The Current - The best cookbooks of 2024

Episode Date: December 13, 2024

A little inspiration in the kitchen can go a long way. Three food fanatics share the cookbooks they loved this year, and what cookbooks are good for in the age of 10-minute recipes on Instagram. 

In 2017, it felt like drugs were everywhere in the news, so I started a podcast called On Drugs. We covered a lot of ground over two seasons, but there are still so many more stories to tell. I'm Jeff Turner, and I'm back with Season 3 of On Drugs. And this time, it's going to get personal. I don't know who Sober Jeff is. I don't even know if I like that guy.

On Drugs is available now wherever you get your podcasts. This is a CBC Podcast. Hello, I'm Matt Galloway, and this is The Current Podcast. A perfect cake, the easiest way to do a rack of lamb, the tastiest and most colorful winter salad. We are always looking for a little bit of kitchen inspiration, and cookbooks are still one of the best places to find it. And since now is the time of the year when a lot of us are buying cookbooks, perhaps for other people, perhaps just for ourselves, we have brought together three people to tell us about their

favorites from 2024. With me in Toronto are Lucy Waverman, author and food columnist at The Globe and Mail, and Chris Nuttlesmith, food writer and restaurant critic. And in our Montreal studio, we have Jonathan Chung, chef and owner of the cookbook store Appetite for Books. Good morning, everyone. Good morning. Good morning. Good morning.

We will get to, and I have some books here piled up, and some other people have them stacked around as well. We'll get to your picks, but what are people looking for, Chris, in a cookbook right now? I think people are looking for an escape. Often people are looking for dishes that are comforting. You also have different audiences. A lot of people ask, my son or my daughter is going off to school, to university or moved out. They need to learn to cook. So something that's exciting with big, beautiful flavors. And then of course, there's always people who are committed cooks who spend a lot of time in the kitchen who maybe want a great baking book or, you know, books from a new cuisine that they're keen to try or a way to move their skills forward and, you know, make food that's delicious. Jonathan, what do you think people are looking for in a cookbook?

It's interesting. Chris mentioned comfort. A lot of the books that I've been cooking for, maybe it's just because I have to deal with the news all the time, but a lot of those books are about things that are going to make me feel good. Absolutely. Gone are the days of the cookbooks of really high-end restaurants where they're inaccessible. You can't cook it at home. People are really looking for, like you said, comfort. I also think people are looking for really great ways to prepare vegetables. That's interesting.

Yeah, and very vegetable-forward, plant-based stuff. And plant-based doesn't necessarily mean vegetarian or vegan, just more vegetables, interesting ways to prepare them. And at the same time, they need ideas on what to do on a Tuesday night. Lucy, a lot of those ideas might come from Instagram these days. People cooking for you. You just had this scowl on your face. I mean, I've rewired my algorithm, I think, on Instagram. So it just gives me salad recipes instead of terrible things. What do people need cookbooks for? I think they need them for connection. I think that they buy cookbooks

because they feel a connection with the author. It can be that they want a really good baking book, and they pick it up, and they look at the pictures, and they look at the stories. Gone are the days where cookbooks are just a bunch of recipes. Today, a cookbook has an identity. It has the identity of the author. And when people look at it and they trust the author, or they feel they trust the author, they're going to buy the author. And when people look at it and they trust the author or they feel the trust of the author, they're going to buy the book. I find the new crops of cookbooks to be so interesting

because I learn so much about the people who write the cookbook. People have talked about baking a couple of times. Chris, that's where you're going to start us off with, right? I think the baking books this season are fantastic. And I wish I could pick 15 of them. There's one that's really up there at the top of my I wish I could pick 15 of them. There's, you know, one that's that's really up there at the top of my list is Sift by Nicola Lamb. She's a pastry chef from the UK. And it is like going to pastry school with the coolest instructor you could imagine. There's 120 pages in the front of the book that break down, you know, how does sugar work? What

are the different kinds of flours? You know, how do they react to fats, to liquids? How do you adjust texture and color in your baking? You know, how do you deal with leaveners? It takes you through, I'm reluctant to even use the word science because I think it's a turnoff for a lot of cooks, but it takes you through science in a way that is actually not just illuminating, but entertaining. And then, you know, it's a British baking book. The British do baked products so beautifully. You know, there's a mocha opera cake, you know, they're beautiful, like Victoria cakes with roasted strawberries. It's just such a great book. It takes you through breads, through pastries, and so on.

