Foodies Clan

New titles from Pati Jinich, Dorie Greenspan, Zoe Adjonyoh, and more to shake up your fall cooking

Even in more typical years, fall can represent a turning inward: a recommitment to schedules, and an end to languid summer weekends. This year, as Hot Vax Summer became something decidedly less celebratory, it feels like we’ve already spent weeks considering the change in routine the next few months will bring. But, the things that make fall a time to look forward to — namely a new season of art and music and books — are still there. For the person that enjoys time spent in the kitchen, cookbooks can be the very thing to make those quiet indoor evenings a welcome comfort.

Over the next few months, cookbook publishers are trotting out their most anticipated titles of the year. Below you’ll find the 17 most exciting cookbooks from this new slate — the books that compelled us to add to our grocery lists, set aside an hour or two, and actually cook. This isn’t to say that all of these selections require real effort or cooking expertise: The list features cookbooks for busy weeknights, ones that will assist with a rededication to meal prep, and many that will end any kind of bean rut. There are books that aim to expand culinary horizons, too, from Indigenous cuisine to Korean vegan to Ghanaian food. And for the bakers who are already anticipating the need to occupy time this fall, there are a host of options to choose from, covering classic chocolate chip cookies, buttery Southern biscuits, and fluffy Chinese milk bread (just to name a few).

Most crucially, you’ll also find books on this list that just seem fun. And while fun in cooking is always appreciated, it’s perhaps needed now more than ever. — Monica Burton

Life is What You Bake It: Recipes, Stories, and Inspiration to Bake Your Way to the Top

Vallery Lomas
Clarkson Potter, September 7

The title of Vallery Lomas’s debut cookbook is quite sweet. But for Lomas, Life is What You Bake It isn’t just some cutesy phrase — it’s a philosophy that has shaped her life. After becoming an attorney, Lomas quit her job in law to follow a passion for baking. She went on to win the first season of the Great American Baking Show, only for it to be cancelled when one of the judges was accused of past sexual harassment. If not for an outpouring of media coverage, her win may never have reached the masses.

In chapter after chapter of Life is What You Bake It, Lomas weaves together the technical prowess she brought to the Great American Baking Show with stories of personal victories both in and out of the kitchen, providing a tribute to the steadfast vision and excellent cooking of the women — Lomas’s mother and grandmothers — who paved the way for her. There’s something for everyone here, and nearly every recipe ties back to a memory of family or friends. There’s strawberry mash — a mixture of smashed strawberries and sugar — which recalls summer trips to a cousin’s farm to pick lipstick-red, juicy strawberries, and a recipe for cornmeal pancakes, inspired by the ones Lomas’s Grandma Leona made with leftover cornbread batter.

Family and her Southern Louisiana upbringing are central sources of inspiration, but Lomas also draws from a trip to France during her final year of law school, including recipes for crisp twice-baked almond croissants, lemon-honey madeleines that glow bright yellow on the page, and a self-described “very dramatic crêpe cake.” Later chapters cover cookies, brownies, cobblers and pies, showstopping cakes, and sweet and savory breads. There are also plenty of doughnuts and other fried treats. Lomas could have made the central theme of her first cookbook her title as a television-show winner. Instead, she gives us a big, twisting, beautiful story of her life, and an enormously impressive variety of recipes that cement exactly how deserving she was of winning that title. — Elazar Sontag

Foodheim: A Culinary Adventure

Eric Wareheim with Emily Timberlake
Ten Speed Press, September 21

You’d be reasonable to question why Eric Wareheim has the right to publish a cookbook. The comedian is maybe best known for being half of Adult Swim’s Tim and Eric Awesome Show, Great Job! which, depending on your age, may have completely shaped and/or scarred your sense of the world. But he’s also the co-founder of Las Jaras Wines, regularly blogs about food, and has cultivated an impressive technical expertise over his years of eating. All this makes Foodheim a blueprint for eating well, and having a really good time doing it.

The book is separated into irreverently titled chapters full of saturated and silly photography: Chicken Chapter, Circle Foods, Juicy Foods. All the dishes are influenced by family, friends, or Wareheim’s favorite restaurants, so there’s not one unifying cuisine present. Wareheim’s palate is like if you ran the Epic Meal Time guys through finishing school, bombastic and refined all at once. He recreates crab hand rolls and aguachile he’s eaten on his travels, gives tips for his grandma’s chicken schnitzel, makes a sandwich called a “pork dork,” and even recreates a Pizza Hut personal pan pizza using a cake pan. But the book also guides you on how to best enjoy the food once the cooking is over. There’s a whole spread on how to properly host a raclette party and another on how to saber a bottle of wine, along with guides on how to buy the right tomatoes, oils, and wines for every occasion. It all ensures you’ll have as much fun making and sharing your creations as you do eating them. And everyone could use a party right now. — Jaya Saxena

Burnt Toast and Other Disasters: A Book of Heroic Hacks, Fabulous Fixes, and Secret Sauces

Cal Peternell
William Morrow Cookbooks, September 21

Cal Peternell could write a dozen books on aspirational cooking: gardens of perfect California produce; pasture-raised cuts of beef; and freshly caught fish, served simply, sprinkled with the freshest, grassiest, most expensive olive oil. This was, after all, exactly the kind of cooking he did while running the kitchen at Berkeley’s famed Chez Panisse. But this is not the kind of cooking lesson Peternell offers up in his fourth cookbook, Burnt Toast and Other Disasters. This is a book, as he puts it, “of bad food made good. It’s a book about moving the dial, about meeting food where it is and bringing it someplace better, regardless of the why of it.” This is the book you turn to when cooking for a house of exhausted family, friends, or lovers, when what you’ve got in the fridge is just the dregs of last week’s inspiration.

You should almost burn the bread for the cheesy onion bread pudding, and the vegetables mixed into roasted vegetable cornmeal cakes should be, you guessed it, pretty close to burnt, too. It’s not that Peternell wants you to be mindless in your cooking, only that he thinks you should relax a bit. And when you make a mistake, he wants you to believe you can still put good food on the table. He tells you what to do with really well-done meat — the stuff you meant to cook medium-rare, but that came out closer to rubber — and dedicates a chapter to turning mushy, gloppy rice into dishes like crisped beet-red pancakes dolloped with tart yogurt and mango pickle. In case you think the whole “just relax” thing is a gimmick, written by a chef in a pristine kitchen, let the book’s photos and lighthearted illustrations (done by the author’s family) convince you otherwise. Peternell’s stovetop — like most of ours who cook regularly — is photographed covered in grease splatters from days of good and not-so-good cooking, and a majority of the photos look, in a very appealing way, like they may have been shot at night, on a camera you too might use to document cooking victories.

There’s enough to worry about these days. Cooking, Peternell assures through each carefully written but not-too-serious recipe, shouldn’t be one of those things. So burn your vegetables, overcook the rice, and eat a tin of fish for dinner. It will be fine. Actually, it will probably be great. — ES

Mooncakes and Milkbread: Sweet and Savory Recipes Inspired by Chinese Bakeries

Kristina Cho
Harper Horizon, October 12

There are few joys greater to me than walking up to the cases at a Chinese bakery and considering the plastic-wrapped treats within: the baked char siu buns and egg tarts, the scallion-filled twists, and buns holding a corn-and-mayo mixture. The act is one imbued with meaning; as Kristina Cho writes in the headnotes of one recipe in her new book Mooncakes and Milkbread, “your favorite bun says a lot about you.” And while she’s undoubtedly correct, the book offers a much wider berth than either that statement or its title seems to suggest.

Cho, a Chinese American recipe developer, highlights many recipes for those familiar bakery items, most revolving around one of two main dough recipes (for milk bread and steamed bun dough; each comes with several variations). But the cookbook also harkens to the broader traditions surrounding bakeries and cafes, with recipes for dim sum classics like har gow and turnip cakes. There are recipes for jianbing, congee, and Hong Kong’s famous pork cutlet sandwich. There are sweets and celebration cakes and mooncakes and milk teas. But the book never feels overwhelming or scattered — Cho roots the chapters around a specific immigrant experience I know well, one of seeking out a highly specific food to fill a specific fleeting craving. The hunt-and-find nature of the book, anchored by brief glimpses into four noted Chinese bakeries across the U.S., functions much in the same way. So while the process of acquiring those specific tastes, for me, has long involved sauntering up to one of those pastry cases and overloading on items, Mooncakes and Milkbread has inspired me to actually recreate that experience in my own kitchen. For those unfamiliar, Cho invites you into this world with clear instructions, tons of enthusiasm, and lots and lots of flour. — Erin DeJesus

That Sounds So Good: 100 Real-Life Recipes for Every Day of the Week

Carla Lalli Music
Clarkson Potter, October 12

Cookbooks specifically designed for home cooks ought to do more than just offer new recipe ideas; at their finest, they help home cooks gain confidence and skill. Carla Lalli Music, the former food director at Bon Appétit, has been doing that work for years — both at BA and with her first cookbook Where Cooking Begins. Her second book, That Sounds So Good, continues the mission.

