Dorie Greenspan’s cookbook recommendations for 2024

The inimitable Dorie Greenspan just published her favorite cookbooks of 2024 and I’m passing along the recommendations to our Members. I feel like no one will believe me when I state (for the nth year in a row) that the releases this year are even better than before, but Dorie agrees, saying “This year’s crop is more exciting than ever. This year’s baking books are veritable masterworks. And this year’s cooking-cookbooks are a fabulously delicious circle-the-globe voyage you can take without pulling out your passports.”

Dorie has divided books into rough categories: BIG Baking Books; BIG Bread Books; Baking Books of All Kinds; (So Many) Cooking Books from Here, There, and Everywhere; and finally Books About Food, Cooks, and Life. Each section is filled with fantastic volumes, many of which Jenny has already covered in her list of the best books of 2024, but there are several that have flown under my radar, at least, especially in the last category. I am rushing to pick up a copy of Julia Child’s Kitchen: The Design, Tools, Stories, and Legacy of an Iconic Space by Paula Johnson, who is responsible for installing Child’s kitchen in The Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History.

I’ve written about one of the BIG baking books that Dorie recommends (the 35th anniversary edition of The Cake Bible by Rose Levy Beranbaum and Woody Wolston), but there are baking volumes here that didn’t get much attention from Jenny or me, including Life’s Sweetest Moments by Dominique Ansel and Sweet Tooth by Sarah Fennel. The cooking books that Dorie recommends that have not received an in-depth look at EYB include AfriCali – Recipes from My Jikoni by Kiano Moju, Kalaya’s Southern Thai Kitchen by Nok Suntaranon, Pass the Plate by Carolina Gelen, and Bohème Cooking by Carrie Solomon.