The Best Cookbooks of 2024
This cheekily titled two hander would have slipped right by without a gentle reminder of its greatness from my friends at Eat Your Books*. It’s written by experienced recipe authors Olga Masson and Sanaë Lemoine, who take turns with and occasionally collaborate on each dish.
Nobody needs another book full of middling sheet pan meals, yet this one stands out with what they call “elevated but accessible recipes.”
I tried sheet pan “fried” rice, which is more of a clever technique to help get lots of crispy rice and clear out leftover veggies from the fridge and freezer. It ends with a flourish where you make a divot in the center of all the food, pour in three beaten eggs, and tuck it back in the oven, where they cook up in minutes. A fish tacos recipe has you roast spice-coated fillets while you make use of the pan’s time in the oven by prepping guacamole and a cumin-lime crema to go on top.
Things happen pleasantly quickly with their recipe for chicken with clementines, dates, and capers, a riff on a lovely number from Team Ottolenghi’s Jerusalem cookbook. This version uses powerhouse ingredients like date molasses, clementines, fennel, dates, and capers spread across the pan—and, soon, your plate—to keep you engaged from start to finish.
My current favorite recipe has you lay down a bed of Greek yogurt on a serving dish, then top it with roast sweet potatoes and red-onion wedges, sprinkled with toasted pistachios, bits of date, za’atar, and flaky salt. It’s a low effort, big reward meal that earned a quick spot in my regular dinner rotation. People like me sometimes overcomplicate their meals, and genre-buster books like this are good reminders that we can get sophisticated flavors and be a bit more hands off about it.
*An Eat Your Books subscription makes for a great gift (or gift to yourself) for cookbook lovers. It creates a searchable index of your cookbooks, so if you’re looking for a bolognese recipe, it tells you which of your cookbooks has one and what page it’s on, and can do the same for ingredients you’d like to cook with. I use it almost every day.
