Is there any object that holds as much promise as a new cookbook? Page after glossy page of scintillating meals-to-be, well-organized shopping lists that might send you to a new specialty store, the anticipation of happy, meditative hours spent shopping and prepping and cooking and serving. Many more than ten of this year’s new cookbooks earned a place on the seven-foot-tall bookcase I have designated for culinary titles. On my long list are “Third Culture Cooking,” by the Bon Appétit and Times contributor Zaynab Issa, who brilliantly and breezily upends the arbitrary boundaries that exist between global categories of cuisine; “Sesame,” by Rachel Simons, the co-founder of the brand Seed + Mill, which makes superlative tahini and halva; and “Something from Nothing,” Alison Roman’s paean to the pantry. I’m grateful that Hailee Catalano, one half of my favorite Instagram and TikTok cooking duo, has catalogued her subtly playful, vibrant, Italian-leaning recipes, in “By Heart”; that Enrique Olvera, the Mexican master chef known primarily for his relatively formal restaurants, has given us a wealth of more casual inspiration, in “Sunny Days Taco Nights”; and that Ada Boni’s “The Talisman of Happiness,” the Italian equivalent of “The Joy of Cooking,” originally published in the nineteen-twenties, has been translated into English for the first time this year.

2025 in Review

New Yorker writers reflect on the year’s highs and lows.

The selection below encapsulates my absolute favorites, the ones I found I could not stop thinking about and cooking from, the ones that struck me as most unique and satisfying. Some are more edifying than practical; a few deliver on pleasure and technique in equal measure.

“Hot Date!,” by Rawaan Alkhatib

A single-ingredient cookbook can be a tough sell—there are few ingredients that are both versatile and special enough to sustain a whole collection of recipes. In this book, Alkhatib, a cook, a writer, and an artist, who is of Palestinian and Indian descent, shows that the miraculous date—as in, the fruit of the date-palm tree, dried so that its sugars concentrate into a vessel for an intense and complex caramel flavor—deserves its due.

The beautiful book—rich with photos, Alkhatib’s own water-color illustrations, and her handwritten notes—investigates the history, cultural significance, and many varieties of the date, along with the unusually wide spectrum of contexts into which the savory-sweet fruit fits. Dates can be a simple snack, wrapped in bacon, or layered with kashkaval cheese for a grilled sandwich. They can be breakfast: mixed into tahini granola and blended with avocado for a smoothie or, more surprisingly, halved and sizzled in a pan before crowning an unfolded omelette, a dish known in northwestern Iran as ghisava and in Iraq as Cupid’s omelette, thanks to the date’s supposed aphrodisiacal qualities. Alkhatib also shares inventive ideas for adding sweetness and complexity to lunch and dinner, mixing dates with ground beef and pistachios to make nutty, savory meatballs; soaking them and stirring them into a marinade for miso-mustard salmon with asparagus; and loading them into condiments like butter or spiced chile crisp, as an anytime secret weapon.

“Six Seasons of Pasta,” by Joshua McFadden, with Martha Holmberg

The chef and restaurateur Joshua McFadden has a way with pasta, evident to anyone who’s been to his Portland Italian restaurant Ava Gene’s; to anyone who remembers eating at Franny’s, in Brooklyn, where he cooked in the early two-thousands; and to fans of his fantastic first book, also co-authored by Holmberg, “Six Seasons: A New Way with Vegetables.” A recipe from that title that I return to again and again is the spaghetti with Swiss chard, pine nuts, raisins, and chiles, an incredibly satisfying, indulgent yet nourishing combination, rich with both greens and butter.

This year, the duo returned with “Six Seasons of Pasta: A New Way with Everyone’s Favorite Food,” which offers more than a hundred ideas, for every type of mood and weather. For spring, McFadden and Holmberg suggest an Alfredo in which ribbons of leek mimic and enhance any long noodle, complemented by cream and shrimp and cheese—“to the chagrin of Italian traditionalists, I’m sure, but rules are for breaking as long as the results are delicious,” the recipe headnote reads. For early summer, there are beets with brown butter and poppy seeds, to dye gemelli a vibrant magenta; as fall approaches, green lentil ragù with roasted cherry tomatoes, to get caught in the crooks of cascatelli. (There’s also a new iteration of McFadden’s cult-favorite blended-kale sauce, with ideas for pairings such as chile crisp and borlotti beans, or tuna and pickled pepperoncini.) Winter already feels warmer with visions of charred cabbage and lemony pork-shoulder ragù stuck to glossy tubes of paccheri and showered in a mix of grated parm and pecorino.

