IACP 2025 Cookbook Award finalists

The IACP announced the finalists for its 2025 Awards, which includes cookbooks along with digital media, food writing, food photography & styling, and special recognition awards. The IACP Cookbook Awards honors “the authors, publishers, and other contributors behind the best cookbooks published each year.” There are fourteen categories plus a cookbook of the year. The categories shifted slightly in 2025 – gone are the Children Youth & Family and Self-Published categories, added is Book Design.

Our members will recognize most of the books on the list, which you can see in full on our IACP 2025 page. Nicola Lamb’s Sift: The Elements of Great Baking was nominated for both the Baking Sweet & Savory, Confections & Desserts and First Book: Julia Child Award. Two other books were nominated in two categories: Convivir: Modern Mexican Cuisine in California’s Wine Country by Rogelio Garcia and Andrea Lawson Gray, in Chefs & Restaurants and Food Photography & Styling, and Bayou: Feasting Through the Seasons of a Cajun Life by Melissa M. Martin also in Food Photography & Styling and in American.

The General category was one where some lesser-known books entered the chat and I made notes to look at these more closely. Warm Your Bones by Vanessa Seder and Big Night: Dinners, Parties, and Dinner Parties by Katherine Lewin are not on a lot of bookshelves in the EYB Library, although they are well rated. Easy Weeknight Dinners by New York Times Cooking and Emily Weinstein may be more well-known but still isn’t hugely popular.

Take a look at the other nominees on our IACP 2025 Awards page and let us know what you think about the books that made the cut. We will update the winners once they are announced on November 5, 2025 at the International Association of Culinary Professionals Awards and Summit to be held in Brooklyn, New York.