As Chris was talking about this, Lucy, you were nodding your head. Well, I had picked SIFT as well. It's a fight. I like this. Let's duke it out. But I gave it to Chris. And the reason, it's similar reasons. It's kind of like learning all the things that you didn't know or whenever you had a failure, you can look back in this book and she explains exactly why and what you do about it. It's one of the most complete baking books that I've ever seen. People have compared it to the

Samin Nostra book, Salt, Fat. Acid Heat. Yeah. And how she explains everything and how she gets you into wanting to really bake. That's sift. What was your, you had another pick that was, I mean, sweet-ish. I mean, nature's candy. Tell us about that. Okay. So there is a woman, Camilla Wynn. She's from Toronto. And she decided.

Via Montreal. Via Montreal, yes. Don't shortchange the Montreal connection. Sorry about that. No, she lived here for a while. She certainly baked here. I know that. It's a book for the more sophisticated baker.

It's called Nature's Candy. The reason that I picked it is that I came home once from Provence years ago just in love with all the gorgeous glassy fruits and the tiny pears that were encased in sugar syrup. I thought, I'm going to make this. And I bought a refractometer, which measures the amount of sugar in your sugar syrup, which is how you candy fruit. Disaster. I couldn't make one thing. And I just sort of threw the whole thing away and said, that's it, I'm buying it. But I never liked buying candied fruit because it's all awful, and it's over-sugared, and believe it or not, in some of the cheaper mixes, they use things like turnips instead of fruit. Goodness.

So along comes Camilla, and I thought, well, this is something, I'll look at the book, I'll try the things in it. Who knows? To this point, I've counted pineapple cherries, orange peel, ginger, pears. The book is fantastic. You brought none of these in. Yeah, I was just going to say, I'll be right over. You're set for the holidays, I feel. Well, yeah, I'm set to make Christmas cakes right now. I just was so impressed with how easily her recipes work, the tips that she gives for it. The book, when I was in the bookstore, the bookstore woman told me that this is their largest selling cookbook this year. I am shocked because I wouldn't have thought that people wanted

to do this niche kind of work. But it's so relaxing. You know, Camilla is an excellent pastry chef. And this is an extremely unique book. This subject is not available on the market really at all. Maybe some at the extreme professional level. But for an everyday use, it's going to be the one that people are going to go to. All right. Your pick is a book of food from France's borderlands. What are France's borderlands? France spends many borders. It's a book called Frontiers, the Food of France's

Borderlands. It's written by a chef named Alex Jackson. He's based in the UK. He's the chef at Noble Rot in Soho. This is his third book. This one runs through the food that stretches along the French borders. It's divided by regions. So for example, the Southwest, which is the stretch of land that borders Spain. So from Montpelier to Biarritz, famous for duck and the use of duck fat. It covers French Catalonia with a lot of Spanish and Catalonian and Arabic and sometimes Italian influences. I think salt cod, saffron, espalette is big in this part of France. North Africa has a lot of influence. Even though it doesn't really border, there is a lot of North African influence, especially

around Marseille, which is a port city, French Riviera, the Alps. Let's talk about Alsace, which with its apparent German influence, sausages, sauerkraut, smoked bacon, beer. This is the type of food that I'm super interested in, border food. You know, you think of what a specific cuisine consists of, but then you go closer to a border, especially when it borders a country with completely different styles of food, and you see the apparent influence from that adjoining country, which creates kind of like a fusion cuisine, yet it is authentic to that region. We think of what French food is, but then when you start incorporating saffron, or what's the difference between pistou and pesto?

It's essentially the same thing, yet one is French and one is Italian. So, you know, we travel through the Alps, you're looking at tart flambé, you're looking at spetzli, you're looking at all these very different dishes that you don't associate with French food, yet it is very French. That's so interesting. Chris, you were going to talk about flour. Yeah, there's another baking book that I am absolutely in love with. And this is a little book.

