11 Best New Summer Cookbooks, According to F&W Editors
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We can’t wait to add these new releases to our bookshelves.
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With farmer’s market produce at its peak, longer days, and backyard barbecue invites stacking up, it’s hard to imagine a better time to add a new cookbook or two to your shelves than summer. With the start of warmer weather, we’re looking for recipes that help simplify weeknight cooking — bonus points for those that require minimal stove or oven usage, which Irene and Margaret Li absolutely nail in Perfectly Good Food. Likewise, we can’t wait to make the most of the juiciest tomatoes of the year with Susan Spungen’s Veg Forward, and find some new favorite Italian wines to stock up on, thanks to Shelley Lindgren and Katie Leahy. Read on for 11 summer cookbooks our editors are most excited about.
Veg Forward: Super-Delicious Recipes that Put Produce at the Center of Your Plate
Susan Spungen has a way with vegetables, and Veg Forward is the ultimate farmer's market companion for this summer (and summers to come, for that matter). I'm looking forward to picking up tomatoes, garlic scapes, kohlrabi, and asparagus and letting Susan tell me how to turn them into beautiful pizzas, salads, and pastas, the latter two of which I especially crave during the warmer months of the year. –– Oset Babür-Winter, Senior Drinks Editor
Full title: Veg Forward: Super-Delicious Recipes that Put Produce at the Center of Your Plate
Author: Susan Spungen
Release Date: March 30
Italian Wine: The History, Regions, and Grapes of an Iconic Wine Country
Shelly Lindgren and Katie Leahy have achieved the impossible with this book: they've created a user-friendly guide to Italy's diverse wine regions that paints a picture of what winemaking looks like today as well as how it has changed — sometimes drastically — over the years. By blending Lindgren's expert sommelier knowledge with Leahy's sensibilities as a cookbook author, the duo have managed to craft a seminal Italian wine book perfect for experts and newbies alike. –– Lucy Simon, Assistant Editor
Full title: Italian Wine: The History, Regions, and Grapes of an Iconic Wine Country
Author: Shelly Lindgren and Katie Leahy
Release Date: August 29
Portico: Cooking and Feasting in Rome’s Jewish Kitchen
Let Leah Koenig be your guide to the centuries-long history and culinary splendors of Roman Jewish food. These dishes feature everything I love about Jewish cooking — warming stews, pickled things, international flavors from Jewish diasporas, and, of course, creative takes on cooking with matzo, seen through the lens of Italy's produce-driven cuisine. Koenig’s recipes are fresh and weeknight-friendly with crystal clear explanations on less-obvious techniques, like preparing and frying Roman Jewish artichokes. –– LS
Full title: Portico: Cooking and Feasting in Rome’s Jewish Kitchen
Author: Leah Koenig
Release Date: August 29
Perfectly Good Food: A Totally Achievable Zero Waste Approach to Home Cooking
Ever noticed that some cooks can look at a few odds and ends in the refrigerator and somehow know what to do to transform them into a cohesive meal? Margaret and Irene Li, co-authors of the cookbook Double Awesome Chinese Food, want to help you become someone who knows how to turn a few spare veggies into fried rice, paella or a pot pie. They also have ideas for onion scraps (make chile oil), and share formulas for creating a tasty dressing from the jars and pastes sitting in your fridge door. The book is full of recipes and use-it-up ideas to help you eliminate food waste in your kitchen one delicious summer roll at a time. –– Chandra Ram, Associate Editorial Director, Food
Title: Perfectly Good Food: A Totally Achievable Zero Waste Approach to Home Cooking
Author: Margaret Li and Irene Li
Release Date: June 20
Arepa: Classic & Contemporary Recipes for Venezuela's Daily Bread
Photographer, cultural anthropologist and owner of Baltimore’s Venezuelan restaurant Alma Cocina Latina Irena Stein writes a love letter to arepas, one of best-known Venezuelan preparations, in this book. She calls these corn flour dough pockets a treasure, and includes recipes for traditional arepas made with corn flour, and variations made with red peppers, coconut, and green plantains. She also offers recipes for all kinds of fillings, from grilled sardines to soft Brie, pulled pork, and Caracas-style chicken, as well as desserts, sauces, and snacks to accompany your arepa meal. Throughout the book, beautiful photos and stories from Venezuela connect the recipes to the place they came from and the people who make arepas a definitive Venezuelan food. –– CAR
Full title: Arepa: Classic & Contemporary Recipes for Venezuela's Daily Bread
Author: Irena Stein
Release Date: July 18
Tenderheart: A Cookbook About Vegetables and Unbreakable Family Bonds
I've gifted Hetty McKinnon's books to more people than I can count. Come for the allergy-friendly, surprisingly executable recipes that speak to vegeterians in particular, and stay for the captivating storytelling about the people who develop and inspire them. With Tenderheart, Hetty delivers on that hefty promise in the way that only she can, and I can't wait to make my way through the chapters on sweet potatoes, mushrooms, and cabbage, to start. — OBW
Full title: Tenderheart: A Cookbook About Vegetables and Unbreakable Family Bonds
Author: Hetty Lui McKinnon
Release Date: May 30
Still We Rise: A Love Letter to the Southern Biscuit with Over 70 Sweet and Savory Recipes
