The cookbooks that resonate this year are the ones that get real. Whether encouraging you to use some kitchen smarts, or employing a brute-force meat-shredding method that relies on a sledgehammer, this season's best cookbooks emphasize technique, authenticity, and the occasional bit of salty language. The fancy kitchen cookbooks are still out there but somehow feel less important, ceding their slots in our rankings to the tomes that focus on making better food at home, perhaps perfecting a long braise or getting a little philosophical instead of fussing with plating.
Pie & Whiskey[1]
Edited by Kate Lebo and Samuel Ligon, Sasquatch Books.
This book is small enough to fit in somebody's Christmas stocking, and it also contains a lot of swearing. Of course, those are both selling points for the right person. If all that and co-editor Kate Lebo's recipe for Motherfucking Strawberry Rhubarb Pie doesn't tick off the boxes for holiday gift giving, you might give thought to expanding your social circle. Born of a wildly popular reading series of the same name, Lebo and co-editor Samuel Ligon have assembled stories from a cast of writers, a poet laureate, skilled pie slingers, Anthony Doerr, and a guy whose last name is Fries[2].
You'll also learn as you pull out the ingredients to Lebo's raspberry mascarpone walnut hand pies that if you make the pies round instead of triangular, the ingredients will both blend together more evenly while they cook and—pro tip!—the pies will be less likely to explode in the oven. Sometimes, like those hand pies, the recipes are legit—Funeral Pie certainly sounds like something to eat before you die and sometimes the drink recipe instructions start with a line like, "Find a shrub and chop it down...