The Best Cookbooks of 2020 Are Beautiful Tributes to Food and Drink

If this year in cookbooks could be summed up in one neat phrase, we'd have to say it was the year of origin stories. We interpret that broadly. The books we devoured in 2020 retread ancient history, revisited homegrown habits, and reexamined roots. These books gently reminded us that looking backwards isn't a foolish endeavor, especially when the rest of the world is stuck in this horrible present. Sometimes, a good memory is the best meal prep. That and a deep breath, especially when you're standing in the kitchen with a slew of ingredients in front of you and a hungry table awaiting your final dish.

Of course, it isn't as simple as looking back. Cookbooks this year come not just after months of self-taught cooking and social upheaval, but on the heels of a decade that was defined largely by opening up the mysterious, high-energy world of culinary arts to far more people. And that’s literally what cookbooks do. You’ll see it reflected through thoughtful storytelling, gorgeous imagery, and updated technique in the following cookbooks, which are our favorites of the year here at Esquire. Use them (or if you're a dreamer but not a do-er, just display them) well.

By Dan Kluger with Nick Fauchald (Photographs by Evan Sung)

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$32.20

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Dan Kluger’s regular-guy persona undercuts the recognition he deserves for being an innovator. No, he doesn’t preen and proclaim like some “gastronomic pioneer,” but his modest wizardry with vegetables—at New York’s ABC Kitchen, originally, and more recently at Loring Place—has made him an important influence on American chefs and home cooks alike. Spending time with Chasing Flavor is like flipping through an encyclopedia of deliciousness. Roasted delicata squash with hazelnuts, spicy onions, and goat cheese? Zucchini pizza with soppressata and tomato jam? Brussels sprouts with mustard vinaigrette? Crushed cucumbers with yogurt and chiles? We want to eat this way every night. —J.G.

Flatiron Books

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$31.50

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Harry N. Abrams

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$27.99

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By Hawa Hassan with Julia Turshen (Photographs by Khadija M. Farah and Jennifer May; Illustrations by Araki Koman)

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$31.50

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Shiro and zebhi hamli, doro wat and digaag qumbe, mukimo and Zanzibar pilau, tseke com peix frito and denningvleis: In Bibi’s Kitchen, from Basbaas entrepreneur Hawa Hassan, overflows with these delicious dishes from eight African countries that make contact with the Indian Ocean. Your guides, along the way, are grandmothers from those countries, matriarchs whose voices enrich each page with extra helpings of history and wisdom. The result is a breakthrough that will be remembered, years from now, as one of the essential food volumes of our time. —J.G.

By Joe Yonan (Photographs by Aubrie Pick):

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Is the Washington Post’s Joe Yonan clairvoyant? Did he somehow sense that 2020 was going to be a year in which millions of us would huddle in our homes with bags of dried beans? If timing is everything, give the guy a trophy. In my own household, this book became a quarantine fixture in our kitchen as I searched for fresh treatments and wise techniques regarding lentils, chickpeas, borlotti beans, and black-eyed peas. —J.G.

Ten Speed Press

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By Andrea Fazzari

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$87.40

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I suppose you could argue that Sushi Shokunin comes from the opposite end of the timing spectrum as Cool Beans: In the middle of crushing shutdowns and furloughs, who wanted a glossy, gleaming peak into Japan’s priciest omakase sanctuaries? Well, I did. No, I can’t afford the exquisite plates of uni and toro captured in Sushi Shokunin, and I probably won’t be boarding a plane to Tokyo anytime soon, but I can dream, can’t I? And that’s what this book felt like every time I picked it up, which was often. It felt like a dream of beauty and pleasure. Someday I’ll get there, damn it. —J.G.

By Jonathan Waxman

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$36.00

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If you’re like me, you might not really want recipes for Barbuto’s famous roast chicken or its kale salad, in the same way that you don’t really want David Copperfield to show you how he does a magic trick. But learning about the infrastructure of the signature dishes at downtown Manhattan’s signature hangout turns out to be useful. (Cooking the JW chicken requires nothing more than salt, pepper, and olive oil, but everything depends on how you cut up the bird before you put it into the oven. The kale salad? You’re going to need surgical gloves—no joke—because it’s all about aggressively crushing the dressing and the kale leaves together. As Waxman puts it, “The kale needs force in order to loosen up and reveal its flavor.”) True, trying your (gloved) hand at Barbuto favorites is no substitute for the magic of going to Barbuto on a warm spring evening, but until that evening arrives, this is what we’ve got. —J.G.

By Julia Bainbridge (Photographs by Alex Lau):

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You could call 2020 a sobering year. I witnessed a shift among my friends as the pandemic dragged on. “Can we all agree to temporarily raise the bar for what’s considered an ‘alcoholic?’” Conan O’Brien tweeted way back in April. But by the end of summer a little abstinence seemed to go a long way toward helping us endure the housebound monotony. Along came Julia Bainbridge’s much-appreciated reminder, with Good Drinks, that forsaking booze now and then has nothing to do with abandoning elegance. The Shimeji Mushroom Elixir, the Squash & Sorghum, the King Palm—these are drinks that deliver plenty of pleasure to the eye and the palate without undermining anyone’s sleep cycle. —J.G.

