The Current - The best cookbooks of 2025

Episode Date: December 17, 2025

Our panel of experts give us their top picks for 2025. Food journalists Lucy Waverman, Jonathan Cheung, and Chris Nuttall-Smith name their top picks for cookbooks that will inspire you in the kitchen.

The PWHL is back for the third season of heart-stopping women's hockey. And this season, there are two new teams looking to make their mark on the ice, the Seattle Torrent and Vancouver Golden Eyes. When the world's best women's hockey players face off, anything can happen. Will the Minnesota Frost achieve a three-beat? Will a new team take home the trophy? There's only one way to find out. Watch the PWHL for free on CBCJ.

This is a CBC podcast. Hello, I'm Matt Galloway, and this is the current podcast. One of the great things about this time of the year is all the delicious food that is part of our holiday celebrations. We all have our own tastes and traditions, our own definitions of what makes a good nosh, and the key to making it all happen is a good cookbook. And so it is time to reconvene our annual cookbook panel with their picks for 2025. And if you were paying close attention, you would know that I've just given you some hidden clues about some of the titles on their lists with me in Toronto. Lucy Waverman, food writer and cookbook author.

And Chris Nuddle Smith, food writer and restaurant critic. And in Montreal, Jonathan Chung, chef and owner of the cookbook store, Appetite for Books. Good morning, everyone. Good morning. Good morning. Before we'll get to your picks and people have piles of books in front of them, what are you looking for from a cookbook? book this year? Jonathan? There are a lot of things I look for.

Number one, can I do these recipes? They need to be doable. They need to be done in a certain amount of time for me. Number two, is it interesting? Is it something that I haven't seen before? And at the same time, you know, a lot of people who are buying cookbooks, the visuals. The visuals have to be appetizing. And I have to look at it and say to myself, will I cook this?

Lucy, what are you looking for? Well, I look for a kind of a relationship with the author that when I look at the book and I see how the author puts it together the kind of recipes and what she writes about the recipes and herself and life, whatever it is she chooses, I have to feel that I connect with that. As soon as I feel I connect with that,

I know I'm going to connect with the recipes. All right, what about your question? I mean, I asked you in part, we talked about this last year, but people can get cooking information from any number of different sources. Everywhere. There are so many recipes out there, so cookbooks have to do more.

I'm always looking for richness. You know, if an author is going to spend the time and a publisher is going to spend the time to do a book, I want it to be the last word on what they're doing. I want it to just tell me so much that I didn't know. I want to turn to it for years and years and years. And I hope the picks I've picked today, too. I'm also looking for beauty.

I mean, there's an old term in the business. Is this book lickable? Do you literally want to lick the pages? I think that's such an important part, typically, not always, but typically with cookbooks. So those are, you know, those are the two main things? And then, yeah, are the recipes I want to cook and that I can cook? It shouldn't just be aspirational. It should be something that everybody can do.

Let's begin. Jonathan, you get the first pick. And this is a hometown pick. Tell me a little bit about Arthur's Home of the Nosh. Ooh, Arthur's subtitle, a big personality cookbook of delicious Jewish favorites. That certainly is that. I'm a big fan of the Jewish Deli. It's an institution here in Montreal, places like Snowden Deli, Schwartz's, Lesters, Wilenskis.

They've put Montreal on the map. And new ones like Shea Greenberg and Yan's Deli, they really continue the tradition of a new generation. But Arthur's, Arthur's, on another level. They're speaking to a generation like none other. Arthur's Home of the Nosh. It's by Reagan, Steinberg, Alex Cohen, Evelyn Eng. it's really a love letter to many things. First and foremost, it's a, it's a tribute to Reagan's late father, who is a really larger than life character with a real passion for food. That really influenced her in her cooking. It's really a love letter to the classic Montreal Jewish deli that they all grew up with. And it's a really great blend of cultures with Reagan's Ashkenazi upbringing and Alex's Moroccan roots, you know, with that old school Montreal style and all. all at the same time, there's a lot of modern takes on classics.

And an entire chapter on sandwiches, which I was pleased to see. Holy cow. And when Chris said lickable, is the book lickable? This is very much is that. You know, think a salami sandwich, which is a clear nod to the Wollenski sandwich here in Montreal. And actually, one of the things that really struck me, the first page I opened up to the book when I first got it in, it was this maple. and brown sugar marinated salami. And, you know, it's one of, it's this dish that kind of right away grabbed me.

