The Cookshelf Gift Guide
So many great books, so little space to sing their praises! Each year, The Cookshelf features over forty cookbooks, food memoirs and other food-centric books that explore the history, traditions, science, and geography of food—only a fraction of what is published each year. The holiday season is upon us, and books make wonderful, lasting gifts. Here are some recent releases to consider as you shop for your favorite foodie.
They say we eat with our eyes first. With The Cheese Board Deck: 50 Cards for Styling Spreads, Savory and Sweet, anyone can put together visually stunning boards filled with tasty treats. Meg Quinn’s clever creations include cheese and charcuterie boards for cocktail hour, bagel or Bloody Mary boards for weekend brunches, “Top Your Own Hot Cocoa” boards, and much more. Use the photo on the front of the card as your design guide. The back of the card includes a list of components and provides tips on how to assemble and serve.
Kate Leahy’s Wine Style, a bright, refreshing take on sharable food paired with nine categories of wine (sparkling, crisp whites, and picnic reds to name a few) will make the wine lovers in your life happy. Whether it’s a simple bowl of curry and lime-spiked popcorn washed down with a bubbly prosecco, or a cozy dinner of Orange and Fennel Pork Loin Roast paired with a “reasonably serious red” (she defines that!), Leahy’s no fuss approach makes pairing easy and eliminates the guess work.
Weeknight cooking can be a challenge any time of the year, but holidays are particularly difficult. The busy cooks in your life will appreciate Jessica Merchant’s Everyday Dinners: Real-Life Recipes to Set Your Family Up for a Week of Success. The 30-minute meals are nutritious, packed with flavor and geared toward cooks of all levels. Part of her secret is incorporating ten minutes of targeted meal prep into each day. Butternut Minestrone, Sheet-Pan Cashew Chicken, and Bang Salmon Burgers will rival anything you can grab on the go.
We are still baking, aren’t we? Mother Grains and Life Is What You Bake It are suitable for beginner or accomplished bakers. In Mother Grains: Recipes for the Grain Revolution, Roxana Jullapat’s nuanced discussion of eight “mother” grains (think buckwheat, corn, and rye—all of which are nutritious and grown domestically) will expand any budding baker’s repertoire. Rye Focaccia, Buckwheat Banana Bread, Oat Graham Crackers, and savory oat Digestives are just a few of the winners in this gorgeous book.
In Life Is What You Bake It: Recipes, Stories and Inspiration to Bake Your Way to the Top, Vallery Lomas, winner of the Great American Baking Show (tragically the show never fully aired), captivates readers with recipes and stories that reflect her personal journey. Accordion Biscuits, adapted from her great-grandmother’s recipe, Olive Oil-Chocolate Chip Cookies, and Cranberry Orange Torte (Paul Hollywood was a fan) share the spotlight with inspiring narrative sections.
The much anticipated and multi-voiced Black Food: Stories, Art and Recipes from Across the African Diaspora, edited and curated by Bryant Terry, is much more than a cookbook. Over one hundred contributors feature in this book of recipes, essays, poems, and visual art (Terry also includes a musical playlist). Recipes reflect the organizing themes of the chapters—Crispy Cassava Skillet Cakes in “Motherland,” Inferno Hot Kale Chips in “Spirituality,” and Vegetarian Gumbo in “Black Future.” “Radical Self-Care” includes a recipe for Overnight Ancestral Tonic. This book invites readers to reflect, nourish and celebrate.
Can cooking the food of a particular locale allow us access to it, even if we aren’t there? For the frustrated travelers on your gift list, why not give a destination cookbook like Ben Tish’s Sicilia: A Love Letter to the Food of Sicily. The dream of travel won’t feel as remote when sitting down to a briny Aeolian-style tomato salad and a classic yet simple Sicilian pasta dish of lemon, sage, chili and parmesan. Tish also includes two timballo recipes for your next “Big Night.”
Speaking of travel, culinary explorers will be fascinated by the smorgasbord of fun food facts in Gastro Obscura: A Food Adventurer’s Guide. Cecily Wong and Dylan Thuras take readers on a journey around the culinary globe, featuring everything from the world’s largest edible mushroom in Zambia, seal flipper pie in Newfoundland and Labrador, and yes, beach plum jelly, sold right here in coastal Delaware! The book is a great gift for your food-curious friends.
Both locals and newcomers can discover more about the culinary history of the area with two new offerings. In A Culinary History of the Chesapeake Bay: Four Centuries of Food & Recipes, Tangie Holifield explores how colonization, slavery, and migration shaped the region’s resources and culinary traditions. Profiles of cooks and entrepreneurs, research into historic recipes, and engaging stories provide context to dishes such as Coddies and Chicken Maryland. Delmarva’s natural landscape provides the backdrop through which Curtis J. Badger explores local cuisine. In The Culinary History of Delmarva: From the Bay to the Sea, Badger takes readers “bottom fishing,” crabbing, clamming, and into the marshes to hunt for birds. He also explains how the region’s agriculture and aquaculture influence what is on our plates.
Last but certainly not least is the long-awaited The Dogfish Head Book: 26 Years of Off-Centered Adventures by founders Sam and Mariah Calagione and Dogfish Innkeeper Andrew C. Greeley. There’s a whole lotta love on tap in these pages! From a ten-gallon brew system to craft beer mega-star status, readers get a front row seat to the evolution of Dogfish Head’s homegrown success. Included are profiles of Dogfish Head coworkers, a “biography” of many of the beers made over the past 26 years, and candid photos of dedicated people having fun doing what they love. The book is an ode to the entrepreneurial spirit that Sam and Mariah Calagione embodied to spark the company’s genius creative culture. Craft beer lovers and off-centered fans will treasure this book.
