When I first received a copy of one of this year’s great cookbooks, it stopped me in my tracks. There’s such a rush of books at the end of the year that I usually make a couple stacks at the far end of my desk, then attack them methodically, but this book was different. The cover was inviting, like I landed in a party where the drinks and people looked fun and beautiful, and at the same time it immediately started answering questions about the food and culture. Amazingly, that serendipity happened five times this fall.

What makes this group of books unique is that they are all artistic big swings. It’s almost like the authors, photographers, editors, and art department folks stood in a circle, put their hands in the middle, counted to three, and shouted "go for broke!’

There have been isolated versions of similar greatness in the last few years, often in surprising corners of the cookbook kingdom. Recent favorites from the last few years include Koreaworld, Korean American, Start Here, Oaxaca, Big Dip Energy, and maybe even Molly Baz’s trippy More Is More. The resulting efforts opened me up like a favorite piece of art, making me happy and making learning effortless, everything working together to draw me in further.

My hope is that this is the start of a new way forward, because once you start comparing this bunch with older cookbooks, or those from publishers with rigid and repetitive styles, those quickly start to look boring. This year’s bumper crop looks at salsa, instant ramen noodles, drinking culture, a country, and home baking. Subtle they aren’t, but they get you cooking, eating, drinking, and dreaming, which sounds like cookbook perfection to me. More really is more. Enjoy!

We’ll have one more selection of cookbooks to recommend before the year is up, so check back next week for the full list of 2025’s best. In the meantime, also see our recent recommendations for disaspora cookbooks. Also see winning titles from 2024 and 2023.

Soju Party: How to Drink (and Eat!) Like a Korean

Courtesy of Penguin Random House

By Irene Yoo

I’ve always had a soft spot for offbeat or accidental travel guides that help you understand a place in a different and usually more interesting way than something like Tripadvisor can offer. These books are like secret keys to understanding a culture. I love Fernando Pessoa’s Lisbon—What the Tourist Should See, pulled from his unpublished papers in 1992, and journalist and historian András Török’s quirky and loving Budapest: A Critical Guide. In the 2000s, Barcelona-based Le Cool’s cloth-bound books lived up to their names and didn’t make you look like a dork tourist with your Lonely Planet beside your wine glass.

If a good guide is your jam, add Soju Party to your list. Food writer Irene Yoo owns Brooklyn’s Orion Bar and grew up in the US while spending summers with family in Seoul. While her book is loaded with information about soju, Korea’s most consumed alcohol, and its cousins like beer and makgeolli, it is also a cultural guide, decrypting boozy, fun rituals that take place over the course of a multistage night.

Of course, it’s full of recipes for drinks and drinking food, but the book may be most valuable for the way it opens up this specific and important sector of Korean life to the reader. There is basic information like how to pour for others in a group, which is often deferential to elders and respect based, and how to receive a pour. (Never pour for yourself.) There’s fun stuff like creating a soju tornado, or playing the drinking game created by twisting and flicking off the metal ring on a Soju cap. We also learn how to make haejung guk, the "hangover soup" of beef chuck, Korean radish, cabbage, and soy beans. There’s even a "ode to Pocari Sweat," the electrolyte-rich drink she loves because it’s neither carbonated nor too sweet, making it chuggable relief.

I made dubu kimchi, where slabs of tofu and pork belly each get a side of the plate. The pork belly, seared on its own, then bubbled with kimchi, gochugaru, garlic, and sesame oil, may briefly and wildly overwhelm your sinuses at the stove, but it provides whopping amounts of flavor, especially when paired with a belly-filling wodge of tofu. It’s classic Korean drinking fare, but there’s no need for the drinkers to hog all the fun.

Like Yoo’s inviting tone, Heami Lee’s photos cast a wonderful spell. You might be a little intimidated at first, but the book is too fun and beautiful to resist.

Fat + Flour: The Art of a Simple Bake

Courtesy of Penguin Random House

By Nicole Rucker

This book wasted no time introducing itself as my new best friend in the kitchen. Covid, explained baker-author Nicole Rucker, changed her relationship with baking, forcing a short hiatus. When she returned to her own recipes, she found them fussy and found herself wondering if some of the high-maintenance aspects of the baking craft were really necessary, especially at home.

"Why wasn’t I using a stand mixer to mix my pie dough? Why does every cookie recipe in my recipe binder start with "cream butter and sugar together until light and fluffy"? Why can’t every recipe be as simple to put together as a good banana-bread recipe?"

She kept asking herself these questions and paring things down as she realized that a lot of what she was making could be simplified and still taste wonderful. As she did this, she found her love for baking again.

"There I was, 40 years old, back in the kitchen, finding myself in a bowl of smashed banana guts," she says. "I realized that, as I moved forward, a core value of my baking life would be to not fuck around with fussiness unless it’s 100 percent necessary."

Her key innovation is applying what she calls the Cold-Butter Method, aka the “CBM,” which combines methods used for cakes (reverse creaming) and biscuits (cut in or short crust), to simplify things like cookies and pie dough.

I started with her lemony Greek yogurt pound cake, which gave me an appreciation for her encouraging and economical recipe-writing style, which gives plenty of signs of doneness so you don’t get lost. The sour cream, she explains, creates a "sturdy but tender crumb" while tucking in clever techniques like starting the cake in a cold oven to give it that lovely golden brown exterior. I followed up with her "classic 1980s mom banana bread," which was nostalgic, sure, but ripping good, getting molasses flavors from both dark brown and Demerara sugar, and a bit of tang from the sour cream. I dropped off a few slices with a neighbor and bumped into her a few days later in the grocery store, where she was so effusive about it that I turned bright red, right there in the dairy section.