We have reached that time of year again. Every good tomato suddenly prompts the pondering: Will this be the last one for the season? The heat begins to give way to crisper breezes, and we start to crave the comfort of windows fogged up from bubbling pots of soup instead of thinking about how to minimize our time in front of a hot stove.
Luckily, this season’s cookbooks offer many exciting ways to joyously warm ourselves in the kitchen, whether by baking border-traversing croissants and comforting counter cakes, or keeping the stove simmering with Dutch ovens of borscht, beef noodle soup, or budae jjigae. There are diversions from the standard cookbook on this list, too, like a divorce-inspired reflection (in which the essays are just as essential as the recipes) and a treasure trove of a garden almanac that feels like an escape into another world. I’ve compiled 12 selections from the fall cookbook season that have me especially excited to cook and read this fall and winter.
Bake Sum: Asian American Pastries, Breads, and Other Treats
Joyce Tang with Soleil Ho
If you feel like everything is an Asian American bakery now, you’re right. In the Bay Area, Bake Sum — with its Spam-musubi-esque croissants and ube pineapple buns — was an early adopter of the current trend, starting as a pandemic pop-up in 2020 before opening its Oakland location the following year. In her colorful and playful new cookbook, chief baking officer Joyce Tang pulls back the curtain on her cuisine-bending treats, like quiche inspired by chawanmushi, the Japanese savory egg custard, and danishes in the style of okonomiyaki and aloo matar, the Indian dish of spiced potatoes and peas. The bakes involving laminated dough are ambitious, weekend-worthy projects, but the book takes a welcomingly progressive approach, easing in novice bakers via puddings and jellies (its first recipe is a simple, anyone-can-do-it microwave mochi) before exploring more advanced techniques in its chapter on cakes, and then making its way to croissants. This is a book for the person who counts big baking projects among their favorite ways to spend the colder months.
Food Is a Feeling: Recipes & Stories, with Love
Lalli, who won audiences over as Carla Lalli Music during her time at Bon Appétit, has catalogued the dissolution of her 24-year marriage in a cookbook. With its reflections on motherhood, identity, and where a background in restaurants fits into those things, Lalli continues the narrative thread of releases like Tanya Bush’s Will This Make Me Happy and Rebecca May Johnson’s Small Fires. That’s to say that you’re here as much for the essays as for the recipes.
The latter, including dishes such as “weeknight lamb chop special, for any number” and “quick beans and rice for when the avocado is ripe,” are delightfully loose and flexible. These are realistic suggestions for weeknights when you’re burnt-out, but also for those glorious instances in which you care more about getting yourself on the sand than fussing about what to make for your beach trip (for those instances: peaches with lime and salt).Many of these ideas were birthed during “separation summer,” when Lalli often found herself eating alone after years of cooking for four. These recipes (and the words that accompany them, like a list of things that “made [Lalli] feel free”) will feel useful on bad days, sick days, and anytime you need to give yourself grace, but also whenever you need to be reminded of how much pleasure life offers.
Flamingo Estate Pleasure Principles: An Almanac from the Garden
Pleasure Principles is the newest book from Richard Christiansen of Flamingo Estate, the Los Angeles-based lifestyle brand so luxurious and sprawling in its ambitions that even Martha Stewart has described it as “over the top.” Pleasure Principles is predictably maximalist; not specifically a cookbook, it feels like picking up a paper trail while exploring the lush thicket of Christiansen’s secret (if oft-Instagrammed) garden. Stories about the building of Christiansen’s property veer into detours about the history of camellia plants and Coco Chanel, interspersed with archival imagery and photos of flora shot in the style of high-fashion editorial. A primer about the vast range of sage plants gives way to a checklist of garden tasks for January, seasonal project ideas (“help build a bird’s nest” or “make a sage tincture”), and recipes for pasta with sage leaves embedded in the dough and vegetable broth featuring lotus petals and dried skullcap. Pleasure Principles feels like an immersive fantasy world: Open up any random page for a little hit of magic, or an escape into Christiansen’s sparkly, greenery-filled universe. It’s a book that’ll make even winter feel vibrant and full of possibility.
