Introducing the VERY BEST Cookbooks of 2024!

I made a list.

Author

Paula Forbes
December 02, 2024

Howdy cookbook fans!

Some excellent cookbooks IMO.

I am so thrilled to share with you my best cookbooks of 2024 list, which I wrote for The Washington Post and just went up today! I have been working on this for months, reading and hemming and hawing but most of all COOKING! There were a lot of books this year, some good, some great (some terrible), but these were the best.

Please click on over to go read it—all of the links in this issue are gift links, don’t be shy!!—and then come back here for a liiiiiitle bit more.

You can go over and read some specifics about my methodology, but do know that I was extremely thorough and that I have cooked several recipes out of each book. (What do you think I’ve been doing?? I clearly haven’t been writing this newsletter.)

Things I was looking for: balance, in terms of authors, subject matters, skill levels, and use cases. (You may notice, as some commenters on the piece have, that only two books here have male authors. Well, men can’t have everything.) I wanted books that were pushing the genre forward in some way, whether via new topics, new ways of approaching old topics, new approaches to pedagogy, innovative recipe writing, or wildly creative design. Obviously, I wanted books that were well written, gorgeous, and thoroughly considered.

But mostly I wanted to include books that made me excited to get in the kitchen! That’s what we’re here for, right? I wanted books I couldn’t shut up about to my friends. Books absolutely LITTERED with post-its marking recipes I want to try. Books that make me a better cook.

I did want to mention a few books that weren’t considered for this list because of conflicts of interest, including two projects I worked on. (If you are sad your book isn’t on this list, well, hey, neither is mine.) These are all great books and I encourage you to check them out!

4 REASONS BOOKS DIDN’T MAKE THE LIST

Because I know y’all are here for the goss.

  • Recipes That Don’t Work This seems obvious, and yet? Weird yields, ingredients that are supposed to go in a food processor but didn’t fit in my (14-cup, so on the large end of standard-sized) food processor, pasta dishes that turned out like soup but were definitely not supposed to be soup, odd restaurant-y steps in non-restaurant books, unnecessary usage of SO MANY DISHES (if I don’t need a clean bowl for a step…why ask me to use one?). I was actually kind of surprised by this. In 2024, recipes that don’t work?!

  • Boring Recipe Lists I have to say this piece Lauren Scherb wrote for SPN in 2023 rings more true than ever. The recipe lists! Are all! So similar! Made doubly worse when you start digging into all the influencer books, as they are used to creating content for algorithms, not cranky cookbook critics. Zig when they zag, people! Zig when they zag! (And can y’all lay off the out-of-season asparagus? What’s up with that, is that a TikTok thing?)

  • Repeating Old Tricks It worked for the author’s first book (and in some cases third book, sixth book…), won’t readers love more of the same? Yes! I get it! This is not actually a problem, and in some cases lovely and welcome, but it’s not exciting or innovative enough to put it on a best cookbooks of the year list. Try something new, take a risk, then we’ll talk!

  • Unknowable Fourth Thing I just…at a certain point have to go with my gut! Crticism is subjective. Some of the books this year just didn’t do it for me. I’m sorry!!!

In any case, I am really quite proud of this list and I think each one of the books on it is a gem. I hope you’ll go read it (and maybe pipe up in the comments, if you wanna!)! Thanks to Joe Yonan and the WP food team for letting me have some fun with this!

^ GO ^ CLICK ^ READ^

Anyway, cheers y’all! And hope to see the inside of your inbox again soon.

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