“Braided Heritage,” by Jessica B. Harris

It can be hard to pin down an idea of “American food,” and easy to argue that a unified cuisine doesn’t exist here the way it does in Italy or France or Mexico. (Of course, look closely at any of those cuisines and you’ll realize how much most people oversimplify them, too.) In “Braided Heritage: Recipes and Stories on the Origin of American Cuisine,” the culinary historian Jessica B. Harris takes on the challenge by “establishing the American braid,” writing that “the early, original foodways of this country are the result of an intricate braiding of three overarching cultures: Native American, European, and African.” She turned to food-loving friends who grew up in different culinary traditions—many of them cooks and scholars—to gather their stories and family and community recipes.

Each recipe doubles as a lesson in cultural and culinary history. The very first, from Juli Vanderhoop, a Wampanoag chef from Martha’s Vineyard, surprised and delighted me: beer-battered maple leaves—which are, indeed, edible— with cranberry syrup. The Minneapolis Sioux chef Sean Sherman’s wild-rice-and-mustard-green cakes, made with what Sherman calls “Indigenous mirepoix” (winter squash, turnip, and sweet potato), are served with berry-bergamot sauce; Harris’s headnote explains that true wild rice, which grows only in the Great Lakes region, is completely unrelated to domesticated rice, and that wild bergamot—an oregano- and mint-adjacent herb native to North America—has nothing to do with the Sicilian bergamot orange.

Is there any dish so American as clam chowder, Manhattan or New England? In the book’s European section, we learn that the word “chowder” might have French etymology (it’s an Anglicization of chaudron, or “cauldron”) and that it’s believed to have its origins in both Brittany and Cornwall, England. The pages about African American cooking are recipes from Harris’s own life, including one for peanut brittle, which was a tradition on her mother’s side of her family, and which she used to make often that she bought a marble slab specifically for cooling it. Peanuts, though native to the American hemisphere, were brought to Africa by Portuguese and Spanish explorers and traders, and only became popular in the United States when the slave trade brought them back. Candy was often sold by enslaved and free African American women, to make extra cash, Harris writes, and recipes for peanut brittle “began appearing in American cookbooks in the nineteenth century, and rarely anywhere else. It is considered by many to be a truly American recipe.”

“Fat + Flour,” by Nicole Rucker

If you, like me, are a person who loves to bake and yet can never, ever remember to take your butter out of the refrigerator in time to bring it to room temperature, Nicole Rucker’s “Fat + Flour: The Art of a Simple Bake” will change your life. During an early-pandemic baking rut, Rucker, who owns Los Angeles’s Fat + Flour bakeries, was inspired to streamline her process, and skip the usual step of creaming butter and sugar together. She homed in on what she calls the cold butter method, or C.B.M. Making pie dough requires mixing cubes of cold, unsalted butter into dry ingredients, to insure a tender crumb—why couldn’t one do the same with cake batter, or cookie dough? The answer is: you can, as proved by her recipes for 1990s Oatmeal Chocolate Chunk Cookies (a “wrinkly, buttery” version that reminds her of her middle-school cafeteria) and a vanilla-coconut Bundt cake. The latter of those also deploys a “cold oven” technique that Rucker learned from her friend Cheryl Day, a baker and a cookbook author from Savannah, which requires placing your batter-filled pan in the oven before turning it on, for an especially even golden exterior, and a “textbook-tight crumb.”

And if you, like me, are a person who almost always has a bunch of deeply brown, gently oozing bananas sitting on your kitchen counter, you may be as delighted as I am by Rucker’s recipes for not one, not two—not even three—but five distinct banana breads, an inclusion that I’m glad she found an editor to support. (I heard her say, on a podcast, that several others tried to talk her out of it.) I knew I would enjoy her Classic 1980s Mom Banana Bread and the version with browned butter, but the Wholesome Hi-Protein Banana Bread—developed for her distance-cycling husband and made with health-nut ingredients including extra-virgin coconut oil, coconut sugar, almond flour, low-fat Greek yogurt, and protein powder—won me over, against the odds.