This is a pocket-sized, inexpensive book produced by Good Egg, a bookstore and publisher in Kensington Market. It's called Flour is Flavor, and it's by a baker named Dawn Woodward. She runs a company called evelyn's crackers and it is all about using whole grain kind of less typical less known flowers like emmer or spelt or barley or kamut or red red fife she typically uh fresh mills them and this is and you know i think a lot of people think of that and they think kind of, oh, this is crunchy granola. It's not that interesting. She does the most beautiful breads.

There's an Estonian rye bread. But, you know, she'll do shortbreads. She'll do biscotti. There's a whole grain brioche that just folds in the most incredible techniques that's doable. Her argument is that different flours bring incredible flavor to food, and they do. You know, I made the ginger snaps out of this book, and she uses rye and buckwheat flowers in them as the base. And so, you know, you get the ginger, you get the pop of black pepper, but you get such a gorgeous kind of base flavor from the flowers. I made her Estonian rye.

It's this dark, gorgeous rye. The recipes are fantastic. And, you know, it's kind of flown under the radar so far. But I think for any baker who wants to take their baking someplace really interesting in a way that's accessible, flour's flavor is just a great, great pick. It will get you thinking differently about flour. Absolutely. I also believe that you can, from what I heard, you can get it at Appetite for Books in Montreal. Sources say it's available there as well.

But it's not from a big publisher, you know. It's this little kind of under-the-radar publication. I can't recommend it highly enough. It's been such a wonderful addition. She is a fabulous baker. Great. She really is. I have it right here.

I might keep it. Lucy, tell us about, the next one is what, from an Australian writer? Well, the next one is by a woman called Najee Mahashi. And I had never heard of her up until about maybe a year ago when I was searching for a recipe. And I found that she had a blog. And her blog was really interesting because her recipes were super tested and she had all sorts of variations and if you can't do this and if you have to do that.

And I thought, well, this is a pretty interesting blog and she does a lot of Asian food. This is a book for people who want to sort of up their game a little bit. They're not like great cooks, but they want to do something that would be a little bit. They're not like great cooks, but they want to do something that would be a little bit more interesting, a little bit more exciting, but not take the kind of work

that you would have to put in if you got one of the more sophisticated books. I mean, the title kind of says it all. Delicious Tonight, Foolproof Recipes for Easy Dinners. Well, she has a blog called Recipe Tin Eats. And people are always saying to me, what's Recipe Tin Eats? Well, recipe tins in Australia and Britain were where you kept your recipes. And so everybody had a little recipe tin in their kitchen.

She's a former accountant. I thought this was really interesting. She's a former Troutard accountant. accountant. I thought this was really interesting. She's a former Troutard accountant. So that you know that she has a tremendous background in accuracy because of that. She got just fed up with figures and decided to go into cooking. And she'd always been a great cook. She answers every question that you can think of as a sidebar on the recipes. People are looking for like foolproof recipes. They want to think that they can't screw this up, right? They cannot screw these up.

Plus, each recipe has a video and you just point your phone at the QR code and the video pops up. So for people who even feel a bit insecure in the kitchen, this gives them the security of being able to see what they can do. And the recipes are good. They're tasty. They're tasty. They're interesting. I have never had a failure of a recipe with her, ever, which is why I think this is a great book to be giving students, to be giving people who want to have a bit more fun in the kitchen.

She has quite a bit of Asian food in it. She herself is Asian. She has quite a bit of Asian food in it. She herself is Asian. She has quite a bit of Asian food. The ingredients are not expensive. In 2017, it felt like drugs were everywhere in the news. So I started a podcast called On Drugs. We covered a lot of ground over two seasons, but there are still so many more stories to tell.

I'm Jeff Turner, and I'm back with season three of On Drugs. And this time, it's going to get personal. I don't know who Sober Jeff is. I don't even know if I like that guy. On Drugs is available now wherever you get your podcasts. Jonathan, wave the flag for Montreal. Tell us about the place of Chuck Hughes in your city. I'm a big fan of Chuck. Chuck is such a great guy, and his new book, Chuck's Home Cooking, his personality really comes through in this book. It's been about 10 years since he's written a cookbook,

mainly because he's had kids. And this one is a big departure from his other two books, Le Garment J'ai and Chuck's Day Off. Chuck's home cooking, family favorite recipes from my kitchen to yours. This is what he cooks at home for his kids, with his kids. I feel like the common theme is just very comforting. You know, spicy maple syrup vinaigrette on Brussels sprouts. Really nice and simple.

