The African elephant holds the earthly record for the longest gestation period, a whopping six hundred and forty-five days of pregnancy, or just a few months shy of two years. This happens also to be the approximate time it takes for an average cookbook to go from pitch to publication. With schedules set so far in advance, each year’s crop of cookbooks serves as something of a time capsule: the trends, hopes, celebrities, and big ideas of a few years ago land on our kitchen counters, their fates tied to the staying power of their central conceits.
Who could have foreseen a worldwide pandemic coming and throwing everything—including the world of cookbooks—into chaotic, extraordinary realignment? (Besides, of course, all the folks who very clearly saw it coming.) Major titles set to publish this past spring were postponed—some to the fall, some to next year, some indefinitely—and others were delayed as the spread of COVID-19 put printing and shipping infrastructures on pause. The books that did come out on time, or maybe a little late, were born into a world where the usual promotional parade of bookstore events and in-person cook-alongs were replaced by Zoom events and Instagram Lives, and had to fight against a relentless litany of crises to get even a little space in the popular consciousness.
Still, despite it all, 2020 turned out to be a hell of a year for cookbooks. Incidentally—almost eerily—many of the volumes released addressed the conundrums of quarantine cooking head on: roadmaps to D.I.Y. bread baking and bean simmering; inspiration for pantry fatigue; ersatz replacements for beloved, out-of-reach restaurant dishes (plus, for restaurants selling their own books, ways to help boost their free-fall bottom lines). Cookbooks are always marvelous vehicles for armchair journeys, though from our current vantage the travel they facilitate is less geographic than chronological, conjuring a now-remote era of dinner parties, weekend jaunts, raucous celebrations, and crowded marketplaces.
Cookbooks have never been our only source of culinary guidance, and this year’s explosion in Instagram Live broadcasts, TikTok cooking demos, and cook-along Zoom sessions served as a reminder that recipes aren’t defined by their medium. But there’s a particular beauty of scale to the best cookbooks, which, between front cover and back, have space for greater narrative arcs and can explore places and people and techniques in greater detail than a single video or blog post possibly can. (Not to mention that, after eight or nine hours of staring at, talking into, and being talked at by a screen, one is relieved to turn one’s eyes to the relative tranquility of the paper page.) Like so many people, I cooked at home this year more than I ever have before, and haven’t exactly loved every minute of it. But one of the few reliable ways to coax back a spark of the old excitement was the pleasure of a new cookbook.
A note that the year’s crop of food writing included many marvelous drinks books and non-cookbooks (such as John deBary’s razor-sharp “Drink What You Want” and Marcia Chatelain’s stunning “Franchise: The Golden Arches in Black America”), which aren’t included here in this wholly subjective, completely personal, undoubtedly incomplete list, ordered alphabetically by author.
“Red Sands,” by Caroline Eden
In a sprawling, journalistic first-person travelogue through Central Asia—punctuated with alluring and approachable recipes—Eden, who is based in Edinburgh, captures both the beauty and unease of travel with uncanny precision, accounting for small moments, great histories, and political tensions with a literary voice that often brushes against the sublime. “We left Aktau’s shoreline and its clinging marine air, driving through the scrappy outskirts of the city, travelling into the desert interior, a vast untamed spiritual geography,” she writes of her entry into the great sweep of western Kazakhstan. From there, she traces a journey through Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, and Tajikistan, a cluster of nations precariously balanced between Russia and China, following paths set by pilgrims, farmers, and oil convoys, eating all the while: jewel-like fruits, pillowy pilafs, dense yogurt cheeses, and buttery dumplings.
“New World Sourdough,” by Bryan Ford
This guidebook to all things sourdough, published in June, was perfectly timed to the pandemic-fuelled obsession with naturally leavened bread. Ford, who made his name as a baking blogger, urges those of us in thrall to our starters to think beyond the boule: pretzel buns, masa focaccia, Puerto Rican mallorcas, airy challah—and, as I’d expect from Ford, who grew up in New Orleans, definitive takes on French bread, queen cake, and the dense-yet-airy rounds that house a muffuletta. For beginners, the book’s encouraging first section goes through all the tools, techniques, and troubleshooting in scrupulous (yet never off-puttingly technical) detail. I think of myself as having cursed hands that murder sourdough starter at a touch, but under Ford’s patient, meticulous mentorship I actually turned out a tangy, hearty, truly gorgeous round of pan rustico.
“In Bibi’s Kitchen,” by Hawa Hassan
The grandmother trope, when it comes to cooking, is well-worn with good reason—it’s reasonable, especially as the world becomes more industrialized and homogenized, that our elders are the keepers of domestic wisdom. Here, Hassan interviewed grandmothers from eight East African countries—some now emigrated to the U.S., some still living in their homelands, at least one who’s never moved from the place she was born but who now, thanks to shifting international borders, technically resides in a different country than the one she was born in. Hassan allowed each participating bibi to select her own recipes to share, and the result is a beautifully intimate portrait of home cooking across many homes: spiced fried fish, plantains with prawns, lasagna, cheddar-stuffed grilled cheese sandwiches spiked with a spice-laden South African chutney called chakalaka.