“Salt Sugar MSG,” by Calvin Eng, with Phoebe Melnick

I’ve been burned by many a restaurant cookbook, slamming it shut before I even attempt one of its unrealistic recipes, the kind clearly not developed with the home cook (or home kitchen) in mind. “Salt Sugar MSG: Recipes and Stories from a Cantonese American Home” is written by the chef Calvin Eng and his partner (in life and work) Phoebe Melnick, of the buzzy Brooklyn restaurant Bonnie’s. What I love about the book is how it absolutely captures the spirit of Bonnie’s, even while replicating very few of the dishes you can order there. Instead, you can make “fish mix,” a playful spin on Chex Mix featuring dried anchovies and dried shrimp; “hot salad” (romaine sautéed with garlic in soy sauce and oyster sauce, an excellent use for that head you’ve forgotten in the back of your crisper drawer); and a crazy-good Cantonese minestrone, heady with fennel seeds and fish sauce and blasted into Flavortown with half a tablespoon of MSG.

On my most recent flip-through, I laughed at—and was moved by—a chapter entitled “Mommy Knows Best,” which begins with an ode to Eng’s mother, Bonnie. She taught him everything he knows about Cantonese food, Eng says, cooking daily and lavishly for their family when he was growing up. This winter, I can’t wait to try the sweet-potato-curry potpie (inspired by Bonnie’s chicken-and-potato curry, a culinary consequence of the British colonization of Canton province) and the mini sweet-and-sour meat loaves—an homage to Americanized Chinese food, with canned lychees and ketchup in the sauce—which I suspect that even my small and choosy children will enjoy.

“What Can I Bring?,” by Casey Elsass

Another tricky category is what you might call the context cookbook, which provides recipes for a specific scenario that is sometimes too specific, so that the book ends up collecting dust on a high shelf. “What Can I Bring? Recipes to Help You Live Your Guest Life,” by Casey Elsass, a recipe developer known to some as “the cookbook doula” (he has collaborated on more than twenty titles) evades this pitfall. The book is incredibly useful not only for when someone invites you over and you’d like to contribute but also for when you’re having guests yourself: the recipes are all meant to be made ahead, and served at room temperature.

There are batch cocktails for any occasion (including a non-alcoholic spiced hibiscus punch), cornmeal crackers (“Yes, of course you could just go out and buy a nice box of artisanal crackers, but there is nothing more simultaneously passive-aggressive and effortlessly chic than rolling in with a batch of homemade,” Elsass writes), “scrunchy bread” made with frozen phyllo dough and feta, apps and salads (seven-onion dip! bagel panzanella!), and desserts galore—two chapters of them, Elsass explains, because dessert is so often the thing a host asks a guest to bring. All of the recipes are labelled in terms of how labor-intensive they are, so you can decide if you want to sweat over a mosaic Jell-O mold or an apple-and-Chinese-five-spice pie (“Roll up your sleeves”-level difficulty), or would prefer to toss together some “Party Krispies” or a flourless chocolate-olive-oil cake (“In your sleep”). As a bonus, Elsass suggests a few edible gifts for hosts, including homemade hot fudge and salty-sweet seasoned oyster crackers.

“Russ & Daughters,” by Niki Russ Federman and Josh Russ Tupper

One of the many downsides of moving away from New York City is a decreased proximity to Russ & Daughters, the century-old appetizing shop whose current stewards—a granddaughter and a grandson of one of the original daughters, who co-authored the cookbook, with the help of the food writer Joshua David Stein—have expanded it into multiple locations, including a charming sit-down café and a commissary bakery. The book, dense with history, including family photos and other memorabilia, is transporting and useful, full of recipes that conjure the turn-of-the-last-century Lower East Side. There’s mushroom-barley soup (before he sold fish, the original Russ, Joel, hawked strings of dried Polish mushrooms) and Aunt Ida’s stuffed cabbage (a painstakingly recovered Russ-family recipe) and ideas for how to use smoked fish.

There are also tips for assembling an appetizing platter, and a diagram divulging the secrets of smoked-salmon slicing, a tool I really could have used during a years-ago birthday brunch, when I only realized once the party had begun that the five pounds I’d ordered direct from a smokehouse was an entire, intact side of fish. We made do, somehow, with a plastic knife, blasphemy in the house of Russ, where the Gaspé Nova is famously so thin that you can read the newspaper through its translucence. And though I’ll decline to add fuel to the debate about whether one can get good bagels in my adopted home of Los Angeles, I will say that I was very happy to find the book’s recipes for varieties including egg and pumpernickel, which are harder and harder to find even in some parts of New York, plus bialys, challah, and Shissel rye (flecked with whole caraway seeds).

