Gastro Obscura’s favorite cookbook stories of 2023

Good cookbooks have well-tested recipes that work. Great cookbooks also tell stories about the food, either personal stories about love, grief, triumph, and despair, or broader stories about the culture and people where the recipe originates. The editors at Gastro Obscura agree, and they regularly feature vignettes about cookbooks – both recent releases and historical volumes. They selected eight of their favorite cookbook related stories of 2023 to share with readers.

The first book they mentioned SAOY: Royal Cambodian Home Cuisine by Rotanak Ros, explores food made in the Cambodian royal palace in the mid-20th century. This is a follow up to Ros’s first cookbook, NHUM: Recipes from a Cambodian Kitchen, which enjoys a 5-star rating in the EYB Library. Other regional books that feature in the Gastro Obscura list are Chími Nu’am: Native California Foodways for the Contemporary Kitchen by Sara Calvosa Olson and My Everyday Lagos: Nigerian Cooking at Home and in the Diaspora by Yewande Komolafe.

Two of the linked articles are about historic books – and when I say historic, I mean historic. One of the books discussed is The Accomplisht Cook: Or, the Art and Mystery of Cookery by Robert May, first published around 1660 and reprinted scores of times. The Accomplisht Cook explained the “outrageous edible entertainments [May] designed for the tables of European nobility.” (The book in the EYB Library is a 2017 facsimile of the 1685 edition.) Obviously an author interview was out of the question, but Gastro Obscura editor Amanda Herbert talked with a librarian from the Folger Shakespearian Library, which digitized the ancient tome.

The article clued me into a recent release from one of my favorite authors, Mark Kurlansky. Although he doesn’t usually write cookbooks, he dives deep into food-related subjects such as salt, milk, and oysters. In his latest book, The Core of an Onion, Kurlansky also includes 100 recipes, so I already have this book on the way. Instead of an author interview, Gastro Obscura printed an excerpt from the book.