This is not an overly difficult book. This is not a restaurant cookbook. This is stuff that you really do want to cook at home. Some great, interesting dishes. One that we made when we did a book signing with him, we made this really amazing risotto. But instead of using rice, we used potatoes, which was really interesting and super easy, very comforting. One of my actually favorite chapters in this book is the Cabana Souk or the Sugar Shack

chapter where he really kind of intertwines his Quebec heritage or French Canadian heritage into this. There's great crepes with maple syrup. You've got these little dumplings that his grandfather used to make that are essentially boiled in maple syrup. Yes, very sweet. I totally get it. But then there's also hot dog bun French toast.

Yes, please. I want fried chicken with hot pepper maple glaze. Yes, absolutely. He won my heart right from the beginning when he said unsalted butter is a crime. I appreciate that. Speaking of personality, Chris, Matty Matheson, superstar, restaurant owner, and I mean, people know him from The Bear as well. And he has this new cookbook out. I mean, again, if we're talking

about comfort, this feels like home cooking when you look through this book. This is home cooking. The book is called Soups, Salads, and Sandwiches. And you think of those three kind of topics and you think, oh, this is all easy. The book, much like its author, is big. It's loud. It's brash. It's a little ridiculous. But God, it's so lovable. The recipes are fantastic. This is a book, I would say, for home cooks who know their way around the kitchen, who have time, who like projects. It's a mix of very, very simple recipes. You know, there's one my son was looking at. He does strawberries and whipping cream and miracle whip on milk bread or wonder bread, if you'd rather, you know.

So it's this simple kind of Japanese strawberry sandwich. It's like he does a lasagna submarine sandwich with a prep time of two days because you make the lasagna first. So, you know, it's this, some people will call it stunt cooking, you know, other people will get super excited about it, but what it has at its core is an incredible sense of taste. There's a salad, it's gone into heavy rotation in our house. It's, you know, white beans, it's capers, it's raisins, it's got these Sicilian flavors, really good anchovies, not like pongy pizza

anchovies that you pick off your pizza pizza, but beautiful anchovies. It's a really well-tested, beautiful book full of fantastic ideas. You can try to resist it, but, you know, it grabs you. There's a lot of heart. There's so much heart. You want to cook. I want to make note. Sorry, can I say something about this book?

Yes. I want to say it's probably his best book. Yes. Because a lot of the dishes in there, you can flip to most pages and be like, I want to make that. Let's cram in a couple more while we're running out of time. Lucy, you have one final pick. Tell me a little bit about this. I think this is a very important book.

It's called Umrakhan, which is the word used by Indians from the diaspora to describe all things American. And can we talk a little bit about third culture cooking? Yes. What is that? Third culture cooking are parents who come from India or they could come from any country and they can't find the ingredients that they want to make, whatever it is they want. So they start to adapt, and they start to use things that are available here, things like bisquick, which apparently makes the best gulab jamun you can possibly imagine. And so they build up this pantry, which is not necessarily totally Indian or from wherever country but has all these elements

in it and it is not fusion cooking. It is a real form of cuisine that is becoming much more important. And that's what's fleshed out in this book here? That is kind of what this book is about. So Kubishe Shah is a quite a very well-known American food writer. She was the restaurant reviewer for Food and Wine for two years. This book is kind of perfect. It's approachable. It's full of family traditions. The recipes are terrific. So I made the mac and cheese, Makhani mac and cheese. So first you make a Makhani sauce, which is not really hot, but it's got a lot of spicing in it. And then you make kind of a traditional, a typical mac and cheese, and you can bind the whole thing together and you bake it. My God, it was so good.

We ate the whole thing. It was supposed to be for four people. She made the saag paneer lasagna. Well, you think about it. Saag paneer is really spinach, and lots of times they're spinach lasagnas, but it's got all the Indian spicing in it. It takes it from being fun but sort of ordinary up to a completely different level. The third culture is really interesting.