Still We Rise feels like somewhat of a culmination of Erica Council's life and career. Baking – specifically, baking biscuits – has been in her family for decades. Her grandmother, Mildred Council, otherwise known as Mama Dip, was a legendary soul food chef and civil rights activist, especially when it came to food equity. Her love of baking was passed on to her family and whoever has had the pleasure of eating at her restaurant, Mama Dip's Kitchen in Chapel Hil, North Carolina. Erika grew up cooking with Mildred, and just like her grandmother, pursued a career of baking, activism, and storytelling. She runs the blog Southern Souffle, where she writes stories and publishes recipes centered around Southern cooking and, in 2016, Erika opened her own business, Bomb Biscuits, in Atlanta. Her upcoming cookbook, Still We Rise, will combine both endeavors with 70 recipes for buttery, delicious Southern-style biscuits, biscuit sandwiches, and spreads, all while paying homage to Black food culture and her family's history. This cookbook may be a culmination of Erika's career, but we know that her impact will long surpass its publish date. — Amelia Schwartz, Associate Editor
Full title: Still We Rise: A Love Letter to the Southern Biscuit with Over 70 Sweet and Savory Recipes
Author: Erica Council
Release Date: August 8
A Middle Eastern Pantry: Essential Ingredients for Classic and Contemporary Recipes
Lior Lev Sercarz is one of the best-known spice experts for good reason. Sercarz trained as a chef in France and cooked for nearly 20 years before starting his New York–based spice business La Boîte à Epice in 2006. The Israeli-born culinarian returns to his roots with this new book, written with Emily Stephenson. He explores the origins and variations behind spice blends like za’atar, shawarma, and baharat, but goes beyond spices in this book. Sercarz takes us further into the Middle Eastern pantry with recipes from all over the region for making eggplant pickles, braised stuffed apricots and dates, pomegranate roasted leg of lamb, and Turkish rice pudding. This is a book to dig into over and over again. — CAR
Full title: A Middle Eastern Pantry: Essential Ingredients for Classic and Contemporary Recipes
Author: Lior Lev Sercarz
Release Date: June 15
Bold Beans: Recipes to Get Your Pulse Racing
As a self-proclaimed bean queen, I feel qualified to assure you that Bold Beans does the humble but mighty legume justice. With pages full of beans baked with eggs, sandwiches, baked casserole-esque dishes, and everything in between, if you don’t like beans already, this cookbook has a recipe that will change your mind. Because this book comes from the founder of Bold Beans, a jarred heirloom bean brand, all of the recipes call for canned beans, making them easy, quick, and accessible. Except lots of vegetarian dishes, including hearty mains like a Black Bean Parmigiana, as well as moments that spotlight beans alongside meat, like a marinated bean salad with mortadella. While most of the recipes were developed by the Bold Beans team, there are also some fun guest recipes from outside food professionals, including a French Onion White Bean Bake by Ali Slagle that is on my must-make list. — Merlyn Miller, Social Media Editor
Full title: Bold Beans: Recipes to Get Your Pulse Racing
Author: Amelia Christie-Miller
Release Date: August 1
Chetna’s Indian Feasts: Everyday Meals and Easy Entertaining
You might know Chetna Makan from The Great British Bake Off, but having published seven cookbooks since her time on the show, she’s more than proved that her skills in the kitchen go well beyond baking. Her latest collection centers on entertaining-friendly recipes, or, as the book calls them, feasts. From the photography alone, it’s clear that most of these dishes are meant to be enjoyed family style; Make an aromatic platter of red chili pulao with chicken for your next dinner party, or grill some marinated paneer skewers to please the vegetarians (and everyone else) at a cookout. What strikes me the most about Chetna’s food is how incredibly cookable everything is; These recipes would be excellent for sharing with others, but they’re also incredibly approachable and feel doable for a weeknight —— I’m looking at you, cheesy egg toast! — MM
Full title: Chetna’s Indian Feasts: Everyday Meals and Easy Entertaining
Author: Chetna Makan
Release Date: August 8
Ed Mitchell's Barbeque
When people ask me about the best meal I've ever eaten, I've led a charmed enough life that I have a difficult time choosing. But narrowed down to the most exquisite food moment, there is no other contender: standing next to a lake being fed a bite of whole-hog barbecue straight from a smoker helmed by Ed Mitchell. This rightly-revered North Carolina pitmaster is a foundational figure in modern barbecue in large part because he grew up in a time when the craft itself was not especially lauded in the larger culture, and definitely not the contributions of Black people. In this long-awaited cookbook-meets-essay-collection, Mitchell and a slew of contributors including historian Dr. Howard J. Conyers and scholar and curator Zella Palmer among others, painstakingly place dishes, techniques, equipment, and rituals back into their historical context in order to give barbecue's overlooked originators and practitioners their proper due, making every bite all the richer for it. — Kat Kinsman, Executive Features Editor
Title: Ed Mitchell’s Barbeque
Author: Ed Mitchell
Release Date: June 6
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