Food & Wine Picks the 25 Best Cookbooks—Out of 24,000
Editor Kate Heddings explains what she looks for in a great cookbook
By Lynn Andriani -- Publishers Weekly, 7/20/2009 9:30:00 AM
Every year, about 24,000 new cookbooks hit bookstore shelves. If you wanted to look at them all to decide which were the best, you’d need to read about 66 cookbooks a day. Or you could just let the Food & Wine editors do the work for you. That’s the premise behind the magazine’s Food & Wine Best of the Best Cookbook Recipes, an annual compendium of recipes from what the editors deem the 25 best cookbooks of the year. Time Inc. Home Entertainment will release the 12th edition in October, and it features more than 100 recipes, all tested and re-tested by Food & Wine’s recipe testers. Although wading through so many cookbooks may sound arduous, the book’s editor, Kate Heddings, says, “We love it. It’s so much fun.”
Heddings has a test kitchen background, having worked in the kitchens at Martha Stewart for two years before becoming a cookbook editor at Morrow and then, briefly, at Artisan. She joined Food & Wine in 2000, and began working on Best of the Best six years ago. Back then, the magazine had a policy of only testing hardcover cookbooks, as a way of narrowing the field. But after editing the book for four years, Heddings realized that policy knocked many worthy trade paperbacks out of the running. “I convinced Dana [Cowin, F&W’s editor-in-chief] that that was limiting.” (Some of the most talked-about recent cookbooks have been paperback originals, including Martha Stewart’s Cookies; the Ball Complete Book of Home Preserving; and Hello, Cupcake!) Heddings points to Sweet! by Mani Niall as a recent standout paperback that made it into this year’s book.
Heddings and her colleagues test recipes throughout the year. When galleys arrive, Heddings looks through them to “see if there’s something that catches my eye, a new way of looking at a recipe, or if an author seems like an interesting person. There are a lot of generic books that come out, and I don’t go down that road.” The main criteria is that a book’s recipes appeal to Food & Wine readers. That means no “down market” books, and no books that Heddings “feels like I’ve seen several times before.” Ultimately, the “yes” pile is whittled down to about 175 books, and those are the ones F&W tests.
Uncomplicated, accessible recipes reign; they must “sound interesting and be doable, and can’t be super long,” says Heddings. F&W starts by testing two recipes in a book; if they’re both flops, the book goes to the reject pile. The editors test recipes all year long, although Heddings says there’s usually a rush at the end. “We can come to 20 really easily, but we always struggle with the last five books.”
This year’s book is heavy on Italian cookbooks, and there are some notable chef cookbooks in there as well. Although Heddings insists, “I love every one of these books,” this year’s highlights (published in ’08) include Baked (“a phenomenal book. Those peanut butter crispy bars were sublime and had so few ingredients”); Urban Italian (“those lamb meatballs”); The Secrets of the Red Lantern (“the soy chicken drumsticks were really simple, really delicious”) and The New Book of Israeli Food (“the fennel pistachio salad”).
We're already more than halfway through 2009, so cookbook publishers: send the best of your best to Food & Wine soon.
Books included in this year's Food & Wine Best of the Best Cookbook Recipes:
660 Curries by Raghavan Iyer (Workman)
A16: Food + Wineby Nate Appleman and Shelley Lindgren with Kate Leahy (Ten Speed)
The Art and Soul of Baking by Sur La Table with Cindy Mushet (Andrews McMeel)
Arthur Schwartz's Jewish Home Cooking by Arthur Schwartz (Ten Speed)
Baked by Matt Lewis and Renato Poliafito (Stewart, Tabori & Chang)
Baking for All Occasions by Flo Braker (Chronicle)
The Best Casserole Cookbook Ever by Beatrice Ojakangas (Chronicle)
Big Night In by Domenica Marchetti (Chronicle)
Bobby Flay's Grill It! by Bobby Flay with Stephanie Banyas and Sally Jackson (Clarkson Potter)
The Book of New Israeli Food by Janna Gur (Schocken)
Chanterelle by David Waltuck and Andrew Friedman (Taunton)
The Complete Robuchon by Joel Robuchon (Knopf)
Cuisine a Latina by Michelle Bernstein and Andrew Friedman (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt)
Frank Stitt's Bottega Favorita by Frank Stitt with Katherine Cobbs (Artisan)
Giada's Kitchen by Giada De Laurentiis (Clarkson Potter)
Heirloom Cooking with the Brass Sisters by Marilynn Brass and Sheila Brass (Black Dog & Leventhal)
Home Cooking with Charlie Trotter by Charlie Trotter (Ten Speed)
Italian Grill by Mario Batali with Judith Sutton (Ecco)
Mediterranean Fresh by Joyce Goldstein (Norton)
Olives and Oranges by Sara Jenkins and Mindy Fox (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt)
Osteria by Rick Tramonto with Mary Goodbody (Broadway)
Screen Doors and Sweet Tea by Martha Hall Foose (Clarkson Potter)
Secrets of the Red Lantern by Pauline Nguyen with recipes by Luke Nguyen and Mark Jensen (Andrews McMeel)
Sweet! by Mani Niall (Da Capo Lifelong)
Urban Italian by Andrew Carmellini and Gwen Hyman (Bloomsbury)
