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7 New Cookbooks We Love

Add to your collection or wrap one up for your favorite foodie


spinner image collage of cookbooks with utensils on a blue background
From top left: Da Capo, SIMON & SCHUSTER, America's Test Kitchen, NICOLE FRANZEN, Emma Lee, America's Test Kitchen/AARP

These are some mouth-watering new cookbooks sure to inspire anyone who loves to cook, bake or entertain.

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Cookies for Everyone: 99 Deliciously Customizable Bakeshop Recipes

Mimi Council

"Let them eat cookies!” as Marie Antoinette never, but should have, said. The owner of Dessert'D Organic Bake Shop in California starts her new cookbook with a confession, “My name is Mimi and I've never met a cookie I didn't like.” She offers 99 cookie recipes, from pistachio macarons to apple pie cookies, and even peanut-butter cookie treats for dogs. Most are easy (macarons less so), and many include tweaks to make them gluten-free or vegan. She also includes advice for high-altitude baking.

The Side Dish Bible: 1001 Perfect Recipes for Every Vegetable, Rice, Grain, and Bean Dish You'll Ever Need

America's Test Kitchen

It's easy to get in a rut when it comes to side dishes, but this weighty book will make that unlikely. It includes 1,001 recipes for foods as varied as crescent rolls, stuffed eggplant, fried green tomatoes, sushi rice and avocado-grapefruit salad, along with instructions on the best way to prepare simple dishes such as roasted asparagus and skillet-charred green beans. And quinoa taco salad and spiced red lentils are just two of the many sides in this cookbook that would work just as well as a main course.

When Pies Fly: Handmade Pastries from Strudels to Stromboli, Empanadas to Knishes

Cathy Barrow

Making pie-dough looks more fun than daunting in this globe-trotting roundup of all things dough-wrapped and shaped by hand: “flying pies,” Barrow calls them, “unencumbered, not needing a pan to be formed.” Also the author of Pie Squared: Irresistibly Easy Sweet & Savory Slab Pies, she includes tempting recipes such as chai-spiced plum and walnut empanadas, sweet cheese kolache, cheeseburger hand pies, and pistachio strudel, with instructions on how to make and handle different kinds of doughs.

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Pasta Grannies: The Secrets of Italy's Best Home Cooks

Vicky Bennison

This cookbook is essentially a love letter to Italy and its melt-in-your-mouth regional recipes, as well as to the grandmothers (nonne) who keep them alive. The result of Bennison's interviews with Italian home cooks for her Pasta Grannies YouTube channel, it includes recipes such as Franco and Alessandra's corzetti (coin-shaped pasta common in Liguria) with fresh marjoram dressing; Olga's canederli (bread dumplings); and Carmela's cavatelli rigati with beans. The recipes are accompanied by their back stories, plus photos of the nonne and their carb-tacular dishes. If you're Italian American — or maybe even if you're not — they look and taste like home.

How to Cocktail: Recipes and Techniques for Building the Best Drinks

America's Test Kitchen

America's Test Kitchen famously tests its recipes over and over again until, as they put it “we arrive at the best version.” This group of recipes must have been fun to test. It includes the classics — the Manhattan, Negroni, mimosa, mai tai, whiskey sour — plus some fun additions, such as Brandied Caramel Apple Milkshakes. Really ambitious home bartenders can impress their companions.

Weeknight Baking: Recipes to Fit Your Schedule

Michelle Lopez

Some of these recipes are easy-peasy (classic pound cake), others are more complex (vegan and gluten-free peanut butter pretzel pie). But all of them — cookies, cakes, pies, tarts, brownies and more — can be fit into a busy schedule. In some cases that means prepping on night one, baking on night two. Lopez, who has a full-time tech job and runs the baking blog Hummingbird High, notes the active time required for each recipe (the pretzel pie, for instance, takes 30 minutes over three days), and useful guidance on baking basics such as making all-butter pie dough and baking with bananas.

Food: What the Heck Should I Cook?

Mark Hyman, M.D.

The wellness/food guru wrote last year's Food: What the Heck Should I Eat?; now he's telling us how to cook it. Hyman, director of the Cleveland Clinic Center for Functional Medicine, is a proponent of the Pegan diet, which combines what he considers to be the best concepts from the Paleo and vegan diets, such as limiting dairy, gluten and sugar. He explains his food philosophy, then dives into his recipes, some of which are on the complex side — Moroccan Fish Balls in Pepper Sauce doesn't look like a go-to weeknight dish, for instance. But many others, such as Orange-Blackberry Almond Scones (using almond and millet flours rather than wheat) are more straightforward.

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