My lifelong Chinese-bakery favorite, for instance, is the joyously silly hot-dog flower bun, which is something like a remixed pig in a blanket, with the weenies wrapped in luxuriously soft milk-bread dough and finished with a joyful shower of green onions and sesame seeds.Īnthology cookbooks rarely rise beyond novelty status-it’s hard to play ball in the same arena as the 1996 masterpiece “ In the Kitchen with Miss Piggy,” which intersperses James Taylor’s baked bluefish fillets and Maya Angelou’s jollof rice with lustful porcine bons mots. It’s in the form and in the details that each dish finds its identity. Like those at most commercial bakeries, many of the treats here are based around a handful of master recipes (a milk dough, a steamed-bun dough, a sponge cake, etc.). The book is rounded out with recipes for dumplings, drinks, and a few street-food classics such as bubble waffles. Kristina Cho’s cookbook, which features traditional Chinese baked goods-pork-floss rolls, custardy egg tarts, pineapple buns sandwiched around a slab of butter-along with new creations, describes family visits to Hong Kong, weekends spent visiting her grandparents in Cleveland’s Chinatown, and cheesecake runs to Costco. There’s something about the smell and taste and feel of flour, yeast, and sugar that lodges in our sense memories as children, no matter where we are. It is a universal truth that bakeries are potent vessels of nostalgia. They’re worth the read, but they deserve to get their spines broken and their pages stained, too.
The ten books here, listed in alphabetical order and representing just a fraction of the year’s excellent crop, are the ones that have most forcefully pulled me off the sofa and into the kitchen.
The photo cookbook vegetarian full#
This year, I’ve found myself most drawn to cookbooks that are written more as conversations than as instruction manuals-those that speak in clear, intimate voices, telling personal stories with openness and grace, with recipes full of generous guidance. But there is something especially wonderful about finding that burst of feeling in cookbooks: a note of satisfaction, a resolving chord, as if the book itself is glad that I’m doing what it intends for me to do. Midway through mindless scrolling, I’ll be overcome by the need to make a chopped salad with the dressing poured into the bowl first, or to roast butternut squash with a brick of feta and stir it all into pasta. Often, I discover them on Instagram and TikTok.
The most reliable way I’ve found to access that “By God, I’ve got to cook something” feeling is to read killer recipes-the kind that I want to know physically, not just intellectually. New Yorker writers reflect on the year’s highs and lows.
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