And they use that to make their salami sandwich. It's marinated, sweet, salty, and then it's pan-fried, really nice and crispy, very easily done at home. The personality really shines in this book. You know, I'm going to make an executive decision. And next year we're going to do this, like, over food. We can't just talk, I mean, it's just, this is going to drive me. That's a fine idea.

This is going to drive me crazy over the course of this conversation, people talking about food and me not eating it. Lucy, you have a book about breadcrumbs. I love this book, but I looked at it initially when I heard about it and I thought, an entire book about bread crumbs. Tell me a little bit about this. Well, Camilla Wynne, who wrote breadcrumbs, also wrote Nature's Candy last year, which I actually brought. She is definitely a chef who has a way of looking at things that is different from most people. Most people would look at breadcrumbs and say, breadcrumbs, I keep them in the freezer

in case I'm going to make a stuffing. This whole book is about how to use breadcrumbs, not just to make chicken schnitzels or something like that, but to use them in very different and interesting manners. So she goes through appetizers, main courses, desserts. There's only 50 recipes.

I tested quite a few recipes. out of this book. They all work perfectly. We made a shortbread. It was a breadcom marmalade shortbread. And I am a huge marmalade fan. And they were absolutely delicious. So much so. And I made them for a dinner party. And everybody wanted the recipe. Fantastic. I love it. I mean, again, do something with the ends of things that you might otherwise throw away. You can make something out of it. You know, use up the waist. Chris Nettle Smith. You have a book. This is a Toronto chef, but this is not urban food, right? Tell me a little bit about what you're going to start out with here.

I've got a book for the rest of Canada, if you call it that. It's Hunter Chef in the Wild. It's by Michael Hunter. He's a Toronto chef. He's also a big hunter. And it is devoted to how so many people in Canada eat, whether they hunt, whether they fish, whether they have friends or loved ones who give them game, whether that's deer or grouse or whatever it may be. The thing that Michael Hunter does that I love is he bridges this divide. I'm a hunter myself, and I know from experience so many hunters, the way people traditionally cook wild game as you soak it in bottled Italian dressing for five days,

and then you cook it till it's the color of smokers' lung. It's just so many people don't know how to handle game. Michael Schiff brings, excuse me, Michael Hunter brings this chef's perspective. His recipes are so fantastic. There's fire-roasted antelope chops with rosemary and teziki, for instance. Or he'll do, instead of pulled pork, you know, Southern-style pulled pork. He'll make a sandwich with pulled wild goose leg that's done in a beautiful southern barbecue style. But, you know, he also has, for example, spit-roasted beaver with birch syrup and blueberry glaze.

Do people eat a lot of the spit-roasted beaver these days? I am not making this up. I got a text three weeks ago from a friend of mine who's a hunter who said, do you have any good recipes for beaver because I have two, a neighbor-needed help? So, yeah, it happens. Jonathan, for the vegetarians who are listening to this and thinking, this is not for me. Tell me about salads.

Oh, yeah. Linger. Wow, that was a great segue. Something completely different. Yes, linger, salad, sweets, and stories to savor by Hetty Lou McKinnon. Hetty started making salads in Sydney about 15 years ago from her home and delivered them around her community on her bike. And it was this, at the heart of it, that, really kind of spawn this linger

cookbook. But it's really so much more. It's really expansive, pulls from global flavors with a lean towards her Chinese Australian heritage. So it really kind of speaks to me. I really love those Asian flavors. Mapo tofu salad. Who thought that Mapo tofu

could be turned into a salad? It definitely can with crispy tofu and a dressing with like chili bean paste. There's chargai lan, which is like a Chinese broccoli with black-eyed peas and this really great chili crisp vignorette. Everyone loves chili crisp. Not the salad you're thinking of, right? That's kind of the thing. That's right. It really thinks outside the box and

gets you using ingredients that you may not be super familiar with, but let's be honest, that's what cookbooks are for. Absolutely. This sounds fantastic. And vegetable forward, that's where a lot of people's heads are at these days, I think. That's right. Lucy, your next pick, this is like two and one. You're We were very strict on the amount of books that people could, and you managed to slide in. What is from somebody who we know we spoke to on this program, the Palestinian chef, Sammy Tamimi. Yes, so Sami Tamimi has done a wonderful vegetable forward also cookbook called Bustani. And Bustani means my garden. And the recipes, really, you would love to think that you were able to take.

everything from this in your garden, but he's a wonderful writer, and because he is a wonderful writer, you get the feeling all the time of being in the garden and being part of the feast. He just draws you in, and his descriptions of food, and he draws on memory, and family traditions, cultural rituals, things like that. It's a serious book, but it's a serious book, but it's a very thoughtful book. It also includes a chapter, which I found very interesting, which is called The Pantry. And it is about preserving, pickling, freezing, fermenting, bottling, but his recipes are so well written, and that's what I really want to stress, that you will have no problem with any of them. And it's just so beautifully written.