More than any single recipe, what I most admire about this book are the many, many ways Lalli Music attempts to make the collection as educational and adaptable as possible. Organized by weekday versus weekend cooking, each recipe’s steps include which order to cut and prep individual ingredients, reminding the reader that in many cases it’s in fact more efficient to do some prep while other components are cooking (even if years of listening to experts shouting MISE EN PLACE might have us convinced we need to have every single ingredient sliced in a ramekin and at the ready before we start). At the bottom are several ideas about how to swap ingredients based on what you might already have at home, a wonderfully useful format I hope other cookbook authors consider.

With all this helpful insight, the recipe becomes more of a template than a specific set of instructions to follow — and those templates are incredibly inviting: I’ve already bookmarked the one-pot chicken and rice and the pantry eggs in purgatory to add to my own weekday rotation. From the weekend ideas, I’m especially drawn to the spaghetti with melted cauliflower sauce, utterly intrigued by the promise of what totally softened cauliflower could mean for my household: another pasta idea, for sure, but also the base of a scoopable mashed cauliflower for my toddler and a new toast spread for me, too. The structure of That Sounds So Good will encourage even the most harried home cook to think more flexibly — and more than any one thing to eat, being confident and adaptable in the kitchen is what sounds so good right now. — Hillary Dixler Canavan

The Korean Vegan Cookbook: Reflections and Recipes from Omma’s Kitchen

Joanne Lee Molinaro
Avery, October 12

Many of the most beloved Korean dishes are meaty: One of the easiest ways for people to get into Korean cuisine is Korean barbecue, Spam has become an essential pantry item for many Korean recipes, and Korean essential kimchi is often made with pungent fish sauce and salty, fermented shrimp. It almost feels impossible to be vegan and enjoy Korean dishes at the same time. But, Joanne Lee Molinaro, better known as @thekoreanvegan on social media, wants to challenge this idea.

In her debut cookbook, The Korean Vegan Cookbook: Reflections and Recipes from Omma’s Kitchen, Molinaro presents plant-based recipes for some of the most popular Korean dishes, while remaining true to original techniques and flavors. Bulgogi, often made with beef, is instead prepared with soy curls, a meat alternative with a slightly chewy texture. Her kimchi recipe replaces fish with “fishy sauce,” which gets its subtle umami punch from dried shiitake mushrooms. Variations of quintessential Korean soups, like doenjang jjigae (fermented soybean stew) and yukgaejang (a spicy beef soup with vegetables, veganized here with shiitake mushrooms), appear in the book, titled with their Korean characters, reminding readers this book is indeed Korean first.

The other element of the book, as the title declares, is Molinaro’s reflections on her family. Many of these focus on her omma (mom), who immigrated to America to become a nurse without knowing the language, her appa (dad), who at 9 years old started selling bags of rice at the market with his father, and others. Each of these anecdotes ties into a recipe. Before the kimchi chapter, for example, Molinaro describes her hahlmuhnee’s (grandma) cherished kimchi byung (a glass container made for storing kimchi) and why it means so much for her hahlmuhnee to reuse the same container to store kimchi despite its strong, lingering fish smell. With these stories, it becomes clear that every dish is deeply personal to Molinaro, and by presenting the recipes here, she does more than offer up delicious food — she invites the reader to honor one immigrant family’s story. — James Park

Italian American: Red Sauce Classics and New Essentials

Angie Rito and Scott Tacinelli with Jamie Feldmar
Clarkson Potter, October 19

At Don Angie, the critically acclaimed restaurant in New York City’s West Village neighborhood, husband-and-wife duo Scott Tacinelli and Angie Rito surprise diners with their unconventional takes on Italian-American classics. (I’m looking at you, pinwheel lasagna). Upon first glance, their cookbook, Italian American, seems like a collection of red sauce favorites, but at its core it’s a book about family. As Tacinelli and Rito write in the introduction, “Italian-American cooking always is.”

Divided into 10 chapters, including hot and cold antipasti, sauces and ragus, pasta, and desserts and after-dinner drinks, Italian American is rich with Tacinelli and Rito’s family history. And among old family photos and anecdotes is a mix of classic and not-so-classic Italian-American dishes, some of which have been passed down through generations (Grandma Rito’s marinated roasted peppers, Grandma Addario’s lasagna with tiny meatballs), and some of which were born of Tacinelli’s and Rito’s own imaginations and experiences:

The chrysanthemum Caesar salad calls for delicate greens the couple was introduced to when they lived in an apartment above a restaurant serving Yunnanese food. Most of the 125 recipes are doable on a weeknight and home-cook friendly, calling for ingredients you likely already have in your pantry. But it’s the duo’s spirited take on each recipe — if the Campari & orange sticky ribs “remind you of Chinese-American takeout, then we’ve done our job” — that speaks to the heart of the book: While these are comforting, familiar dishes, Tacinelli and Rito provide all the technique and inspiration necessary to bring old-school classics new life. — Esra Erol

Roberta’s: Still Cookin’

Carlo Mirarchi and Brandon Hoy
Rizzoli, October 19

Roberta’s: Still Cookin’ is bookended by a close-up of the legendary Bushwick’s restaurant’s most recognizable dish: a wood-fired pizza. The book will teach you how to make that pizza, from starter through dough through sauce — and even how to make mozzarella, in the penultimate pantry section. But that only scratches the surface of what is really part scrapbook, part tribute to what has become the “Roberta’s universe” — not one but two Brooklyn restaurants, a Los Angeles restaurant, a name synonymous with plucky early-aughts optimism that has been veneered with the elegant luster of a three-restaurant, two-cookbook brand — and the tensions that arise out of such a journey.

It begins with a frank roundtable retrospective between co-founders Brandon Hoy and Carlo Mirarchi, and acolytes will be delighted by the punky attitude that punctuates every page. Muppet-like puppets ham up dish photos; curt recipe headnotes tread the line between instruction and good-natured insults. One reads, “Warm the sungolds, but don’t let the skin burst, otherwise you’re a jerk”; the intro for pasta carbonara is simply: “Don’t be afraid.”

The recipes are similarly unfussy, assembled dishes built around a few ingredients and some items from the pantry section, which covers compound butters, flavored oils, condiments, and other staples like that pizza sauce and mozzarella. Methods tend to be looser, with helpful warnings and cautions where required.

But what might be most interesting about this cookbook is what it leaves out. Before there were two co-founders, there were three: Chris Parachini left amid a $5.4 million lawsuit in 2015. His part in the Roberta’s story is absent, although photo collages depict the raucous parties and gritty build-outs of those early days, with bootleg salumi setups and beat-up walk-ins sometimes sitting uncomfortably alongside the lusher interiors at its more recent outposts. In a way, producing this cookbook is an acknowledgement that what “Roberta’s” meant in 2008 is not what it means in 2021. But if that’s a kind of honesty, Still Cookin’ is also deeply nostalgic and rose-tinted, to the point that the statement feels, most of all, like one of defiance. — James Hansen

Baking with Dorie: Sweet, Salty & Simple

Dorie Greenspan
Mariner Books, October 19

There are four chocolate chip cookie recipes in Dorie Greenspan’s new cookbook, preceded by a two-page primer on how to get the most out of the ingredients and techniques used to make them. Taken together, the recipes and primer encapsulate what Greenspan stans (Greenstans?) such as myself love about her cookbooks: thoroughness mixed with innovation, seasoned with just the right amount of borderline obsession. (Also, I made the first of those chocolate chip recipes — the “classic” — and it was extremely good.)

To read a Greenspan cookbook is to feel welcomed to a party given by an uncommonly empathetic host, and this, Greenspan’s 14th, is no exception. Dedicated to recipes that are, as she writes, “simple, rely on basic techniques, and have deep flavors and complex textures,” the book delves into cookies, cakes, pies/tarts, savory baked goods, breakfast, and just the right amount of pastry. There are both stalwarts (chocolate babka, English muffins) and lots of fun twists on familiar forms, such as rye-cranberry chocolate chunk cookies and a glorious miso-maple loaf with apricot jam glaze. All of the 150 recipes are accompanied by the generous, accommodating instructions that characterize Greenspan’s books: She encourages playing around with different ingredients, offers helpful insights on technique, and reassures you that even if you end up with a mess, it will be a worthwhile one. Really, the biggest difficulty here, especially given the unrelentingly gorgeous photography, is deciding what to make first. — Rebecca Flint Marx

Black Food

Bryant Terry
4 Color Books, October 19

The notion that a cookbook can amount to more than a mere collection of recipes is commonplace — recipe headnotes often contain historical context and personal narrative, which can put forth a particular idea of a place or cuisine. But when I say that Black Food is more than a cookbook, I mean that literally. The first offering from 4 Color Books, Bryant Terry’s imprint with Penguin Random House dedicated to uplifting BIPOC voices, Black Food is also a book of essays, poetry, and art. It’s the kind of book that belongs both on your coffee table and in your regular kitchen rotation.

