All the Cookbooks and Regular Books We Adored in 2018
We’ve all bought a book with the best of intentions—We’ll read it on the beach! In a sunny breakfast nook! In the bathtub without getting a single page wet!—only to leave it on a shelf where it stares at us and reminds us of our failings. That’s not what happened with these books of 2018. These are the stories captured our attention, the cookbooks that convinced us we could skip the takeout, the novels that made us miss our stop on the subway. And they’re the books we’re giving to our favorite reader-friends this year.
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Photo by Alex Lau1/10Tiffin
I always figured it would be impossible to write a cookbook that covered the sheer diversity and nuance of India's regional cuisines. But in her book, Tiffin, Sonal Ved (the food editor of Vogue India) has done just that. My family is North Indian, and I've dabbled in cooking some South Indian food, but I found myself totally taken (in a good way) by how much I realized I didn't know about the country's cuisine. There are dishes in here that I truly can't wait to cook—clams cooked in coconut, cumin, and coriander from Goa, pumpkin-tamarind chutney from Nagaland, and a mango-chickpea flour soup from Gujarat—plus useful explainers about what defines the various regional cuisines. Tiffin, with its encyclopedia-like heft and colorful illustrations by Abhilasha Dwan, is my new coffee table fixture. It's the kind of book I'll keep picking up and referring back to, learning something new about Indian cuisine every time. – Priya Krishna , contributing writer
Buy it: Tiffin, $22 on Amazon.
Photo by Alex Lau2/10A Place for Us
A Place for Us is a gut punch—but the kind of gut punch that's good for you. Author Fatima Farheen Mirza tells the story of a first-generation Indian-American couple and their three children, focusing on their son Amar who is adrift amongst two overachieving sisters. He's a sympathetic character—the reader is rooting for him to find his footing. But his actions affect the people who try the hardest to pull him up and, in the process, they all fall down, at least a little bit. If nothing else, this book will make you think about the strength and fragility of familial bonds... and how parents may want the best without always knowing what is best. – Carey Polis, digital director.
Buy it: A Place for Us, $18 on Amazon.
Photo by Alex Lau3/10Salad Feasts
Salad Feasts is no misnomer. Jessica Elliot Dennison’s bountiful recipes are vegetable-forward and totally craveable, channeling all-day cafe fare into truly accessible home-cooking. She bolsters warm chard with mango and crispy paneer, pairs pickled fennel with whipped mint ricotta, and never forgets the power of really good sourdough bread. There are no side salads here—only hearty mains—and the creative recipes have led me to examine my fridge with new eyes. Why not pickle Lacinato kale instead of red onions? Is there any dish sunflower seed gremolata can’t improve? (I haven’t found it.) Really, this cookbook proves a longtime hypothesis: throw everything you love into a salad and it’s bound to be delicious. – Aliza Abarbanel, Healthyish editorial assistant.
Buy it: Salad Feasts, $16 on Amazon.
Photo by Alex Lau4/10All You Can Ever Know
I first started reading Nicole Chung’s memoir, All You Can Ever Know on the subway, and, five pages into the e-book on my phone, I was crying. Chung’s powerful book is about her life as a Korean adoptee, lovingly raised by two white parents in a small Oregon town. I related to it a lot as someone who was also adopted and who struggled with similar issues. Chung’s journey toward discovering the truth about her birth family—and eventually meeting some of them—is riveting and painfully real. It’s a story of lost generations and found families, infinitely relatable whether you’re adopted or not. – Alyse Whitney, associate editor.
Buy it: All You Can Ever Know, $17.
Photo by Alex Lau5/10Solo
Let me say this right now: This is not a cookbook for single people. It can be, fine. Each recipe is portioned for one, but they're easy to double, and I already have (that steamed sea bass with ginger scallion sauce, the twice-roasted sweet potatoes stuffed with ricotta and Parm!). Chef Anita Lo is my hero. Her weeknight recipes challenge you to eat better, treat yourself better, and find comfort in meals made by your own hand. She tells these little vignettes with each recipe that span her life, the globe, and awkward relationships that’ve come and gone. The book is funny. (See: the stock chapter that sneaks in a cat in every recipe, not like, in the pot, but in the context.) The recipes, at times, are unabashedly cheffy (lookin’ at you, duck ragu), and that’s what I love. They’re not basic, predictable, or limited. You’ll need kombu for dashi and gochujang for Korean short ribs: Deal with it. The playful illustrations by Julia Rothman are like, go ahead, make this seafood stew and don’t Instagram it. Great, I won’t! Let me live. Let me cook. Let me be happy. And then let me say this one last time: This is the cookbook that made my heart sing in 2018. – Alex Beggs, senior staff writer.
Buy it: Solo, $18 on Amazon.