So I'm pairing it, in a sense, with Tahini Baby. And Tihini Baby, and Tihini Baby, is by Eden Grinspan She lives in Toronto She's a host of Top Chef She has lived In New York And she has actually a restaurant in New York

Okay, she's late 30s, I believe And so the book is there to appeal to families It's also vegetarian Or veg forward But the recipes are easy They work extremely well they taste good. I made a cake that's made with filo dough.

We use filo dough in the batter. And the cake, and this is from Tahini Baby, the cake was terrific. Everything that we made out of that book worked. The PWHL is back for the third season of heart-stopping women's hockey. And this season, there are two new teams looking to make their mark on the ice, the Seattle Torrent and Vancouver Golden Eyes. the world's best women's hockey players face off, anything can happen. Will the Minnesota

Frost achieve a three-beat? Will a new team take home the trophy? There's only one way to find out. Watch the PWH for free on CBCJ. Chris, you're going to take us to Rome. This is a book that I have cooked from. This is one of the few books in the stack that I have cooked from, and I love it already. I am just head over heels for this book. I can't stop reading it. I can't. can't stop cooking out of it. This is Rome by Katie Parla. Katie Parla is this force of nature. She's a Yale educated art historian who moved to Rome 20 years ago. She became a journalist focusing on food. Today, I would say she is the leading Western voice on Italian food, regional Italian food,

where to eat if you're going to Naples, if you're going to Rome, if you're going to the southern Italian islands. This cookbook is fantastic because Katie Parla is also a publisher. She has has self-published this. This is her second book on a printing press in Italy as an object. It is absolutely gorgeous. The photography, the design are beautiful. But what I love most about this book is its richness. You get so much history and culture of how and why people in Italy's capital eat the way they do. She takes you through really, truly rock solid recipes, recipes that work for classics like pasta fagioli or spaghetti alla carbonara. Katie Parla has tested these so much.

She works so closely with chefs. They work beautifully. They're so accessible. But she also gets into less known, less popular, especially with Westerners, dishes, like gorgeous herb salads or stews of artichokes and favas or lamb cooked in an egg sauce. It's a classic in Rome for Easter. The other thing this book has that I absolutely love is what Katie Parla calls Parla picks. She tells you, where do you eat? Where do you drink?

What wines should you try? How do you order a coffee in Rome? It is just such a useful document. I am in love. I used her recipe for the Carbonara just in the weekend. And, I mean, I made enough carbonara's in my life. And this was a different, but the better version. Jonathan, you're next.

And we talked last year about third culture cooking, this kind of space in between. And you have a pick that speaks to that idea. Tell us about Calvadang. Calvinang and Phoebe Melnick. they are the authors of salt sugar MSG recipes and stories from a Cantonese American home. Now, before you freak out about the title, Salt Sugar, MSG is more shorthand for the bold, kind of layered seasonings that defines Chinese food. The cooking in this book not only centers around Calvin Eng's restaurant, which is Bonnies and Williamsburg and Brooklyn, but it also speaks to the Chinese immigrant story, which really resonated with me.

I grew up eating dishes like Yat Jiao Gai, those like crispy, salty, cruehler-like donuts that you serve with conji. And in this book, recipes for both of those, there's Cantonese fried chicken, which is not something that a lot of people know of, but it's fried chicken, super crispy skin, served with those puffy shrimp chips. And then it's served with this little bowl of MSG season salt, which you dip the chicken. in and it's literally a flavor bomb. It's an explosion in your mouth. But they're all written with a home cook in mind. So, for example, chasu, you can make simple chasu roast barbecue pork. You know, that's sticky, sweet, salty barbecue pork, but in this case, it uses pomegranate and molasses. They're really nostalgic, but at the same time, really inventive. It's a really great story about a second generation Chinese American kid who's brought up in the U.S. by his mom's

cooking, opening a restaurant, cooking the food he loves, which is that like traditional Cantonese cooking with a little bit of a Western slant to it. But, you know, what is most important about this book that I think is that unapologetic use of salt sugar and energy, which really brings food to the next level. Lucy, this next book, I mean, again, is a cookbook, but it's also a book with stories in it. Tell me about Chop Chop. Okay. So, Chop Chop Chop is a book about Nigerian and West African cooking. The author of Ozosoko is an educator, she is a researcher, she has done incredible work on this book. The photographs in it are not just food, they're markets, their people.

