2016 James Beard Cookbook Award winners

The James Beard Foundation announced it cookbook award winners yesterday. The list is generally different from the IACP winners announced earlier this month, although there are a few books that made both lists.

The big winner in 2016 is J. Kenji López-Alt’s The Food Lab: Better Home Cooking Through Science. It won in the American category for IACP and was named that organization’s Cookbook of the Year. It also took home the General category for the JBF awards, but didn’t snag Cookbook of the Year for JBF. That honor went to Zahav: A World of Israeli Cooking by Michael Solomonov and Steven Cook, which also won in the International category. It’s interesting that Zahav wasn’t even among the IACP nominees.

The JBF winner for the American category was the little-known The Beetlebung Farm Cookbook: A Year of Cooking on Martha’s Vineyard by Chris Fischer and Catherine Young. While that book may have flown under the radar, the winner for ‘Cooking from a Professional Point of View’ certainly did not. Yotam Ottlenghi’s Nopi: The Cookbook took home that honor.

Other notable JBF winners include Sourdough by Sarah Owens for Baking, Lighten Up, Y’all by Virginia Willis in the ‘Focus on Health’ category, and A Bird in the Hand by Diana Henry for best Single Subject book. Near & Far by Heidi Swanson (from indexed blog 101 Cookbooks) took home an award in the Photography category, and beloved author Deborah Madison was inducted into the JBF Cookbook Hall of Fame. You can see the full list of JBF nominees and winners on our community page and at the JBF website.