My Favorite Cookbooks

For right now anyway. Thoughts?

I have written this story approximately a hundred times in my food-writing life, and you want to know something funny? With few exceptions (see number 4), the list has been different every single time. Early on in my career, when I was teaching myself how to cook, I was all about the encyclopedic and the iconic — titles like How to Cook Everything and The Silver Palate — but the more I learned (and the more I wrote), I realized that the books I reach for the most frequently have a unique perspective and in some way changed the way I thought about food and cooking. Here is a list of my current favorites, which I also measured in a very quantitative way, namely: How often have they appeared on Dinner: A Love Story since I launched by Substack four years ago? (Answer: A lot.) Please feel free to weigh in with your own picks.