Chelsea Green Publishing Company

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By Wilson Tang with Joshua David Stein (Photographs by Alex Lau)

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$31.36

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Yes, you are reading that correctly: Nom Wah Tea Parlor has existed in Manhattan’s Chinatown for a century. You should go there when we can travel and congregate again. You should pay your respects with a gluttonous yet reasonably priced feast of turnip cakes and egg rolls and har gow and siu mai. Until then, you can rev up your appetite by swooning over these recipes and pictures. —J.G.

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By Bryant Terry

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$26.14

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Vegan is no longer the curse-word it used to be. It's just vegetables—albeit lovingly prepared, borderline magical vegetables, if done like Vegetable Kingdom teaches. In this cookbook, which pulls from Afro-Asian tradition and avoids buzzy vegan powders and substitutes, you'll find Terry's approach to vegan recipes less like that of a wellness guru evangelizing about tempeh bacon and more like that of a close friend with garden-grown wisdom to impart. You'll find bright color on every page, too.

By John Wang and Storm Garner

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$16.49

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Out April 28

The trope is as old as eating: Food is the best way to understand the story of a person—where they came from, where they're going, what they hold dear. And the world comes to roost in the Queens borough of New York City. More specifically, at the Queens Night Market, where stories flow as people chow down on paper baskets of food. Many of the Queens Night Market vendors brought their recipes to America from their homelands, and this books collects them, as well as the backstories that give them more flavor than salt and pepper ever could.

Clarkson Potter

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By Darra Goldstein

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Russian food isn't as boring as herring and paint-stripping-strong vodka, even if that's all we really associate it with back in the States. The mother country is rich with flavor that Goldstein found hidden in its more remote Siberian villages and tumultuous history. Her recipes focus on the hearty grains, fermentation methods, and vegetables of Russia—and vodka, of course, but vodka on steroids. Here, you'll learn to infuse it with pepper, horseradish, and other blood-thickening ingredients.

By Alexander Smalls

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Smalls began his adult life by tearing it up onstage as an opera singer (a baritone) and then pivoting to an illustrious career as a chef and restaurateur in New York. Quite the journey, no? His newest cookbook reflects it, leaning on stories and recipes from his early years in the South, as well as his musical heritage. Put more plainly, each chapter's recipes, from okra skewers to roast quail in bourbon cream sauce, is themed around a genre of music and the tales Smalls can tell about it—gospel for greens and serenades for dessert, for example.

By Mike Cioffi, Sara B. Franklin, and Chris Bradley

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Esquire is a bit obsessed with the Catskills right now, as the restaurants and hotels in the mountainous region north of New York have become a culinary destination we're calling the alt-Napa Valley. The Phoenicia Diner is integral to this revolution, a pit-stop along the highway for biscuits and gravy and chicken pot pie that's never not bustling. This year, the diner made a cookbook about its comfort food and Catskills roots. It's almost as good as taking Route 28 west from the Hudson River, on the road to a good meal at Phoenicia yourself.

By Eric Werner

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$21.35

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Out March 24

We will never not be mesmerized by fire. Werner, of Hartwood in Tulum, Mexico, illustrates a fire-centric grilling philosophy that is aspirational to the extreme, if you're the type to dream of ditching the modern world so you can roast meats and vegetables over an open flame in a wooded glen under a dusky sky. Or, you know, on the back deck. And the book itself is quite beautiful. With guidance on everything from building your own smoker to recipes, you'll be loathe to ever cook inside again.

By Hooni Kim

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$27.99

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Out April 7

Kim received the first-ever Michelin star awarded to a Korean restaurant for his joint Danji in New York. The masterful presentation of small, tapas-style Korean dishes he mastered there naturally came from his background in Korean cooking, which he recounts here in a modern, invigorating cookbook that still pays homage to tradition. As you'll learn, it all starts with doenjang, ganjang, and gochujang.

By Ned Baldwin and Peter Kaminsky

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$20.25

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Out April 7

They say you only really need to master one recipe before you're allowed to consider yourself something that resembles a chef. And eggs—scrambled, over easy, omelette—are the most fundamental ingredient of all, whether you're 11 and just learning to use a skillet or 77 and finally getting the hang of poaching. The humble egg leads to bigger, better, bolder dishes. This book, both quirky and homey, will show the way.

By Phyllis Grant

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$19.69

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Out April 21

Here we're pushing the definition of cookbook; this memoir is by a woman who indeed cooks, and there are indeed recipes included in its pages, but the power is in the vignettes Grant writes about love and parenting, growing up and settling down, baby food and wedding cake and Vicodin—all of which ring dead-true even though you don't know Grant yourself. You'll steamroll through it. And then you'll start cooking.

By Camille Fourmont and Kate Leahy

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$17.60

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Out July 7

Live like a Parisian, and you'll know what bliss is. At least, that's the idea behind La Buvette, a cookbook from the owners of the wine shop/bar by the same name in Paris that gives you the know-how to host and eat and laugh like you're in a café on a cobbled street, surrounded by cigarette-smoking friends and carafes of wine, soaking in the early-fall sun before it sets beyond the Seine. In other words, La Buvette is Paris distilled into chapters of recipes.

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$40.00

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