Terry is the author of several cookbooks, but for Black Food, he drew on the contributions of more than 100 Black creators, thinkers, and community leaders to explore the question of what is “Black food,” really? The pieces that make up the answer include writings on the role of food in Black culture as well as explorations of Black culture and identity more generally, as in Lazarus Lynch’s essay on growing up Black and queer. But it’s the recipes, with the kind of headnotes that reference deeper cultural themes and histories, that form the book’s through line. They include the vegan options Terry has become known for through his cookbooks, which include Afro-Vegan and Vegetable Kingdom, as well as recipes with origins in the American South (such as Kia Damon’s sweet potato grits and Terry’s jackfruit tamales) and in the wider African diaspora (including Eric Adjepong’s corn and goat milk pudding, which uses West African ingredients to tell the story of the trans-Atlantic slave trade). There are also no-recipe recipes that highlight various aspects of the Black experience, like Amanda Yee on how to build a late-fall shoebox lunch, or Kanchan Dawn Hunter on how to grow and prepare medicinal plants. It’s a collection of recipes and more that makes it clear that Black food doesn’t mean any one thing: Black food is many things from around the world and, like this book, it defies categorization. — MB

Zoe’s Ghana Kitchen: An Introduction to New African Cuisine – From Ghana With Love

Zoe Adjonyoh
Voracious, October 19

The foodways of the African diaspora are, as Zoe Adjonyoh puts it in the American edition of her 2017 U.K. hit cookbook, “the last frontier of food.” Adjonyoh isn’t suggesting that people within the continent lack awareness of the incredibly rich and varied culinary traditions surrounding them. Instead, she points to the way African food has been criminally overlooked by mainstream food media. That was certainly the case when her book was first published, but now, Adjonyoh sees interest and representation picking up, at the perfect time for her tribute to Ghanaian cooking to reach American readers.

The book promises an introduction to “new African cuisine,” but “new” is not intended to suggest that these recipes are dumbed down or oversimplified for an unfamiliar reader. On the contrary, Adjonyoh encourages cooks to push beyond what may feel most comfortable, to seek out potentially hard-to-find ingredients. To that end, Adjonyoh also operates an online store — by the same name as this cookbook — that sources and sells many of the ingredients one will need to cook their way through this book.

To really understand what Adjonyoh means by “new,” perhaps start with her suya flank steak, a twist on steak and fries in which steak is seasoned with the spices of beef suya, a classic West African street food, and the fries are made with starchy yam. For more familiar Ghanaian dishes, turn to a spiced, rich stew of garden egg (an African eggplant variety) and tilapia, or work your way through five preparations of both green and yellow plantain. Born in Ghana, Adjonyoh spent most of her childhood between Southeast London and West Cork, Ireland, and some of the most exciting recipes come when the author joins Ghanaian and Irish foodways: Think Ghanaian-Irish Scotch eggs, brought together with mashed yam, seasoned with a Ghanaian five-spice mixture, and coated in gari, or fermented, ground cassava.

The excitement Adjonyoh feels in sharing these recipes and stories with readers is tangible in the gorgeous photos of both food and of Ghana, and the little treats she sneaks in between recipes. For the fullest experience, flip to the playlist of highlife and Afrobeats music to fill your kitchen while you cook; something to enjoy as you dig into stews and curries, perfectly cooked fish, and for good measure, a warmly spiced slice of honey and plantain ginger cake. — ES

New Native Kitchen: Celebrating Modern Recipes of the American Indian

Freddie Bitsoie and James O. Fraioli
Abrams, October 19

It will likely come as no shock to learn that the Indigenous foodways of America have been largely ignored by the culinary mainstream for the last few hundred-ish years. Fry bread and the occasional bison burger notwithstanding, the diverse cooking styles of Native Americans have only recently drawn attention from scholars and cooks outside Indigenous communities. Even before then, though, there was Freddie Bitsoie. A member of the Navajo Nation and a longtime chef and advocate for Indigenous cooking, he led the kitchen at Mitsitam Native Foods Café at the Smithsonian in Washington D.C., and today continues to promote Indigenous cooking as a living, breathing, varied, and evolving cuisine. Written in collaboration with James O. Fraioli, this book of recipes seeks to further that mission. “Referring to all Indigenous peoples, or their foods, as one homogenous group is like saying that there’s no difference between Spain’s tapas and France’s hors d’oeuvres,” Bitsoie writes. As such, in addition to recipes for Three Sisters bean soup, roasted duck with summer berries, and pumpkin bread pudding, there are handy one-page primers on Indigenous culinary regionalism, with variances by terrain and tribal nation, from the people of the Chaco Canyon to the Hopi, Muscogee, Chumash, and more.

By its very nature, this kind of cooking is not fussy, so recipes feel weeknight-level inviting, hyper-seasonal, and full of good, whole ingredients (Bitsoie provides tips on how to procure any of the more-obscure ones, like acorn meal and fiddlehead ferns). Dishes like a dandelion salad with jicama and prickly pear vinaigrette and cornmeal-crusted walleye with roasted corn and grilled chiles will appeal to health-focused home cooks as well as the historically curious. But Bitsoie is emphatic to explain this is not a history book. “I ... find ways to be creative within those traditions — taking Indigenous ingredients from thousands of miles apart and building their flavors in ways traditional recipes never could have, given the limits of geography,” he writes. The result is a delicious “snapshot of the continent’s ancient ingredients, shown through modernized recipes inspired by ancient traditions,” as well as a fitting manual for a more considered, more wholly American dinner table. — Lesley Suter

Grist: A Practical Guide to Cooking Grains, Beans, Seeds, and Legumes

Abra Berens
Chronicle Books, October 26

The sheer volume of grains and legumes in the world can be overwhelming. And yet you can only make so many grain bowls before you’re in a cooking rut. Enter Grist, chef Abra Berens’s follow-up to Ruffage, her 2019 cookbook focused on vegetables. A thorough A to Z of grains, beans, seeds, and legumes, Grist is based on the philosophy that great cooking comes from working with ingredients you’re excited about; once you’ve mastered them, you can bend any number of recipes to showcase those ingredients.

Beginning with a section on condiments (vinaigrettes, gussied-up dairy) designed to elevate newly cooked dishes and leftovers, Grist is then divided into two categories: legumes and grains. Seems simple, right? But what follows is a crash course on beans, chickpeas, lentils, oats, and rice, including how to prepare them, answers to the age-old question “to soak or not to soak?” and average boiling times and “signs of doneness.” Berens also shows readers how to build meals around a week’s worth of a particular grain or legume, providing day-by-day instructions for transforming an ordinary pile of beans into a solid breakfast (with two big scoops of cooked beans, a soft-boiled egg, and a handful of greens), a warm bowl of black bean and sweet potato soup, or a $15 knockoff Sweetgreen salad. Have buckwheat flour on hand? Begin your morning with a different plate of buckwheat crepes for every day of the week, perhaps with a fried egg and sauteed kale, cherry tomato conserva and ricotta, or mascarpone and berries.

Regular cooking has become a consistent part of our lives over the past year, and this book will help you take comfort in knowing that after a long, grueling day of work, a quick, heart-warming dinner with some vegetables, already-boiled grains, and a good sauce is well within reach. — EE

Cheryl Day’s Treasury of Southern Baking

Cheryl Day
Artisan, October 26

Cheryl Day has written several cookbooks with her husband Griffith Day, with whom she opened Savannah’s Back in the Day Bakery in 2002. But in the first cookbook that bears her name alone, Day begins by establishing her Southern-baker bona fides. Although she grew up in Los Angeles, her mother lived in Alabama before moving during the Great Migration, and Day spent many summers there. After her mother passed away, she found a trove of handwritten family recipes, including those inherited from her great-great-grandmother. Day acknowledges the contributions of her ancestors and all the Black women in the South who have shaped Southern baking on the dedication page, writing, “My great-great-grandmother Hannah Queen Grubbs was born enslaved in 1838 and was among the women who created many of these Southern recipes … With reverence for her and so many like her, I carry this history forward in sharing recipes that I love.” And in presenting them in Cheryl Day’s Treasury of Southern Baking, Day makes her position clear: “I feel that there is no better baking than that happening in Southern kitchens, but you can bake like a Southerner no matter where you live.”

It’s a prospect that seems eminently achievable. Although Day outlines some rules to Southern baking, they’re really more akin to tips for success: Butter for creaming shouldn’t be warmer than 70 degrees; eggs should be separated by hand. In fact, there’s little that’s limiting about Southern baking. Day makes it a point to say there is, for example, no one proper Southern biscuit. “How many Southern grandmothers are there?” Day writes. “That is perhaps how many ways there are to bake a biscuit.”