“Linger,” by Hetty Lui McKinnon

I am an omnivore through and through, but, if there were anyone who could convince me I don’t need meat (and, for the record, she’s not trying to), it would be Hetty Lui McKinnon, a Chinese Australian cook and writer. In “Linger: Salads, Sweets and Stories to Savor,” her sixth cookbook, she returns to the root of her culinary career: hearty vegetarian salads, which she began to make and sell in 2011, in her native Sydney, when she founded a delivery service called Arthur Street Kitchen. When Lui McKinnon moved to New York, in 2015, she hosted gatherings as a way to build community, serving spreads heavy on salad. After the pandemic, when she started hosting again, she doubled down on salads, and things that are nice to have with them or after them, such as Gruyère-jalapeño-scallion mochi balls, or a black-sesame Basque-style cheesecake made with tofu, instead of cheese.

Each salad in “Linger” beckons to me, dense, nutritious and jewel-like. Fans of the dumpling salad in “To Asia, with Love,” Lui McKinnon’s especially beloved fourth book, will thrill to a fresh iteration, featuring homemade samosa-inspired curry-potato-and-pea dumplings on a bed of quick-pickled cabbage. In an homage to Thanksgiving stuffing, she roasts apples, leeks, cubed bread, and sage, and tosses it all in a mustard vinaigrette. The combination of roasted sweet potato, butter beans, and radicchio, dressed in a corn-yuzu-scallion hot sauce modelled after a Noma Projects product, is a good example of the surprising, almost otherworldly alchemy that Lui McKinnon’s recipes achieve, as if she has access to a realm of ideas that the rest of us don’t.

“Good Things,” by Samin Nosrat

The cook and writer Samin Nosrat had a bit of an existential crisis after the publication of her first, incredibly successful cookbook, “Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat,” a hefty volume that taught people how to cook, by way of foundational principles and science- and tradition-backed techniques. What was she supposed to do after that, write a bunch of measly recipes? With the first book, Nosrat (who is a friend) really did help me become more intuitive in the kitchen, and yet I still relish her safety net of carefully developed, if limber, recipes. Her second book, “Good Things: Recipes and Rituals to Share with People You Love,” is warm, unfussy, and generously complete, covering all the bases without inciting a modicum of stress. I’m particularly partial to a section containing “seven versatile dressings (and three ways to use each),” a lesson in seeing potential in the kitchen. The same tahini sbagliato (Italian for “mistaken,” and the happy result of her failed attempt to develop a tahini-based ranch) can be drizzled over Little Gem lettuce or used as a marinade for chicken thighs, to be grilled as kebabs, finished with more dressing, and stuffed into pita pockets—homemade, if you like, but you can also use store-bought lavash.

For a recent dinner party, I doubled her recipe for one-pot chicken with pearl couscous, preserved lemon, and dates, a spin on a Nigella Lawson recipe that I’ve long loved. I liked Nosrat’s version even better, and it seemed to genuinely wow my crowd. Without her recipe for chicken schnitzel, a dish I make once a week or so, I would never have known to swap in potato starch for flour when dredging, for a long-lasting crisp crust, and to grind my panko crumbs to a finer, more even consistency. I’m grateful that she overcame her doubts and put this valuable compendium into the world.

“To Die For,” by Rosie Grant

Truth be told, I may never make anything from “To Die For: A Cookbook of Gravestone Recipes,” but I am inordinately glad that it exists. During an internship at the Congressional Cemetery, the writer, researcher, and archivist Rosie Grant stumbled upon a curious phenomenon: a number of deceased people, buried across the United States, who had requested that recipes be engraved into their tombstones. She began to collect the recipes, and to research the people buried with them, in some cases meeting and interviewing their families. Most of the recipes are for baked goods and sweets, including guava cobbler and Clubhouse-cracker bars, but there are also recipes for Jono’s Jack Daniel’s Marinade and for Whanitta Sheetz’s Fried Ripe Tomato. Grant even includes the recipe she’d like on her own gravestone someday: clam linguine. “My joy comes from the ritual of making it with others,” she writes. “It’s in the steam that rises when the clams pop open, the clink of glasses as you sit down to eat. The food is just the excuse to gather. And that, I think, is how I’d like to be remembered.” ♦