“Blood,” slim and hand-illustrated, is more of a chapbook. Her œuvre includes the sensational volumes “ Fat,” “ Bones,” “ Odd Bits” (a paean to offal), and “ Bitter,” a book dedicated to an entire maligned flavor, all available in elegant hardcover with dramatic photography. Jennifer McLagan is the Louise Nevelson of the kitchen, picking up dismissed and discarded ingredients and recontextualizing them in a framework of beauty and power. But one of the few reliable ways to coax back a spark of the old excitement was the pleasure of a new cookbook.Ī note that the year’s crop of food writing included many marvelous drinks books and non-cookbooks (such as John deBary’s razor-sharp “ Drink What You Want” and Marcia Chatelain’s stunning “ Franchise: The Golden Arches in Black America”), which aren’t included here in this wholly subjective, completely personal, undoubtedly incomplete list, ordered alphabetically by author. (Not to mention that, after eight or nine hours of staring at, talking into, and being talked at by a screen, one is relieved to turn one’s eyes to the relative tranquility of the paper page.) Like so many people, I cooked at home this year more than I ever have before, and haven’t exactly loved every minute of it. But there’s a particular beauty of scale to the best cookbooks, which, between front cover and back, have space for greater narrative arcs and can explore places and people and techniques in greater detail than a single video or blog post possibly can. New Yorker writers reflect on the year’s highs and lows.Ĭookbooks have never been our only source of culinary guidance, and this year’s explosion in Instagram Live broadcasts, TikTok cooking demos, and cook-along Zoom sessions served as a reminder that recipes aren’t defined by their medium. Cookbooks are always marvelous vehicles for armchair journeys, though from our current vantage the travel they facilitate is less geographic than chronological, conjuring a now-remote era of dinner parties, weekend jaunts, raucous celebrations, and crowded marketplaces. bread baking and bean simmering inspiration for pantry fatigue ersatz replacements for beloved, out-of-reach restaurant dishes (plus, for restaurants selling their own books, ways to help boost their free-fall bottom lines). Incidentally-almost eerily-many of the volumes released addressed the conundrums of quarantine cooking head on: roadmaps to D.I.Y. Still, despite it all, 2020 turned out to be a hell of a year for cookbooks. The books that did come out on time, or maybe a little late, were born into a world where the usual promotional parade of bookstore events and in-person cook-alongs were replaced by Zoom events and Instagram Lives, and had to fight against a relentless litany of crises to get even a little space in the popular consciousness. Who could have foreseen a worldwide pandemic coming and throwing everything-including the world of cookbooks-into chaotic, extraordinary realignment? (Besides, of course, all the folks who very clearly saw it coming.) Major titles set to publish this past spring were postponed-some to the fall, some to next year, some indefinitely-and others were delayed as the spread of COVID-19 put printing and shipping infrastructures on pause. With schedules set so far in advance, each year’s crop of cookbooks serves as something of a time capsule: the trends, hopes, celebrities, and big ideas of a few years ago land on our kitchen counters, their fates tied to the staying power of their central conceits. This happens also to be the approximate time it takes for an average cookbook to go from pitch to publication. The African elephant holds the earthly record for the longest gestation period, a whopping six hundred and forty-five days of pregnancy, or just a few months shy of two years.
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