To this point, Day includes four different biscuit recipes, and you’ll find similar variety in other categories. A section on crackers includes buttermilk, benne, sea salt, crispy cheese, and cheese straw versions. Along with Day’s doughnut recipe, you’ll find seven different options for glazes and instructions on how to make filled doughnuts with milk jam, pastry cream, or lemon curd. Cake, that essential baked good, is the subject of three separate chapters, including one for gathering cakes, the kind of cakes that “travel well and are enjoyed as a part of everyday life.” All this is to say, Cheryl Day’s Treasury of Southern Baking is just that: a wealth of recipes that home bakers will be returning to for occasions, years, and even more generations to come. — MB

Treasures of the Mexican Table: Classic Recipes, Local Secrets

Pati Jinich
Mariner Books, November 2

The charming, infectiously enthusiastic Pati Jinich has been educating audiences for years about the breadth and diversity of Mexico’s cuisine through her PBS show, Pati’s Mexican Table. Her latest cookbook, Treasures of the Mexican Table, allows her to continue showcasing hyper-regional dishes from the country’s 31 states and capital, whether it’s chipotle oyster soup from the port city of Atlanta in Sinaloa, or the Pueblan specialty of Lebanese-influenced tacos arabes. Jinich seems less interested putting her own spin on these dishes and more on capturing the focus that chefs, home cooks, and street vendors put into their cooking (the cookbook celebrates many of these individuals in the recipe intros, shouting out folks like Oaxacan chef Ixchel Ornelas, who promotes her city’s traditions with an easy-to-execute, warming corn soup with queso fresco).

The versatile cookbook is a fit for home cooks of any experience or ambition level. Treasures of the Mexican Table teaches cooks newer to Mexican cuisine how to carefully prep prickly nopales for sauteing, roast and sweat poblanos, and differentiate between various dried chiles, while never reading like an encyclopedia. Some recipes, like a tomatillo-enhanced chicken and mushroom mole, delve into project-cooking territory, but others, like a quesadilla-like crispy shrimp taco vibrant with peppers, chipotle, and tomatoes, are perfectly suitable for weeknight meals and can even be easily adapted into something new the next day — pair corn and poblano-spiked rice with chorizo and bacon-topped pinto beans inside a tortilla with some cheese, and you’ve got a monster burrito on your hands for lunch. And recipes like the pistachio- and guajillo-spiked salsa macha and the chorizo- and bacon-topped piggy beans are great for entertaining small groups — you might even be interested in sharing some of those fun facts from Jinich (such as the fact that said beans are a popular bar snack in Jalisco) with your guests. — Missy Frederick

Sambal Shiok: The Malaysian Cookbook

Mandy Yin
Quadrille Publishing, November 2

Celebrated London restaurateur Mandy Yin states her case on the very first page of Sambal Shiok: “My mission in life is to introduce as many people as possible to Malaysian cuisine.” Then, she complicates it: “It is incorrect to refer to all Malaysian food as Malay, which I will now explain.”

And explain she does, in a warmly pedagogical tone that runs throughout the book’s cultural framing of Malaysian cuisine, its explanation of its building blocks, and recipes that chart a kind of two-pronged journey: Yin’s path from street food trader to restaurateur in the U.K., and the childhood and family life that led up to it. The book is, at its core, a paean to the seemingly infinite permutations of Malaysian cuisine, emphasizing how geographical, cultural, and sociological differences create variations on both macro and micro levels: not just region to region or city to city, but household to household.

Recipes are accordingly both instructive and adaptable: learning to cook through Yin’s clear, encouraging guidance on sambals, rice, and rempah — spice pastes that are the backbone of myriad dishes — could create room for improvisation. But that would be to miss out on replicating the restaurant dishes for which people traverse London, particularly the curry laksa for which the restaurant is best known. Here Yin explains that it is campur-style and hails from the city of Malacca, ontologically somewhere between Kuala Lumpur’s curry laksas and Penang’s assam laksas. She writes that those cities are the three names — alongside Malaysia — that she painted on to the front of her restaurant in the North London neighborhood of Holloway, in homage to the cities that produced her family and saw her sit at their tables. It’s this effortless folding of the personal into the cultural that makes Sambal Shiok such a wonderful book from which to read, as much to cook. — JH

The Latin American Cookbook

Virgilio Martínez and Nicholas Gill
Phaidon Press, November 3

The Latin American Cookbook is the latest in the truly massive regional cookbook series from Phaidon, and for this one, publishers turned to acclaimed chef Virgilio Martínez who, along with running some of Lima’s top restaurants, also works with a fascinating culinary research group called Mater Iniciativa. Martínez applied the Mater Iniciativa philosophy to his culinary research across the region, investigating the food of Latin America in its “natural, social, and cultural context” and finding the common threads in how Latin America eats “at home, the food made in the streets and in our markets.”

The result is expansive: Chapters comprise dishes from around Latin America, organized by broad categories like lamb and goat, fish and seafood, sweets, and, of course, an entire chapter devoted to corn. The headnote for each of the 600-plus recipes is only a short paragraph, but together the notes and recipes tell a complex history of how the foodways of Latin America came to be and what these recipes mean today: A hit ’90s song from Honduras opens the recipe for conch soup; the headnote for chocolate atole notes that beverages like it date back to the Aztecs and then hypothesizes how it might have tasted back then; the headnote for yellow chile tiradito traces the steady ascent of Nikkei cooking in Peru as well as the power of Nobu Matsuhisa. So while the book is encyclopedic it’s also lively, entertaining, and surprisingly navigable. The Latin American Cookbook has as much to offer research-oriented readers as those who are only on the hunt for something good to cook. — HDC

Andrea D’Aquino is an illustrator and author based in New York City.

A $7 tool that means not having to ask “Are the dishes clean or dirty?” a million times a day

I always think of dishwashers as argument enders. There’s really no point in fighting over dishes if you have a machine that cleans them for you. And while I believe everyone in a household should put dirty dishes into the machine as soon as they’re done eating, having a dishwasher means that even if I do have to do someone else’s dishes (or if they have to do mine), the task is just not that onerous.

And yet.

I have a toddler who eats five times a day in our kitchen, with various plates and bibs and cups as well as her own tiny utensils, and it started to seem like it was impossible to keep up with all the stuff that needed washing and putting away. This meant my husband and I were often grabbing clean dishes right from the dishwasher and closing it, which would turn the indicator light off, which then meant we would inevitably forget whether the dishes inside the dishwasher were clean or dirty, which meant not being sure if we could unload the dishwasher at any given moment, all while dirty dishes piled up in the sink. We weren’t arguing about dishes — but we were definitely frustrated.

In a blitz of self-improvement energy a few months ago, I tried to zero in on what, exactly, would solve this problem. I googled “dishwasher clean sign” and found this magnet. I wish I had thought to do that months, if not years, ago. It’s so much easier to get back into the habit of loading dirty dishes as soon as I’m done using them now that I know the dishwasher is ready to accept them. As soon as I turn the dishwasher on, I flip the sign to “clean.” As soon as the last clean dish comes out, I flip the sign to dirty. It’s one of the few organizational systems I’ve tried that truly doesn’t require any extra work or time.

I will not lie and tell you that thanks to this magnet we never have a dish pile. That’s just not possible when you’re cooking several meals a day in the small kitchen of the apartment where you live with a toddler in a still ongoing pandemic. But we have, finally, stopped having to ask “Are the dishes clean or dirty?” a million times a day. We have, finally, been able to simply load or unload the dishwasher whenever we have a minute. We have, finally, stopped having feelings about dishes.

The best recipes to make over Labor Day weekend are summery, easy, and make the most out of the season’s best ingredients

Labor Day weekend is almost upon us, and you might find yourself in the position of hosting or attending one last summer dinner party, barbecue, or porch hang. But we’re also in the languid depths of the season’s end, so if you, like us, are trying to maximize the deliciousness and minimize the stress of entertaining, look no further. Among the menu suggestions below, there are plenty of ideas for making good use of those late-summer tomatoes (see also: the best summer tomato recipes) and sweet corn, but also outside-the-box ideas for mains, and even a baking project to make the most of the holiday weekend.