They give you such a feeling of Nigeria. Nigerian food varies regionally. It's all sorts. It's a mosaic. It's soups. It's stews. It's beans. It's quite a lot of awful. And this is all in the book. I think the book is suited to people who cook a lot and like to experiment with different cuisines. And they look at cookbooks as cultural documents. The foodways and the country itself, it makes it a perfect gift for people who like to learn. Chris, this is one of the big, I mean, not just size. This is one of the big books of the year. This is one of the huge releases of the year. It's Good Things by Samin Nasrat. Samin Nasrat is the author of the truly mega best-selling salt-fat acid heat. Probably the most useful book I've seen in the last year.

It is a soup to nuts guide to cook. I think it's better suited to people who are maybe newer to cooking, but she takes you through how to set up a kitchen, how to season, how to cut vegetables properly. You know, her rice, she teaches you how to make beautiful white rice, but then also how to make Spanish rice or how to make the, Iranian crispy rice specialty called Tadegh. Let's call it. It's like a modern, the joy of cooking, but with so much more personality and I think in a lot of ways more deliciousness.

Wow. All right. Because I'm not a Grinch, I'm going to give you all, we have no time. But I know there are more, there's more books to talk about. So you each get a bonus pick and you just put your bonus pick, Chris, on the top of your pile. Tell us a little bit about this. I'm going to keep this short and sweet because that's exactly what is. Short and sweet. This is maple syrup by the Toronto journalist Peter Quittenbrough. This is, I think, a masterpiece. It is just the most glorious history of maple syrup. He shows how indigenous people in the Great Lakes area and in what's now, Quebec,

really developed the methods for boiling maple syrup for making sugar. He takes you through this fascinating 20th century history of Quebec and the sociology of how it became so big there. And then he takes you into the present day, how big maple. And no, that is not an overstatement. Big maple is trying to reshape how consumers think about maple syrup. It is not what you want. You want the dark, tasty stuff.

And that is what is hardest to find. But you can usually get it at a farmer's market or from your local distributor. I love this book. Lucy Waverman, your bonus pick, please. Okay, it's called Taste and Traditions by Natalie Cook. And she is a professor of English at McGill, and it's about menus.

Going to restaurants today, I mean, you get a, hastily computerized menu. Scan the QR code. I mean, it's taken the romance, the romance out of restaurants, honestly. And taste and traditions, well, it'll change your mind about the importance of menus. So she looks at menus back several hundred years. The traditions, the social norms, it's amazing what you can find in menus.

And one thing that I loved in this book is that she did Expo 67. and she went through a bunch of the menus from Expo 67, sort of explaining their backgrounds, including the Canadian Pavilion. And you'll be surprised when you see the menus from there as to how, you know, fairly exotic they were and how long they were. You did a sneaky thing there and a cookbook panel in submitting a book that actually has no recipes in it whatsoever, Lucy,

but we'll let you go with that. Jonathan, your bonus pick, please. My last pick for the love of QP. Cupy mayonnaise, like it says on the cover, 100 years of capturing hearts and taste buds. If it's not the custardy, creamy, eggy richness texture or the sweet, salty, tangy flavor, it's really the squishy bottle and the baby mascot that gets you of QPy mayonnaise. It essentially is a just-add QPy mayo cookbook. So added to Carbonara, added to Caesar salad, added to fish tacos, and yes, chocolate cake.

Chocolate cake. which was a common ingredient added to chocolate cake in Depression-era U.S. when eggs and butter were scarce. But it is a fun cookbook. We all love QP mayonnaise. If anything, it's almost like a stress ball, that bottle. You've made me hungry, and I've learned something. This is like edutainment all in one go.

Thank you all for being here. Thanks for having us. It was a pleasure. Lucy Waverman is a food writer, cookbook author based in Toronto. Chris Nettlesmith, food writer and restaurant critic. And Jonathan Chung is a chef and owner of the cook. bookstore appetite for books in Montreal. If you didn't catch all those titles, we have the list of them up now on our website. Go to cbc.ca.ca slash the current. You've been listening to the current

podcast. My name is Matt Galloway. Thanks for listening. I'll talk to you soon. For more CBC podcasts, go to cbc.ca.ca slash podcasts.