I mean, that's something that I think a lot of people will find familiar, right? Yeah. Just the ways the things come together and create something new. That's right. Jonathan, one last one from you. And I think of, I mean, the guy who's behind this book, he's in the news more, not for his work as a chef and a restaurant owner,

but for his humanitarian work. Absolutely. We're talking about Jose Andres. His new book, Zeytinya, came out earlier this year. And I find a lot of books from springtime tend to get a little bit lost in the end of year roundups. But I'm a big fan of this book. And I'm generally a big fan of Jose Andres' cookbooks. Zeytinya, Delicious Mediterranean Dishes from Greece, Turkey, and Lebanon. This is based on the restaurant that he has started in D.C., but now has three locations, soon to be four,

throughout the U.S. The recipes are extremely accessible, yet, you know, a little bit sophisticated. I'll be honest, he hasn't reinvented really any wheels here. But if you want something that's really accessible, super flavorful, very colorful colorful and you don't want to take a lot of time this is definitely your book fantastic we're out of time but I mean what else is flying at the door of your shop is there one other book that you want to mention that that people can't get enough of you know it's really interesting that Lucy brought up third-generation cooking there's another book that that I picked calledue, flavors of a second generation.

Gurdip Loyal is a British Indian food writer, and Mother Tongue is an ode to his mother. And so it's very similar to the pick that Lucy made, but instead of being American, it's British. Lucy, you have a giant stack of books there. Is there one more that you want to mention? Well, okay. I love food history. This is called A Twist in the Tail, and it's the history of food through the lowly anchovy. The whole history of food through the anchovy.

Yes. And starting in Roman times with garum, which was anchovy, all the way up to the fact that I learned that tapas only came to Spain after the Second World War because they didn't have huge amounts of food to be able to cook. And they had a million anchovies, so they incorporated flavor into a lot of their food with anchovies. It is a really lovely and funny food history. I'll second that. This is such a good book. I'm halfway through. I can hardly put it down. One final one from you. Justine Douaron, Justine Cooks. This is just a great, simple, approachable, delicious book for people who are new to cooking, who want to find their way in

the kitchen. It's fantastic. One more. It's a travelogue. It's called Korea World, a cookbook. Much like Amerikan, it is about how, you know, the kids of immigrants, the grandkids of immigrants cook Korean food. It's beautifully produced. It's a fantastic book. I mean, it's not by design, but a lot of the things that you've all talked about are about, we're living through really hard times and it's about food giving people comfort. A hundred percent. And, you know, the big kind of blousy chef monogram book that has recipes that nobody's ever going to make that sit on your coffee table. Those aren't really a thing anymore. It's been fascinating to see those disappear from publishing and to see cookbook publishing move more toward what's going to give people courage in the kitchen, what's going to help them, what's going to make them feel good about food, what's going to make their families and friends feel good to eat. I also believe that, you know, this trend on immigrant cooking or, like Lucy said,

third culture cooking is going to be big in the next little while. Somebody sent me this book. It's called Sabor Judio, and it is Mexican. It is kosher Mexican cooking. I hardly knew that there were any Jews left in Mexico, but there is a huge community there. They do things like latkes con mole. That's great. It's like I've come to your houses and just rooted through your bookshelves. This is a lot of fun and hopefully some inspiration for people to buy things,

perhaps for other people or maybe themselves. Thank you all. It's a pleasure being here. It's a pleasure. Thank you. Lucy Waverman is an author and food columnist at the Globe and Mail. Chris Nuttall-Smith is a food writer and restaurant critic. And Jonathan Chung is a chef and owner of the cookbook store Appetite for Books

in Montreal. If you didn't catch all those titles, we have a list of them up on our webpage. Go to cbc.ca slash thecurrent. And here's something nice. We also have some of these books to give away to you. What you need to do is write to us with a cookbook story. What is it about cookbooks that makes you happy? What have you made that has worked out from a cookbook?

A tremendously successful recipe, maybe a disaster, something that you made that was a nightmare and it didn't actually work out. Tell us the story of how it went sideways. And when do you turn to your favorite cookbook for inspiration? Email us, thecurrentatcbc.ca. Tell us a good story about you in a cookbook, and we will draw from a hat and give away some of these books to you. For more CBC Podcasts, go to cbc.ca slash podcasts.