Spiced-Tomato-Braised Fish

Rachel Gurjar, Bon Appétit

This recipe is a winner on several levels, starting with its super-approachable ingredient list — besides the fish itself, it’s pretty much pantry basics, down to the canned tomatoes — as well as its versatility as a dairy-free, meat-free, one-pot affair. My husband Daniel (who handles all the cooking around here) made just a few adjustments, swapping in powdered cumin for cumin seeds (again, pantry basics!) and adding turmeric and coriander for good measure. It’s a nice, light, flavorful dish that captures that late-summer tomato vibe — and if you’re planning on entertaining this Labor Day weekend, it’s an impressive dish that is easier to make than it looks. — Ellie Krupnick, director of editorial operations

Esquites

Kay Chun, NYT Cooking

I love elotes, but as a New Yorker I do not have a backyard with a grill (ok I do have a grill on our balcony which may or may not be legal, don’t snitch). Anyway, grilling is an ordeal, which makes this esquites — basically elotes off the cob — recipe an incredible way to use up your sweet summer corn if you don’t have access to a grill, or if you’d just rather not spend all night flossing. Even though it’s full of cheese and mayo, none of it overpowers the charred, bursting corn kernels, which are all I want to eat at the end of summer. I also added some crumbled Flamin’ Hot Cheetos as a garnish for extra color, kick, and just to say I put Flamin’ Hot Cheetos on them. — Jaya Saxena, staff writer

Melon Salad

Adapted from janssushibar.com

I found this recipe years ago on a now-defunct cooking blog called Jan’s Sushi Bar, but it’s easy enough to duplicate and tweak. Slice up three tomatoes, a pound of cantaloupe or watermelon (or both), a large cucumber, and half a red onion. (Mango would probably also be good, or any other summery fruit you prefer.) Whisk together 3 tablespoons of white wine vinegar, 2 tablespoons of olive oil, some salt and pepper, and pour it over the chopped fruit. Let it sit for a few hours in the fridge, toss again, then top with a chiffonade of basil. Easy and delicious. To make it even easier, I often buy pre-chopped fruit from the grocery store. — Brittanie Shey, Eater Houston + Dallas associate editor

DIY Hand Rolls

Christina Chaey, Bon Appétit

My queen Ina Garten once said something that I swear by: The best kind of cooking is no cooking. And DIY hand rolls are a perfect example of a no-cooking, highly-rewarding, and fun dinner party option. You only need to prepare a few essential components, which are highly customizable and come together in less than a half an hour: seasoned rice, a tangy, spicy protein, and a few fresh vegetables. The best part is that you don’t even have to turn on the stove. As the host, you let your dinner guests assemble their ideal bites, sparking interesting conversation, naturally. How easy is that? — James Park, social media manager

Japchae

Maangchi

When I was in college, my friends and I would squat around a tiny charcoal grill while my friend Eric seared pork belly, short ribs, and marinated slices of steak for our summer Korean barbecues. These days, I still try to grill bulgogi and galbi on Labor Day; I find the gently sweet, sort of fruity Korean barbecue marinades far surpass a slather of ketchup-based barbecue sauce on a chicken thigh. But I kick myself for not finding Maangchi’s fantastic japchae recipe earlier, which would have been a natural pairing for Eric’s pile of grilled meats. Japchae, sweet potato starch noodles tossed with stir-fried vegetables, are mellow enough to stand alongside any piece of grilled meat, while the nutty touch of sesame oil, colorful mix of julienned vegetables, and the bass note of rehydrated shiitakes make it an uncomplicated, crowd-pleasing side. I tend to opt out of the beef in this recipe, simply because I have a number of vegetarians in my life who may be relying on it for a main course. It’s easy to double for larger groups, and it’s great hot or cold if you have leftovers. If you’re looking for a knockout bulgogi marinade for the top billing, Maangchi’s remains my go-to. — Brooke Jackson-Glidden, Eater PDX editor

Corn Chowder Salad

Beekman Boys, Smitten Kitchen

Corn salads can be a little ho-hum to me (corn + can of black beans + diced bell pepper = you know the drill), but I really enjoy corn in the summer, so I perk up when I come across a recipe with a bit more personality. Smitten Kitchen’s corn chowder salad (adapted from the Beekman Boys) definitely qualifies; bacon and cooked potatoes add fat and heft, with a little cider vinegar for a spark of acid. It’s even more of a winner during corn season, but no judgment if you just use it as a way to make frozen kernels a bit more exciting; you’ll just have to estimate a little on the swap. — Missy Frederick, cities director

Tomatoes with Fig & Prosciutto; Minty Limeade

Andy Baraghani, Bon Appétit

I am never lazier than when the temperature soars. I have no will to do anything — let alone cook! for a crowd! So, I don’t. Luckily, I can rely on the glory of late-summer tomatoes and figs to split the difference between my sloth and my entertaining aspirations. Why sweat that too-involved, “show-stopping” dish most guests might not even finish? I’ll shop in air-conditioned bliss to stock up on chilled slivers of prosciutto, large bottles of sparkling water, and a few lemons and limes to whip up not only a cooling fig, tomato, and prosciutto salad showered with mint, freshly ground black pepper, and beautiful, beautiful salt but a crisp, minty limeade as well. And when my friends arrive, heat exhausted and hungry, I can always say, “Oh, this? It was nothing!” and mean it. — Jesse Sparks, cities editor

Beautiful Burger Buns

King Arthur Flour

This summer, I honed an excellent party trick: I would show up to barbecues with homemade hot dog and hamburger buns. People automatically think you’re a baking genius and there really is something special about grilling up a dog and eating it on a bespoke bun — so soft, so pillowy, so not dried out from years of sitting on a grocery store shelf. With cooler weather incoming, opportunities to grill are shrinking, so take this chance to impress a crowd while you still can. Luckily, the King Arthur recipe for hamburger buns is basically as easy as they come. (If you’re looking to do hot dog buns, divide the dough into slightly smaller pieces and watch this shaping video for assistance.) Trust me: you’ll be the star of the party and your grilled meats will taste infinitely better. It’s a win-win. — Dayna Evans, Eater Philly editor

Sir, this is literally a Sweetgreen

Shutting up is literally free, but then again, so is posting on LinkedIn, where Jonathan Neman, co-founder and CEO of Sweetgreen, recently published a post — which he then took down after Vice pointed it out — essentially blaming fat people for the ravages of the pandemic and calling on the government to create a “health mandate.” (It’s possible Neman is using a paid version of LinkedIn, but my point stands!!)

The crux of his argument was as simple as it is stupid. “78% of hospitalizations due to COVID are Obese and Overweight people. Is there an underlying problem that perhaps we have not given enough attention to?” the salad-chain founder, who made his fortune selling $11-$15 dollar Guacamole Greens salads and Shroomami bowls, wrote. “No vaccine or mask will save us.”

While high BMI (itself a flawed, racist metric) was classified by the CDC as a risk factor for severe COVID, it’s important to note that vaccines can, actually, save us. As reported recently by CNN, data from the CDC shows that more than 99 percent of fully vaccinated people have not had a breakthrough COVID case resulting in hospitalization or death; recent data gathered by the New York Times suggests that the unvaccinated make up anywhere from 95 percent to 99 percent of all COVID-related hospitalizations right now. I’m not a CEO or anything, but even I can see that’s a pretty effective vaccine.

Neman, who says he is vaccinated (I guess in case his thinness and unlimited access to kale Caesars doesn’t protect him), has fallen for and perpetuated anti-fat bias. Weight and health are not synonymous, and to assume body size is a marker of health ignores the way in which anti-fat bias within the medical system harms fat people in the first place. Fat patients are routinely dismissed, their symptoms either ignored entirely or attributed to their size — a cycle in which these patients delay care, or at worst, end up without medical care, their real medical problems left untreated. It’s not hard to imagine why fat people subjected to worse medical care over the course of their lifetime than their thin counterparts might be more susceptible to COVID-19. And while being overweight has been established as a risk factor, at least one study has found that COVID patients with moderate obesity actually had a lower risk of death in the ICU.

But I’ve already spent more time thinking about fat people’s health care needs than Neman had before posting his screed, so let’s move on to his proposed solution, a “health mandate.” His idea, now stick with him here, okay, because it’s the kind of brave thinking that could only come from a man who co-founded a salad chain that praises itself for “thinking like a tech company” but really is a salad chain: “What if we made the food that is making us sick illegal? What if we taxed processed food and refined sugar to pay for the impact of the pandemic?” The argument mirrors that of fellow vegetable-peddler and Whole Foods CEO John Mackey, who argued in November 2020 against health care being an “intrinsic ethical right” because health care wouldn’t even be necessary if only people would change the way they “eat, the way they live, the lifestyle, and diet.”

I can think of plenty of reasons why a person who makes their money (lots of it!) by selling salad would want to make things that are not salad illegal, and the companies who make foods that are not salad pay more taxes. And I’m sympathetic to it, honestly. Sounds like a great business strategy, but one that, sorry to this salad man, won’t end the pandemic.

In his follow-up to “The Whole Fish Cookbook,” Josh Niland treats tuna like beef or pork

Josh Niland’s first cookbook, The Whole Fish Cookbook, won two James Beard Awards in 2019, for best restaurant and professional book, and cookbook of the year — a title that introduced it to a broader audience than was perhaps anticipated. “It’s one of those books where you pick it up and are like, ‘Oh my gosh.’ Every page is kind of intense, from fish offal through the aging and charcuterie and even the turducken. There’s a lot in there that is a little bit in your face,” Niland says. “But I did set out to write something somewhat provocative because without provocation you don’t make inroads into effecting any kind of change.” The change he had in mind: A nose-to-tail approach to fish.

