traces Italian cooking to its source — apprenticing with a Tuscan butcher and a pasta master in Emilia-Romagna.

Ina Garten's debut cookbook presents the beloved recipes from her Hamptons food shop — elegant, approachable food for people who want to cook well without being professional chefs.

The follow-up to Ottolenghi's game-changing Plenty, featuring more vegetable-focused recipes that combine Middle Eastern, Mediterranean, and Asian influences with his signature bold flavours.

David Chang's memoir and cookbook tells the story of how a Korean-American chef opened a ramen shop with almost no money and built one of the most influential restaurant empires in American culinary history.

Bourdain's follow-up to Kitchen Confidential — a decade later, more famous, more conflicted, and harder on the food world and on himself.