Cookbooks That Carry Us Across Borders
In an age where you can find nearly any recipe and an infinite number of its variations on the internet, it might be easy to wonder why cookbooks are still being made. Yet the cookbook category endures, and in fact has only grown and evolved since we all started cooking at home more, especially from 2020 onward.
Why do we love cookbooks so much? It might sound silly, but cookbooks truly do fill the senses. From the moment we crack one open, before we cook a thing, cookbooks are packed with striking visuals that show us the beauty of a cuisine and take us to another place, whether it’s to a café around the corner, a beloved relative’s kitchen, or halfway across the world. They tell captivating stories and draw us in with tantalizing descriptions of gorgeous dishes, whether you plan to make anything or just read the book cover-to-cover like a novel (we exist!).
And once you do get into the kitchen, the smells, colors, sounds, and flavors bring the whole story together, connecting us with new and familiar cuisines alike. While social media is great at giving us bite-sized doses of that multidimensional kitchen dopamine, the feel of a cookbook in your hands still hits like nothing else.
Whether we want to experience new places from our kitchens or just want to hang on to the feelings of a trip already taken, here is a selection of cookbooks that bring us closer to flavors from all over the globe.
By Olia Hercules
Hercules’ third cookbook centers not only on food from her native Ukraine, but the cultural traditions and many functions of a Ukrainian summer kitchen—a separate little house (often just one room) that serves as a sort of cooking workshop to process and preserve the bounty of summer. Unsurprisingly, preserving, fermenting, smoking, and pickling play a major role in this beautiful book that reads as equal parts cookbook and travelogue, with sweeping landscape photography and heartfelt essays on everything from varenyky (stuffed dumplings) to pich (hand-built masonry ovens commonly found in a summer kitchen).
By Tu David Phu & Soleil Ho
Phu and Ho’s cookbook is a love letter to the Viet community in the Bay Area, and pays homage to their resilience in every page. The visuals are energetic yet elegant, with cool street photography from both Vietnam and the Bay, and textured, saturated food photos. The writing holds your hand through even the most elaborate family recipes (the three-page Southern-Style Chicken Pho is a triumph of recipe writing, tbh), all while candidly questioning what authenticity might mean now.
By Emiko Davies
Davies is a prolific cookbook author (her seventh book is out this fall) who consistently writes some of the most appealing yet reliable recipes out there, but not everyone knows she also takes incredible photographs, always with a signature dreamy feel. Acquacotta is no exception, highlighting the unique ingredients and flavors of la Costa d’Argento, the Silver Coast, right along the Tyrrhenian Sea in the southwest of Tuscany. Chapters like “the sea and lagoon” and “the vegetable patch” will make you feel as if you’re there, breathing in a salty breeze and licking olive oil off your fingers.
By Bricia Lopez and Javier Cabral
Everyone knows the best way to experience a place is in the company of locals, and Oaxaca basically teleports us to one of Mexico’s standout food regions from the very first page. In Lopez and Cabral’s first book (they also wrote Asada, a celebration of Mexican-style grilling), Los Angeles restaurateur and Oaxaca native Lopez proudly shares the flavors of her past and present, giving us the scoop on everything from chicharrón tacos, to family-style goat barbacoa, to her family’s signature mole negro.
By Ashleigh Shanti
We know that food can take us to many dimensions at once: one taste can bring back a place, or a person, and this book proves that it can also take us through time and culinary lineage. Shanti deftly and joyfully takes us through the many regions of “her” South, with dishes like her take on 1800s cookbook author Malinda Russell’s salt-rising bread with country ham ramp butter from the Backcountry chapter, her Grandma Bearnie’s red snapper escovitch in the Lowcountry chapter, plus an invaluable section called Supreme Recipes that form the foundation of dishes across the whole book.
By Hisham Assad
A gorgeous second edition of Assaad’s first cookbook takes us to Lebanon’s bustling capitol and spins us in every direction, with chapters devoted to street food, classic family dishes and Sunday feasts, lush weekend breakfasts, and everything in between. Dishes like chickpeas & garlic yogurt with fried bread, pearl couscous & caraway stew with chicken, and bitter orange preserves are as vibrant and multilayered as the history of Beirut itself, and together with photography that captures the energy of the city, you’ll want to take the time to savor it all.
By Melina Hammer
If the summer travel you’re trying to relive right now was more of a domestic flavor and full of farmers markets, roadside stands, and the occasional forage behind a rental house, this book might be the perfect way to relive those sun-ripened days. You’ll find recipes organized by season (and lucky for us, our seasons aren’t wildly different from Hammer’s in upstate New York), plus invaluable sections on staples and little back-pocket barely-a-recipe recipes for, in Hammer’s words, “eating between the feasts.”