With his second book, Niland continues to implore cooks to use all parts of the fish but without the same level of professional intensity. “It was to approach this far more joyfully, less exhaustively, and to just make people hungry,” Niland says. With photography from Rob Palmer, the finished work certainly does just that.

Rob Palmer

As the title implies, Take One Fish focuses on the many possibilities that can arise from utilizing all the parts of a single fish. The chapters are divided by species; there are 15 of them, beginning with the extra-small, like sardines and herring, and ending with extra-large, including tuna and swordfish. They were chosen for optimal global availability (except for the very Australian coral trout; “That was more in there just for me,” Niland says), and there are suggested substitutes for each. But even as it aims for accessibility, the book is also in keeping with Niland’s broader mission of changing the way home cooks think about buying and cooking fish.

“You can ask those who cut your fish to behave in a similar way to [meat butchers],” Niland says. In his ideal world, fish shops would create appealing products from the less salable parts of the fish so as to ensure every part of the fish is used, thus reducing the number of fish that get taken from the water. This is precisely why he calls the part of his Sydney restaurant that prepares and sells fish a fish butchery. “A butcher is somebody who dresses and prepares an animal in readiness to be consumed and bring desirability to that product, whereas a monger and ‘fish mongery’ is derived from someone who deals and trades in fish as a commodity. And for us to continue to view fish as a commodity is completely neglectful.”

The benefits of treating fish more like meat aren’t only economical and environmental —Take One Fish proves that they’re gustatory, too. This is exemplified in dishes like the tuna lasagna, which takes “the sinewy, muscly parts that sit on the sides of those more desirable, circular loins,” grinds them up, treating the result like ground beef or pork, and layering it in between noodles and sauce. Niland has used the same technique for tuna koftas, mapo tofu, and laab. But it’s also worth noting that there’s more to Take One Fish than fish recipes. Within its pages you’ll find recipes for Yorkshire pudding, blinis, an elegant potato tart, and more, along with the knowledge to cook confidently and thoughtfully with any number of primary proteins. First, though, here’s that lasagna.

Tuna Lasagna Recipe

Serves 4

Now, the thought of this might make you cringe but, trust me, this is one recipe you’ll want to cook again and again. The texture and appearance of the tuna mince will have you second-guessing whether it is actually fish and will certainly break you out of the chicken/veal/pork loop. It should also be noted that I don’t expect anyone to be mincing down sashimi-grade yellowfin tuna belly or the center cut of a potential tuna steak here — instead, you’re looking to use the sinew-heavy area or scrappy chunks that come away from behind the tuna head at the top of the loin, along with any tail cuts and scrapings from the frame of the fish. These are the bits that often get tossed away at the markets because of a perceived lack of customer interest, so it’s great to find a good use for them. Ask your fishmonger or market vendor for them next time you’re shopping.

Ingredients:

8 dried lasagna sheets
1 cup (3¹⁄₂ ounces/100 grams) finely grated Parmesan
¹⁄₃ cup (1³⁄₄ ounces/50 grams) finely grated mozzarella

For the ragu:

¹⁄₂ bunch of thyme
1 fresh bay leaf
1 teaspoon black peppercorns, toasted
1 star anise
10 fluid ounces (300 milliliters) grapeseed oil
3 garlic cloves, finely grated
Sea salt flakes and freshly cracked black pepper
1 large onion, finely diced
1 large carrot, finely diced
1 small fennel bulb, finely diced
1 teaspoon tomato paste
5 fluid ounces (150 milliliters) red wine
7 ounces (200 grams) tinned peeled tomatoes, crushed
1 cup (8¹⁄₂ fluid ounces/250 milliliters) water
9 ounces (250 grams) ground yellowfin tuna

For the bechamel:

2 cups (17 fluid ounces/500 milliliters) whole milk
1 Parmesan rind
1³⁄₄ ounces (50 grams) butter
¹⁄₃ cup (1³⁄₄ ounces/50 grams) all-purpose flour
Freshly grated nutmeg, to taste
Sea salt flakes and freshly cracked black pepper

Instructions:

Step 1: To make the ragu, tie the thyme, bay leaf, peppercorns, and star anise in a piece of cheesecloth to make a bouquet garni.

Step 2: Heat 5 fluid ounces (150 milliliters) of the grapeseed oil in a large heavy-based frying pan over a medium heat, add the garlic and a pinch of salt, and saute for 30 seconds. Add the onion and another pinch of salt and cook for 10 minutes, or until the onion is translucent and just beginning to color. Add the carrot, fennel, and another good pinch of salt and cook for a further 10 minutes until softened, stirring every few minutes to ensure nothing sticks to the base and burns.

Step 3: Stir in the tomato paste and fry for 2 minutes, then add the bouquet garni and red wine. Bring to a simmer and cook until reduced and thickened to a glaze consistency, about 10 minutes. Add the crushed tomato and water and bring to a boil, then reduce the heat to very low and simmer gently for 45 minutes, or until the sauce is thickened, reduced, and fragrant. Season to taste with salt and pepper and set aside.

Step 4: Heat 2¹⁄₂ fluid ounces (75 milliliters) of the remaining oil in a cast-iron skillet or frying pan over a medium heat to a light haze. Add half the tuna and fry, stirring to separate the strands, until colored. Season lightly with salt and pepper, then add to the tomato sauce. Repeat with the remaining oil and tuna, and stir everything well to combine. Leave to cool completely, then transfer to the fridge until you are ready to assemble the lasagna.

Step 5: For the bechamel, place the milk and Parmesan rind in a medium saucepan over a medium heat. Bring to a gentle simmer, then reduce the heat to low and keep warm for 20 minutes, to allow the flavor of the parmesan to infuse the milk.

Step 6: Melt the butter in a separate saucepan over a medium heat. Add the flour and cook for 2 minutes, stirring with a wooden spoon to form a roux. Remove the parmesan rind from the milk, then gradually add to the roux, one-third at a time, whisking after each addition to create a smooth sauce. When you have incorporated all the milk, bring the sauce to a boil, then remove from the heat, stir in a little grated nutmeg, and season to taste with salt and pepper. Closely cover the sauce with plastic wrap or parchment to stop a skin forming, then refrigerate until completely cold.

Step 7: Preheat the oven to 400 degrees.

Step 8: To assemble the lasagna, spoon a layer of the tuna ragu over the base of a 1.5-quart baking dish. Cover with a layer of bechamel, then a layer of lasagna sheets. Repeat the process with the remaining ingredients, finishing with a layer of bechamel. Sprinkle over the grated cheeses in a generous blanket and cover with aluminum foil.

Step 9: Bake for 30 minutes, then remove the foil and cook for another 10 minutes until golden brown and bubbling on top, and the pasta is tender when tested with a skewer in the center. Remove from the oven and rest for 10 minutes before serving, perhaps with a fresh salad of green leaves and herbs.

Recipes excerpted with permission from Take One Fish by Josh Niland, published by Hardie Grant Books, August 2021.

Stacey Mei Yan Fong’s 50 Pies/50 States baking project is a love letter to the country she now calls home

Stacey Mei Yan Fong is stuck on pie number 44. The funeral potato pie, rich as a block of butter and built with all the flavors of a classic post-funeral hot dish, was not actually headed for a funeral when Fong made it on March 10. This particular funeral dish was more of a celebration, of the near completion of a years-long pie-baking project that has taken Fong on a dizzying journey across America.

Fong is the ambitious home baker behind a project she’s called 50 Pies / 50 States. Spurred by the Singapore-born baker’s desire to celebrate the country she calls home, Fong decided in 2016 to bake 50 pies, each inspired by the flavors of a state. To express her gratitude to the many friends who have welcomed her with open arms as she moved from one state to another, each completed pie would eventually find its way to a friend (or sometimes, a stranger), living in or from that place.

The project is at once wildly ambitious, and extremely whimsical. Scrolling through Fong’s Instagram, and reading her online pia-ary (that’s her pie-focused diary), it’s clear just how much research, care, and thought — not to mention travel — has gone into each of the 44 pies Fong has baked and given away so far. In South Dakota, Fong took cues from the Dakota, Lakota, and Nakota tribes, and constructed a rice pudding pie, the pudding made with wild rice, fortified with homemade sunflower milk. Fong met the couple who would later receive her Oregon pie (it was marionberry and pear, topped with a salty hazelnut crumble) while the three were playing beer pong and listening to Springsteen at a mutual friend’s house. Mississippi’s pie, a chocolate graham cracker crust, pumped with chocolate fudge and covered in fluffy whipped cream and chocolate shavings, went to Rachel, who Fong met during a hazy night of Karaoke the day she graduated college. To read through Fong’s blog and scroll her Instagram lends a window into the mind of someone who believes deeply — and beyond any cliche — in the power of food as a means to connect, bridge divides, and express love.