Photo by Alex Lau6/10There There
There There by first-time novelist Tommy Orange was without a doubt the most important book I read this year. But it’s not the kind of “important book” that you want to want to read but don’t actually want to read and end up leaving on your nightstand to gather dust for months while you pretend you’re “workin’ on it” until finally you hide it in a drawer out of pure shame. It's a page-turner, a deep-dark, heart-shattering, ruthless novel that connects the stories of more than a dozen Native people living in Oakland as they prepare to gather for an annual powwow. The sheer number of characters alludes to both the lack of Native literature mainstream readers have been exposed to over the years (though you should also check out the work of Louise Erdrich, James Welch, and Terese Marie Mailhot), and the diversity of "Urban Indians" (as Orange refers to both himself and his characters) living in shared oppression and dealing with it in so many different ways. Brutal historical interludes reveal the largely ignored devastation that Natives have faced since America was colonized, and the writing is just insane—there are these moments of pure poetry that will knock your feet out from under you. Read this book right now. – Hilary Cadigan, associate editor.
Buy it: There There, $18 on Amazon.
Photo by Alex Lau7/10Wine Food
I first saw this book on Instagram, where I see all cool things happen these days. The fun doodles caught my eye, as well as Dana Frank and Andrea Slonecker's easy and unstuffy way of explaining wine. The great thing about this book is that even an entry-level wine lover can learn from it with the help of their quick-pairing cheat sheets on subjects like "Which Wine to Pair with Takeout" to more project-based recipes like a Dungeness crab boil paired with celebratory bottles of bubbly champagne. Dana and Andrea even made a wine that's available for purchase (cheekily named "Food Wine") with the help of Bow & Arrow winery that sums up the bright and fruity everyday wines they like to drink and pair with food. It's happy, fun, and a great look into how the natural wine community thinks about drinking. – Emily Schultz, associate social media manager.
Buy it: Wine Food, $17 on Amazon.
Photo by Alex Lau8/10My Year of Rest and Relaxation
How many times in the past couple of years have you scanned the news, read one horrible, unbelievable thing after the next, and wished you could remove yourself from it all? In My Year of Rest and Relaxation by Ottessa Moshfegh, the twenty-four-year old narrator does what we all occasionally wish we could: She opts out of a whole year of her life by attempting to drug herself to sleep so she can wake up feeling like a new person. That (rather depressing and oversimplified) synopsis belies the complexity and gravity of Moshfegh’s dystopian-ish novel, which taps into that deep desire to turn inward and block out the bigger problems of the world, all while criticizing the selfish privilege of such disengagement. As a Healthyish reader, I suspect you’ll think about how that ties into your own relationship with the wellness industry and what it sells. With my nose buried in this book, I often felt that I, too, was sleepwalking through errands, commutes, life. And to be honest, it was a nice, if temporary, reprieve. – Sarah Jampel, contributing editor.
Photo by Alex Lau9/10Mediterranean
Susie Theodorou’s cookbook, Mediterranean makes me want to stop everything I’m doing and go cook. Don’t be fooled by the incredibly broad title: the book is 100% focused and actionable, and that’s because she manages to expertly combine basic cooking techniques, deep but accessible ingredient information, and casually gorgeous-looking plates of food. Theodorou, a legendary food stylist and incredibly well-traveled cook, breaks the elements of Mediterranean cooking into categories, and then goes deep. There are lots of fishes, from little oily preserved guys to fresh finned types and shellfish too—and she gives easy methods for preparing all of them. On whole grains, Theodorou takes it back to the O.G. grain bowl, and shows you how to combine various types with enough flavor combinations to make two-week’s worth of dinners, all in just a few pages. Her chapter on fresh cheeses made wish I had a platter of dates stuffed with feta and sesame seeds sitting on the desk next to me, and there are enough riffs on Caprese here to make you forget about tomatoes and basil. But he best part about Mediterranean is how beautiful the food looks. You can see, without looking at the ingredient list, what’s in each dish; there are no extraneous ingredients, no unnecessary bits. For a more experienced cook, it’s a welcome hit of the refresh button, a reminder that simple is best. For a beginner, it’s a solid jumping-off point. No matter who you give it to, it will be a treasure. – Carla Lalli Music, food director.
Buy it: Mediterranean, $13 on Amazon.
Photo by Alex Lau10/10Well-Read Black Girl
Well-Read Black Girl is one of those rare collections that feels both laser focused and mind-expanding at the same time. Edim, who founded a book club and conference with the same name, collected original essays from contemporary black writers about their own literary inspirations. Each essay—from talents like Jesmyn Ward, Morgan Jerkins, and Stephanie Powell Watts—unfolds like a path through a forest of other writers and stories, and you’ll want to keep a pencil handy for underlining all the things you’ll want to read next. Fortunately Edim includes plenty of reading lists organized by subject (“Books About Black Girlhood and Friendship,” “Science Fiction and Fantasy Books by Black Women,” etc) and even a master list—“All the Books in This Book”—at the end. Standout essays include Veronica Chambers on how her Brooklyn childhood paralleled Jamaica Kincaid’s famous story “Girl,” Barbara Smith on reading James Baldwin for the first time, and N.K Jemisin on how black-centered science fiction can combat cultural erasure. It’s a gift for well-read black girls—and all those who aspire to be. – Amanda Shapiro, Healthyish editor.
Buy it: Well-Read Black Girl: Finding Our Stories, Discovering Ourselves, $14 on Amazon.
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