Taster’s choice: Our 2023 cookbook recommendations for food lovers
As you press forward with your holiday shopping for the foodies in your life, shoot some cookbooks to the top of your gift-buying list. We’ve asked a few of our favorite booksellers — both online and brick-and-mortar stores — to help us sift through this year’s new cookbooks penned and published by Black authors, and they came back with some new recommendations but told us not to forget some old gems. A gift to taste buds all year, these cookbooks will fill homes with wonderful aromas and feed users with the cultural histories of some favorite dishes.
Juke Joints, Jazz Clubs, and Juice: A Cocktail Recipe Book
Author: Tony Tipton-Martin
Published: 2023
Price: $30
Derrick Young, the co-owner of Mahogany Books in Washington and National Harbor in Maryland, said Toni Tipton-Martin’s newest release, Juke Joints, Jazz Clubs, and Juice: A Cocktail Recipe Book, is the one he’s most excited about this year. “As an amateur mixologist, someone who just likes hanging out with their friends and making drinks for them, it was exciting to see this book come out,” Young said.
With 70 recipes, the book looks at the history of Black mixology’s influence on the American cocktail. It tracks some of the more notable recipes from more than two centuries of mixology and looks at the history and evolution of those cocktails. Young said he’s looking forward to mixing up Tipton-Martin’s recipe for sparkling watermelon lemonade, a mocktail he can make for his teen daughter Mahogany, and friends who don’t imbibe.
“[It’s] very approachable but still feels cocktailish. It has this elaborate build in the way you make it and mix it, so it’s a great mocktail that feels high-end,” Young said of the recipe. For those who drink, recipes that might intrigue them include an Absinthe Frappe, Jerk-Spiced Bloody Mary and Gin and Juice 3.0.
Snoop Dogg Presents Goon with the Spoon
Author: Snoop Dogg and Earl “E-40” Stevens
Published: 2023
Price: $23.20-$24.95
With more than 65 recipes for a crowd, rapper Snoop Dogg’s latest collaboration is with his friend and rapper E-40. The cookbook is on the top of Troy Johnson’s gift list. “It’s a coffee-table cookbook,” said Johnson, the founder and owner of the online bookstore African American Literature Book Club. “I can see having it on your table. Company comes over, they see something interesting, goofy and say let’s try that.” Like a potato chip recipe that directs at-home chefs to lay the chips on a cookie sheet, sprinkle them with seasonings, put them back in the bag, and shake them up. “And that’s the dish!” Johnson said.
“The recipes are reminiscent of the junk food that we would eat as kids, and they’ve just taken it to another level,” Johnson said. Snoop Dogg Presents Goon with the Spoon is inspired, in part by Snoop Dogg’s VH1 show with Martha Stewart, Martha & Snoop’s Potluck Dinner Party, and E-40’s Filipino restaurant, The Lumpia Company, in Oakland, California. Recipes focus on dishes for gatherings – everything from a big Super Bowl and Father’s Day to 4/20 and summertime block parties.
Still, We Rise: A Love Letter to the Southern Biscuit with Over 70 Sweet and Savory Recipes
Author: Erika Council
Published: 2023
Price: $26
Johnson also loves the debut cookbook by Erika Council, founder of Bomb Biscuit Co. in Atlanta. Council is the granddaughter of legendary soul food chef and activist Mildred (Mama Dip) Council. In Still We Rise: A Love Letter to the Southern Biscuit with Over 70 Sweet and Savory Recipes, Council makes the biscuit “the center of everything. It’s almost like it’s a rule. The biscuit is where you start,” Johnson said.
Council’s recipes help the newbie biscuit maker bake up a traditional biscuit. She also introduces new biscuit recipes such as Glori-Fried Chicken Biscuit Sandwich, a mind-blowing cinnamon sugar and pecan biscuit, and biscuit dumplings.
Mahogany Books’ co-owner Ramunda Lark Young also placed And Still We Rise on her gift list. “I love this book because it made me think of my grandmother, and I used to love slathering apple butter on my biscuits,” she said. “It was such an emotional remembrance for me. [There’s] a recipe incorporating apple butter into a biscuit, which is so dope and accessible.”
Jubilee: Recipes From Two Centuries of African American Cooking
Author: Toni Tipton-Martin
Published: 2019
Price: $35
Jubilee: Recipes From Two Centuries of African American Cooking by Toni Tipton-Martin is a kitchen essential. That’s according to Danielle Mullen, the owner of Semicolon Bookstore & Gallery in Chicago. With more than 100 recipes laid out in an “aesthetically pleasing [way], which is a big deal,” said Mullen, Tipton-Martin has updated classics for the modern kitchen – such as sweet potato biscuits, buttermilk fried chicken, and seafood gumbo. But Mullen noted that Jubilee reminds at-home chefs that decadent dishes such as spoon bread or baked ham glazed with champagne are perfect for a celebration.