But now, a pandemic grips the country, and Fong is stuck on pie number 44. She’s decided to wait to bake and deliver her last six pies until travel is less risky. But during this pause, she’s still baking up a storm, turning her attention to only slightly smaller pie-related projects. She’s recently baked her way through a number of desperation pies, the sorts of desserts one might have made in the past when a harvest was slim, or work was scarce: Think pies made with vinegar to replace the tartness of fresh fruit, and others that call for little more than sugar and water. This break from travel, research, and constant baking has also given Fong a chance to reflect on her adopted home, and the racism and hate that have become so prominent and noticeable this year.

I recently called Fong, who’s weathering the pandemic from her Brooklyn apartment, to hear more about her pie baking journey, and what she plans to do when her last six pies have been baked, boxed, and delivered.

Eater: Before you were a pie-baking New Yorker, what was your life like?

Stacey Mei Yan Fong: I was born in Singapore. Because of my dad’s job, we moved around a lot: We moved to Indonesia for a couple years. And then when I was five, we moved to Hong Kong, which is where I stayed until I came to college in America. I went to college in Savannah, Georgia, and then after I graduated, I packed up a truck and drove to New York. When you move a lot as a kid, you don’t really know where your home is.

In New York, what do you do when you’re not baking pies?

I am a handbag and accessory designer. And then all other hours are focused on food. Food is a huge passion of mine, and it’s the way I process my feelings. Growing up, food played such a major part in life, especially coming from a Chinese family. Everything is around a big dinner table. When I moved to New York, I worked fashion jobs with these crazy hours and were really terrible, and my moment of relief was definitely coming home and cooking for myself and my roommate. I would make roast chickens and cakes and just cry because I hated my job. I eventually found my way in fashion, but I’ve always kept food as my passion.

From working a fashion job and baking after work, how did you get started on the 50 Pies project?

In 2014, I was going through a really rough time, thinking about my life and where my home was. I was getting to a point where I had lived in America for about the same time I had lived in Hong Kong. My dad had just moved back to Singapore; one of my sisters was in Boston, about to move back to Singapore; my other sister lived in LA. Everybody I went to college with and everyone that I’m friends with, they can go back to their childhood home. I was just trying to discover what home meant to me. And during that time, my best friend bought me the Four & Twenty Blackbirds Pie Book. I was so lost and confused, and I was like ‘maybe I’ll just start baking from this, and that’ll lead me somewhere. Or at least it will give me some relief because I’ll be eating delicious treats.’

Around 2016, I got my green card. That really marked my decision that this is a place I want to call home. I’ve met so many amazing people from college and from traveling, and I was trying to think of a way to give back to them and in turn, learn more about the country that I’ve chosen. I feel like pie is very synonymous with America, so I thought: What if I bake a pie for every single state in America, that includes state foods or regional cuisine, and then give that pie to someone I know from that state as a symbol of my affection for them? If I didn’t already know anyone from that state, I could travel to the state and meet someone, or find someone in that state to give the pie to through a mutual friend. I wanted to interpret America in some way that would make sense to me.

What were some of your most memorable pie-centric adventures for this project?

For South Dakota, I realized I had never met anyone from the state. And it just so happened that my friend Matt, who got the Massachusetts pie, had recently done a graphic design project for a bunch of historians that live in South Dakota, that know everything about the Black Hills. I reached out to them, and I ended up going to South Dakota in January. They introduced me to Sean Sherman, the Sioux chef, and my South Dakota pie ended up being based on Native American cuisine. It was a wild rice pudding that I made with sunflower milk that I made myself. And then I made a maple-pumpkin sunflower seed crunch. It was one of those things where I would have never ever discovered this part of South Dakota or this part of Native American culture if I hadn’t gone through all these weird connections.

The biggest undertaking was for New York. I really thought long and hard about what I wanted to do, and how I could make the biggest gesture. I decided to make 150 mini pies. I made little cupcake-sized pies. I gave four to the staff at my favorite provision store, four to the people at my tattoo shop that I go to all the time, four to my bikram yoga studio. And then I threw a huge party at a beer hall, and all my friends came to eat pie together. I got to have all my friends in one place. I could not survive New York without them. it was my big grand gesture to them in pie-party form.

My most challenging — but one of my favorite pies — was Nevada. I couldn’t find a lot of state foods or fruits or vegetables that encapsulated the state. The first thing I thought of when I thought about Las Vegas was the all you can eat buffet, and I thought “how can I translate that into pie form?” I went on every casino’s website, and I looked at what was featured on each of their buffets. The Las Vegas pie ended up being an all you can eat buffet pie. Half of the crust was savory and half of the crust was sweet. The pie ended up being a tiny tasting menu. It started with a Caesar salad, and then a shrimp cocktail, and then a prime rib, and it ended with an ice cream sundae. It was all one pie, with little triangular sections.

This is such an enormous undertaking. Could you talk a little bit about what goes into creating each of these pies, from research to delivery?

When I started this project, the first thing I did was put together what I call my pie chart. I wrote out all the states in alphabetical order, and did a bunch of research about each one. When I’m researching, I come home after work, make dinner, and then sit down and read books about pie, and read books about the state that I’m working on a pie for. I’ll talk to people I knew from that state, or I’ll look to recipes that are meaningful to my friends. For Ohio I used a recipe that my friend Meredith’s grandmother passed on to me, so it’s stuff like that — making connections and learning about everybody’s home life. These stories give me energy to push the project forward.

You’ve put a pause on 50 Pies / 50 States during the pandemic because you can’t travel very safely. What have you been doing instead?

I decided to pause because I couldn’t travel to go see the person that the pie is for. So during the pandemic, I’ve looked at other great times of turmoil in American culture. And of course, the Great Depression comes up, and I came upon desperation pies. I first thought that all desperation pies had to do with that era, but it turns out they weren’t just a product of financial burden. Desperation pies also have to do with seasonal depression. During winter months, you won’t have a lot of fresh fruit in your larder, but you always have things like, flour, vinegar, sugar, and different ways to work around that. And even without a lot of resources, these pies were so regional. In Appalachia for instance, there is a vinegar pie to mimic the taste of apples. There were all these people who were coming up with amazing ideas to sub fruit for something else.

I went into the desperation pie-baking project thinking it was going to be like when people try to make food from the ’60s and it’s all just weird aspics. But all the pies ended up tasting so good! A vinegar pie just sounds so odd, but when you eat it, it does taste like a tart apple pie! I find it so incredible that even during times of trouble, people were able to make the best of it.

This project has clearly connected you to America in so many ways. Have the crises playing out across the country these past six months affected your view of America, and your plan for the project moving forward?

It’s super disappointing when you put something on a pedestal — which I did with American culture — to realize it actually isn’t that perfect. What gives me hope is all the action and all the change, and that people in America aren’t just giving up; they’re taking matters into their own hands and trying to make a better future for themselves.

I remember delivering the Florida pie on the day after the election in 2016. It was the saddest day, and I remember giving it to my friends from Florida who were so upset, so disappointed. I was like, “all right, everything does suck right now, but Florida is still a beautiful place. Florida has one of the only national parks in America that is a coral reef! You have Islamorada! You have like Disney World! You have all these beautiful things in Florida like marshes and crocodiles.” There is a lot of crazy, but there is still a lot of good. And I only hope that me coming in with so much passion for learning all these new things about Florida or New Hampshire or Pennsylvania gives the pie recipient in that state a little bit of perspective that there is still good. I still have so much hope.

These are the fancy-ish vinegar brands taking our pantries on an acid trip

Our pantries are in the middle of an acid trip. Shelves are crammed with vinegars from around the world, from gently sweet Filipino sugarcane vinegar to aromatic black Chinkiang vinegar made from fermenting sticky rice. It’s an ever-expanding condiment kaleidoscope — and thanks to increased interest in fermentation from chefs and home cooks bolstered by pandemic-era cooking, North America’s artisanal vinegar industry has only begun to bloom.

New wave vinegar is instantly recognizable. Its sleek packaging is designed to pop out in Instagram pantry tours, tricked out with lush illustrations and loopy lettered labels like “raw,” “unfiltered,” and “living.” Unlike that distilled white vinegar probably stashed beneath your sink, these vinegars sell the fact that they’re packed with probiotics, suggesting a slew of health benefits that come along with.

Like other food-world trends, the hype is bolstered by collaborations with respected farms, pop-ups at popular restaurants, and on-point merch. But one sip of vinegar made from oro blanco grapefruit or funky-floral jasmine kombucha proves this trend isn’t just about aesthetics.

Is this explosion of small-batch vinegar brands the inevitable evolution of a customer base obsessed with gut health and fermented flavors? A response to cookbooks, like Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat, that highlight acid’s ability to unlock a new level of flavor? When did vinegar get so cool?