No. 1 Best Indian Cookbook in the World: At-Home Recipes from the Streets, Truck Stops, Villages, and Palaces of India
Meherwan Irani with Jamie Feldmar
Ten Speed Press, September 22
This is a book that will make you want to have a party. That’s partially because recipes like the deep-fried, carb-on-carb vada pav and crisp, thin dosa with coconut chutney will feed six or more (and benefit, process-wise, from the economy of scale). It’s also because it feels raucous and alive, full of bright colors, bold typography, and big proclamations, ready for joyful debate. Is vada pav, as Meherwan Irani writes, “without question, the greatest sandwich of all time”? Is this, indeed, as the title suggests, the best Indian cookbook in the world? This is food that makes you want to crowd around a table, tearing off pieces of seekh kebab with fluffy, still-steaming naan and crushing cold beers. Whether Indian street food is, as Irani audaciously claims, the “best food on the planet” remains up for discussion, but for those of us who can’t get to India or to Irani’s lauded North Carolina restaurants Chai Pani and Botiwalla anytime soon, this book is a good way to test that argument.
Happy Snacking, Don’t Die!: Foraging and Vegan Recipes with Black Forager
Alexis Nikole Nelson with Jeanelle Hayner Olson
S&S/Simon Element, September 22
Alexis Nikole Nelson, also known as Black Forager, is a bright spot in the doom spiral that social media can often be. Nelson is known (and widely loved, picking up nearly 5 million followers on TikTok alone) for her bubbly disposition, whimsical vibe, and clever creations such as syrup infused with pine cones and color-changing pine-needle cookies. She demystifies the vast array of food that you can forage without even having to go deep into the woods, like acorns and the fruit of the linden trees that are abundant in many parts of the United States, and balances practicality, safety, and play in the process. Her long-awaited cookbook gets its name from the catchphrase that ends her videos: “Happy snacking. Don’t die.” With recipes like pickled magnolia flowers, Japanese knotweed granita, and maitake mushroom “steaks,” this book promises to be a guide to seeing even your suburban neighborhood through new eyes.
Librae: Third-Culture Recipes from a Cult New York Bakery
New York City’s Librae Bakery draws on its owner Dona Murad’s upbringing in Bahrain with an Indian and Portuguese mother and a Bahraini Persian father; her time spent working in Copenhagen with her husband Andre, who is French Moroccan; and her new life in NYC, where Andre grew up. Naturally, the bakery has embraced the language and perspective of “third-culture” cuisine from the start, serving croissants with pistachio frangipane, scented with rose water; morning buns spread with labneh and za’atar; babka with both lemon curd and loomi (black lime); and more.
Much of this book requires getting comfortable with Murad’s “mother dough” recipes — like ones for croissant dough, morning buns, and enriched dough — or working with sourdough starter. For those new to these more involved bakes, Murad provides thorough, nicely documented steps and imagery. If you need something easier than croissants, Murad’s cookies and breads, including cleverly topped sheets of focaccia, provide a more approachable entry point. Another book for bakers who don’t turn down a challenge, Librae is also for anyone who respects traditional pastry techniques but wants to push flavors further.
Korean Soups: Recipes for Soups and Stews That Nourish, Restore, and Delight
If it can’t still be summer, at least it’s almost soup season. Here, Clara Lee and Eddo Kim break Korean soups into fundamentals — a chart compares the qualities of guk versus tang versus jjigae versus jeongol; the first section of the book is about making broth, then categorizing those soups into applications. There are quick-cooking soups, soups for slower nights, soups for each season, soups that are especially restorative, and soups for sharing; you could spend the entirety of the coming colder months cooking exclusively through this repertoire. If Lee and Kim’s names are familiar, that’s because they ran the cherished San Francisco superette Queens, which closed in 2023 to transition into a line of pantry staples. The shop has been described as “iconoclastic,” representing the new wave of Korean American cuisine. Consider Korean Soups essential for anyone who loves to be cozy, anyone who’s looking to deepen their understanding of Korean home cooking, or anyone who simply needs more ways to use the gochujang they bought for cookies a while ago.
Gather Around My Table: Simple, Flavorful Recipes from My Global Pantry
Recipe developers I know cite NYT Cooking contributor Kay Chun among their favorite recipe developers, and it’s easy to see why. Her book starts off with snacks and pickles, Chun adding low-lift but flavor-packed flourishes: She quickly marinates sardines to top toast; her calamari gets a gilda-esque zhuzh, skewered with fried peppers and olives. Gather Around My Table delivers on its promise of simple, weeknight-friendly food that doesn’t feel boring, with dishes such as grilled tofu simmered in soy sauce with aromatics, and then given the ssam and taco treatment with both a perilla leaf and a tortilla. Wakame and a shallot vinaigrette featuring grated tomatoes make her green salad livelier and less run-of-the-mill (her mustard vinaigrette, meanwhile, gets amped up by doenjang). I appreciate that Chun gives tofu an entire chapter, too, coaxing even omnivores to employ it more, as in her pork breakfast sausages with crumbled tofu for added moisture and protein. With Gather Around My Table, Chun consistently offers low-effort ways to make familiar dishes more interesting and rewarding.