Mullen said Jubilee is a cultural study of food. “A lot of people don’t know why they’re cooking the food they’re cooking. And so [Tipton-Martin] consistently introduces everyone to what Black cooking feels like,” presenting techniques and showcasing the roots of African American cooking through the stories of pioneering chefs and enslaved cooks.
Tipton-Martin, who is an African American food and nutrition journalist, won the Julia Child Award in 2021. Besides winning a James Beard award for Jubilee, Tipton-Martin won the James Beard Reference and Scholarship award in 2016 for her book, The Jemima Code.
My America: Recipes from a Young Black Chef
Author: Kwame Onwuachi and Joshua David Stein
Published: 2022
Price: $35
“Sometimes you need to understand the roots of a recipe to understand how it’s best cooked,” said Semicolon’s Mullen of her pick, My America: Recipes from a Young Black Chef, co-authored by James Beard Award winner Kwame Onwuachi. “The cookbook explains in what type of environment is this [dish] best cooked based on where this recipe originated,” said Mullen, who grew up in the South with family roots in Jamaica and Trinidad, which she noted informs her foodie expressions.
Mullen said what makes My America so good is that “It’s traveling the world to figure out how certain recipes exist in every country,” as Onwuachi looks at his past growing up in New York City, Nigeria and Louisiana. “It explores what recipes carry with them and, a lot of time, what recipes carry is culture,” said Mullen. She was particularly interested in the book’s exploration of the similarity between the New Orleans staple, jambalaya, and jollof, a rice dish from Nigeria. “How is it jambalaya here and jollof rice elsewhere? What is the difference? Is it based on the regional items that were available at the time? I love diving into those things,” Mullen said of the dive My America takes.
Black Food
Author: Bryant Terry
Published: 2021
Price: $37.20
Mullen is also a fan of cookbook author Bryant Terry, a historian and writer. “He is a genius. He has so much to say about food and has a deep love and respect for food,” Mullen said. “It’s one of those books that discusses food across different continents.” Mullen said Black Food (“or any book by Terry”), which was published in 2021, is a must-have. Black Food won the prestigious Art of Eating Prize in 2022, and before that, Terry won the James Beard Leadership Award in 2015.
The former chef-in-residence at the Museum of the African Diaspora in San Francisco (2015-2022), Terry used his inaugural role to create museum programming focused on the intersection of activism, art, culture, farming, food and health. Mullen also called out Terry’s 2009 book, Vegan Soul Kitchen: Fresh, Healthy, and Creative African-American Cuisine, which Cooking Light magazine listed among the best vegetarian/vegan cookbooks of the last 25 years.
Black Power Kitchen
Authors: Ghetto Gastro (Pierre Serrao, Jon Gray and Lester Walker)
Published: 2022
Price: $40
Lark Young also placed Ghetto Gastro’s cookbook debut, Black Power Kitchen, on her list. “They kind of approach cooking from a revolutionary act,” said Lark Young. “A lot of their ideas and recipes look at the Black community and what were some of the things that connected us to culture. So it wasn’t just, ‘Oh, let’s cook this cornbread.’ They looked at how cooking could transform communities.”
Formed in 2012, Ghetto Gastro is a culinary collective of chefs and food enthusiasts in Bronx, New York. Described as “Part cookbook. Part manifesto,” the cookbook is much more than its 75 recipes, most of which are plant-based. It’s a book that combines images and photographs with stories that celebrate Black food and culture.
“We’re used to cooking, we’ve come up with innovative recipes since the beginning of time, but when we look at the industry now, there were not a ton of Black people in it. So, I love that they come to the industry kind of raw, kind of edgy and very authentically themselves, no fluff,” Lark Young said of the book’s creators, Pierre Serrao, Jon Gray and Lester Walker, who founded Ghetto Gastro. One of Lark Young’s favorite recipes from Black Power Kitchen is saltfish takoyaki. “I loved that they took a Japanese favorite and adapted it to one reflecting the enslaved culture of the Caribbean,” she said. “[It] fuses them beautifully, creating something at once familiar and new.”
Lark Young’s husband and bookstore co-owner, Derrick Young, said the book teaches its youngest Black readers that if you have a passion for cooking or baking, you belong in that space. At the same time, he said, the book is approachable for the rest of the population.