Before probiotic apple cider vinegar shots dominated the refrigerated beverage aisles at Whole Foods and Erewhon, there was Katz. The Napa Valley farm and food producer helped pioneer California’s olive oil industry in the 1990s, and began making artisanal unfiltered vinegars with grapes from nearby vineyards in the early 2000s. Instead of hiding behind the vague title of “red wine vinegar,” Katz highlights specific grape varietals like pinot noir and late-harvest zinfandel. The laser-focused flavors weren’t just uncommon — they were unheard of.

“It took a while even for restaurants to build up a real desire to work with other things besides red vinegar, white vinegar, and fake balsamic,” says co-owner Albert Katz. “I used to have to search out people to try our vinegar, but I haven’t been able to keep up with production for years. It’s been extraordinary.”

Katz says he hasn’t needed to market his vinegars for the past eight years as customers have grown more knowledgeable about the importance of good ingredients, largely thanks to the internet and the long-simmering influence of food visionaries like James Beard and Alice Waters. Shoutouts in the pantry sections of cookbooks like Samin Nosrat’s Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat and Joshua McFadden’s Six Seasons helped raise the brand’s profile, too. Then the pandemic turbocharged interest. Customers who used to spend money dining out shifted their budgets to invest in higher-quality ingredients for home cooking, and the versatile, shelf-stable nature of vinegar was a perfect fit.

Demand has grown so high, Katz has largely stopped selling wholesale vinegar to restaurants to focus on selling directly to consumers online. These sales have a significantly higher profit margin and surged in the beginning of the pandemic, as people shifted their grocery shopping from crowded store aisles to online.

Katz says that along with increased interest, customers have increased knowledge about artisanal vinegar, specifically the presence of a “mother,” or strands of beneficial bacteria called ​​Acetobacter aceti that turn alcohol into vinegar. “I used to get calls and emails about ‘what is this stuff growing in the bottom of my bottle?’ Many people would want their money back,” he says. “Now people get a bottle and often they’re wondering why they can’t see the mother [if one isn’t visible]. The sophistication level in general has grown exponentially.”

Tart Vinegar founder Chris Crawford counts Katz as her gateway into the world of farm-direct vinegar. After 20 years working in restaurants, she launched the Brooklyn-based brand in September 2019. Her first product was an intensely vegetal celery vinegar designed to evoke a sugar-free Cel-Ray soda. Crawford added other vinegars as she encountered farmers with single-origin products worth preserving, like wild-harvested kombu seaweed and floral (but not overly perfumed) lavender.

“For me, it’s about fostering those relationships directly from farmer to consumer to make a product that reflects time, soil, and harvest,” says Crawford. “I’m looking for raw, natural flavors with very distinct palettes. There’s so much vinegar I don’t sell because it ends up tasting only like vinegar.”

Crawford’s warehouse overflows with fermentation experiments, often using ingredients from other local artisans. She’s currently playing around with peach wine from Brooklyn distillery Forthave Spirits and wild juniper berries foraged by Masha Tea founder Maria Geyman in Wyoming. These ultrasmall runs are frequently funneled into Tart’s Vinegar Club: a quarterly subscription of core products and limited-run bottles capped at 50 members. It’s meant for true vinegarheads, who also proudly rep Tart Vinegar tote bags and show up for the brand’s periodic pop-ups. Earlier this summer, Superiority Burger chef Brooks Headley churned celery vinegar into sorbet. Crawford topped the scoops with Topo Chico for a tangy spin on the classic soda float, served alongside vegan focaccia sandwiches from Susan Kim’s pop-up Doshi.

Vinegar-making is a time-intensive process, and Crawford is her brand’s sole full-time employee. The limits of production on this scale shrink even further when considering the brand’s ethos of working with small-scale farms with greenmarket cult followings of their own, like Pennsylvania’s Campo Rosso and Lavender By The Bay in Long Island: The brand’s iconic celery vinegar can only be made for the length of the celery season. As a result, Tart Vinegar’s products are usually sold out online, and this scarcity inevitably breeds cachet as customers await Instagram announcements for the next drop.

On the other end of the spectrum, Acid League is going big. The “living vinegar” brand began when Scott Friedmann, a food innovation consultant who created legume pasta brand Tolerant Foods, began brewing vinegar at home with his teenage son. He saw the business potential for unfiltered vinegar with turbocharged flavors and brought in designer Rae Drake and food scientists Cole Pearsall and Allan Mai to bring the brand to life.

Last August, Acid League launched a direct-to-consumer site while simultaneously rolling out in Whole Foods nationwide. Their clear bottles showcase vibrantly hued vinegars like juicy strawberry rosé, while the labels lure customers with sans serif fonts and hazy color gradients that nod to aura photography and spore prints. The brand also sells sippable vinegar tonics bolstered with manuka honey and chaga mushrooms, and there’s even the first edition of an Acid League magazine with deep dives on the science behind fermentation and an ode to Goan pork sorpotel.

“The recent apple cider vinegar wave drove a lot of category growth, because people wanted a healthy tonic for their skin, hair, and gut,” says Friedmann. Apple cider vinegar has become a wellness mainstay over the past few years, buoyed by purported benefits like boosting gut health or helping regulate blood sugar. Consumers can buy apple cider vinegar everything, from iconic bottles of Bragg to capsules and “wellness shots,” and this interest is spilling over into raw vinegars of all flavors.

It’s undeniable that surging Western interest in fermented foods like kombucha, sauerkraut, and miso has pushed the flavor and health benefits of probiotics into the mainstream. “Gut health” is a popular wellness topic, and pandemic shutdowns encouraged fermentation projects like sourdough baking. Probiotic-rich products have a proven market, and raw vinegars are rising to meet the moment.

Troy, New York, distillery Yesfolk Tonics has been quietly fermenting vinegar alongside its kombucha for years, with some batches dating back to 2017. “We’d never heard of kombucha vinegar before; we just realized it was really delicious ourselves,” says co-founder Yiyi Mendoza. “It also helps with the ecosystem of our fermentation room. When we get a fresh barrel [for brewing], we’ll fill it with vinegar to inoculate it with microorganisms, and get the fermentation going.”

Mendoza and co-founder Adam Elabd would also cook with the barrel-aged kombucha vinegar at their home, deploying a few dashes to lift a pot of beans or meaty braise. And around three years ago, they began selling some wholesale to chefs and bartenders. It wasn’t until July 2020 that they added vinegar to their online store. “People have been digging it, so now we’re intentionally making more to meet demand,” says Elabd.

Ultimately, the new wave vinegar explosion is right on time. After years of building interest in fermentation and chasing gut health, burnt-out home cooks are seeking new ways to supercharge flavors. Sure, any decent bottle of red wine vinegar can make a good salad dressing. But a great vinegar elevates the everyday into something bright, bold, and unforgettable. Why settle for the routine? There’s a brave new world of vinegar to explore.

Aliza Abarbanel is a freelance writer and editor living in Brooklyn. She loves compost, em dashes, and eating too many plums.

Using local ingredients and inspiration from regional dishes, Fong has made a pie to represent every state in the U.S.

What does a Missouri-themed pie taste like? Or a pie representing New Jersey? Stacey Mei That’s what Yang Fong started 50 Pies for 50 States, her project to bake a pie representing each U.S. state, to find out.

Fong started the project in 2016 when she was in the process of obtaining her permanent residency in the U.S. “I was kind of at a weird point in my life, I didn’t know where my home was,” she says of being born in Singapore, growing up in Hong Kong, attending college in Savanna, Georgia, and now living in Brooklyn. Her pies are a dedication to her chosen home, and all of the friends she has made in it. In each baked good, she incorporates local produce and regional cuisines that each state is known for, then gives it to a person she knows from that state.

Her South Dakota pie, for example, takes inspiration from the Native American cuisine that began in the area, and from chef Sean Sherman’s cookbook The Sioux Chef. It starts with a blue corn crust, and incorporates other ingredients like wild rice, sunflower milk, maple sugar, berries, and more. “I don’t think before this I would have even gone to South Dakota, and now I can say that I have been, and I’ve driven through the Badlands, and it was really amazing,” says Fong. “I feel like there’s not enough awareness of Native American cuisine, I’ve heard of none of the recipes that I read in The Sioux Chef,” she explains, giving one of many examples of how this project has opened her eyes to different cuisines, ingredients, and baking techniques. The resulting pie’s crust turns a deep purple, is filled with a rice pudding-like wild rice mixture, is topped with berry compote, and outlined in a mixture of sunflower seeds and pepitas in maple sugar.

“Throughout the years as I’ve baked the pies, the most rewarding part is not the recipe development, it’s not baking the pie,” she says. “It’s giving it to the person I care about and seeing them be like, ‘Oh my god, this reminds me so much of a flavor of home.’”

Check out the video to learn more about Stacey Mei Yang Fong’s project, and see what other pies she’s inspired to make.