Taiwanese? A Rambling Reflection on the Recipes, Cultures, and People Defining this Island
Eric Sze and Elyse Inamine
We’ve come full circle: Fusion is good again, or at least so proclaims chef Eric Sze, known for his New York City restaurant Wenwen and the recently closed 886. His debut cookbook Taiwanese?, emphasis on that question mark, is an ode to letting Taiwanese food be fun, free, and a little freaky: His lu rou fan, also known as lo ba beng, the dish of braised pork over rice, includes the “strange addition of peanut butter,” for example. Why the hell not? Especially when Sze has, as documented in the book (with vivid imagery from star photographer Alex Lau), gone on a bonkers crawl of 60-plus bowls of lu rou fan in a single week; he’s earned the right to experiment.
Taiwanese? is not the traditionalist’s guide to the cuisine, but anyone who likes seeing the commonalities between disparate cuisines and playing with the boundaries between them will get a kick out of this book, which includes recipes such as seared zhajiang lasagna with pork and octopus, and beef noodle soup burgers. Suffused throughout is an impish irreverence: Sze calls a soup made with yellow-fat chicken, regular chicken, and goth Silkie chicken “diversity chicken soup”; he’s known, at Wenwen, for the “BDSM chicken” (that incredibly involved recipe’s in here, too). Taiwanese? is a good pick for anyone who’s serious about food but also sees some of the self-imposed rules around it as really not that serious, or for anyone who’s got a great relationship with their local butcher.
Daily Dessert: Treats on Repeat
This is, as the name would suggest, a book for the daily-3-p.m.-sweet-treat kind of people. But it’s also a book about making baking less annoying and more chill, a boon for anyone who would love baked goods more often but hates the thought of all the fuss. In her debut cookbook, beloved New York City pastry chef Caroline Schiff, formerly of Gage & Tollner, assures you that sifting is generally unnecessary, and that your baked goods will probably be fine even if you forgot to bring the eggs to room temperature. Her ideas will appeal to the baker without a dishwasher — her giant chocolate chip cookie dirties one bowl and requires no mixer nor hand b. It’s also for the snacker who wants to reap as many rewards as possible out of a single burst of effort (see: the black and white coconut macaroons and the cardamom counter cake with chocolate ganache, both of which keep for a week). Schiff describes her lifestyle as one in which “there’s always something sweet in [the] kitchen — no special occasion required,” allowing friends to stop by anytime for cake and tea (and that’s both definitions of the latter). Daily Dessert is a call to be less fussy and to enjoy ourselves more, and who isn’t enticed by that?
Lozhka: Eastern European Soups, Stews & Other Things We Eat with a Spoon
The cozy hits continue, and as someone who prefers to eat most food out of the comforting confines of a bowl, I appreciate Alissa Timoshkina’s commitment to a highly specific pursuit: spoonable food. In Lozhka, you’ll find a tour of Eastern Europe through all things slurpable and scoopable. Much of this is soup or stew, as to be expected, but oh, the variety! Here is Slovak and Belarusian mačanka, a mushroom stew infused with sauerkraut brine (and which Timoshkina serves with lokše, crepes made with mashed potato dough); Armenian lentil soup with the tannic touch of both prunes and walnuts; and so many ways to use millet, barley, and beans (on that note, this is a great book for anyone who is trying to eat more fiber). There are filled dumplings and drop dumplings and steamed bread dumplings! I don’t want to hope for a long winter, but with this book to work through, I also wouldn’t mind it quite as much.
Cha Chaan Teng: Comfort Food from Hong Kong’s Iconic Diners
Lucas Sin, the chef formerly of New York City’s Junzi, has always been very good at explaining how to cook; his cooking tutorials via Instagram Stories buoyed me through the early pandemic and taught me techniques I still use today. As a cookbook author, he’s a natural. His first cookbook combines his conversational yet helpfully specific instruction style with his clear passion for Hong Kong’s cha chaan tengs, diners where you’ll find set meals of macaroni in soup, luscious scrambled eggs, and toast.
The photography here is gorgeous, indulgent, and transportive, each page a rich text: Sin offers a trove of highly readable little insights, like the backstory as to why roast pork belly and tofu skin over rice became known as “A Man’s Romance” (the answer: a viral, anonymous Hong Kong blog post), cast-iron sizzling pan etiquette, his favorite places in Hong Kong to get the dishes mentioned, and more. Sin is in the process of opening his own cha chaan teng in NYC and is testing out his repertoire of dishes in an extremely popular pop-up; especially for those of us who still haven’t gotten a seat, Cha Chaan Teng is the next best thing.
