Cookbooks are always about connection — written to share the love of a cuisine or celebrate ancestry, or sometimes to eulogize broken bonds and safeguard history.
If you've run out of ideas or motivation for preparing your next meal, if you're longing to be somewhere far away or want to explore fresh approaches to comfort food at home, or if you're thinking about the broader context of food in our troubled culture, take heart and inspiration from 11 standout books of the season.
'Baking at the 20th Century Cafe'
"Admit it," begins the jacket copy of Michelle Polzine's hefty, handsome book. "You're here for the famous honey cake." Well, yes and no. The 10-layer version of the Russian cake that Polzine serves at her cafe in San Francisco's Hayes Valley, given mysterious depths by caramelizing the honey and lightened by dulce de leche in the frosting, deserves its legendary status. Honestly? I likely won't bake this opus myself, nor roll out strudel dough thin enough to cover a table, as Polzine instructs; I will go eat them immediately on 20th Century Cafe's marble counter the next time it's safe to head north. But many other less involved and richly gratifying desserts (cranberry-ginger upside down cake, sherry trifle with Meyer lemon mousse, black walnut and buckwheat tea cakes) make the book worth owning. So does the indomitable life force of its author, whose mischievous spirit shines as brightly in her sentences as it does at her restaurant.