11 Mouth Watering Cookbooks to Give—or Receive—This Holiday Season

PLENTY has many things going for it. From the esteemed chef who brought you JERUSALEM, this vegetarian and Middle Eastern–focused cookbook will make it easy to forgo the meat at any meal. With its easy-to-follow recipes and page after page of stunning pictures, Yotam Ottolenghi proves that there are truly plenty of options for the home cook who is faced with large groups, holiday expectations, and varied palates.

Try this recipe first: Mushroom and Herb Polenta

The beauty of THE BREATH OF A WOK lies in its laser focus. Rather than attempting to cover the entirety of Chinese cuisine, Young compiled her cookbook from favorite recipes utilizing an Asian staple—the wok. Because most recipes are sourced from relatives, and accompanied by a related story from the chef him/herself, THE BREATH OF A WOK has the intimacy of a memoir. You’ll feel like you are cooking alongside the authors as you turn each page.

Try this recipe first: Shrimp Dumplings Spring Moon

When I moved into my own apartment, I inherited our family’s treasured flour jar. It’s an old pickle jar with a red tin twist-off lid and years and years of experience as a devoted flour house. Joanne Chang’s cookbook is full of recipes from her famous Boston bakery, and I can personally attest from baking it at least a dozen times that the banana bread is amazing (especially when you add chocolate chunks).

Preheat the oven to 400 degrees Fahrenheit and roll out the dough on a floured surface to ¼- or ½-inch thick.

ALICE’S TEA CUP used to be the place to test out your afternoon-tea manners on Manhattan’s Upper West Side while being showered in confetti. While they still offer a fantastic tea service, they’ve since expanded to serve every meal of the day. This cookbook features the restaurant’s classic pumpkin scones and a selection of tea sandwiches, but it also offers recipes for main dishes, sides, and even clever Mar-Tea-Ni cocktails.

Try this recipe first: Curried Chicken Salad Sandwich

Ina Garten can do no wrong in my eyes. And with her cookbook FOOLPROOF, she’s making sure you can do no wrong in your kitchen. I salivate over recipes for Spanish Pea Soup, Lobster Corn Fritters, and Ultimate Pumpkin Pie with Rum Whipped Cream. For those of you thinking these sound insanely complicated, fear not: the Barefoot Contessa is there helping you each simple step of the way, and the stunning photos will entice you to get to the finish line. The finish line…where there’s cake.

Try this recipe first: Salmon with Melting Cherry Tomatoes

With 175 recipes showcasing handmade, seasonal, vegetable-forward dishes, MODERN JEWISH COOKING simultaneously pays homage to tradition and updates recipes to reflect how we eat today. From sweet to savory and with regional influences from Central Europe to North Africa, this cookbook is perfect for High Holidays, Sunday brunch, and regular weeknight dinners.

Try this recipe first: Chicken with Fennel and Onions

Gwyneth Paltrow is not the first celebrity to rave about a diet, but she is one of the first to write a cookbook extolling the virtues of her diet. After a doctor prescribed a restrictive diet to recharge her system—eliminating dairy, eggs, sugar, fish, wheat, meat, soy, alcohol, and processed foods—she and food writer Julia Turshen created and collected 185 delicious recipes that nourish the body and the soul.

Try this recipe first: Sweet Potato & Five-Spice Muffins

If you buy frozen pie dough but want to learn how to make it yourself, or if you’ve always wanted to make bread, Nick Malgieri’s PASTRY is for you. He explains—in elaborate detail—each recipe in such a way that you feel like a disciple. These recipes will produce desserts so delicious that your friends and family will ask, “Where did you get this cake? I must go to that bakery tomorrow!”

Try this recipe first: Olive Oil Dough (for beginners) and Vienna Apple Strudel (for experienced bakers)

Deborah Madison has long been at the vanguard of the vegetarian cooking movement. Now she explains how you can substitute vegetables, edible flowers, and herbs from the same family for even more variety. VEGETABLE LITERACY has more than 300 recipes for the very plants in our backyards—or at our local farmers markets.

Try this recipe first: Ivory Carrot Soup

French cuisine has Julia Child, Israeli cuisine has Yotam Ottolenghi, and Italian cuisine has Marcella Hazan, whose ESSENTIALS OF CLASSIC ITALIAN COOKING is one of those cooking bibles that stands the test of time. Hazan doesn’t insist on complex recipes or heavy dishes, but instead prefers to dictate the kind of cuisine residents of Florence would recognize on a daily basis, balanced and succulent. Lemon Chicken (fresh and light for your summer needs), Osso Buco, and the best Minestrone alla Romagnola you may ever taste. These 500 recipes will make you think you’ve died and gone to Roma.

Try this recipe first: Sausage Risotto

You can’t have holidays without pie. Well...you can, but you don’t want to. Melissa and Emily Elsen, twentysomething sisters and proprietors of the celebrated Brooklyn pie shop Four & Twenty Blackbirds, share their unique, mouthwatering recipes organized by season. With stunning photos and truly decadent recipes from two girls who were raised raising dough, you might start extolling the virtues of breakfast pie, lunch pie, snack pie...

Try this recipe first: Rosemary Honey Shoofly Pie