The 5 Best Cookbooks of 2019

Full-page watercolors on almost every spread make this an exceptionally beautiful book. You might be arrested by elegant flavor juxtapositions you wouldn’t have thought of, like a surprisingly simple roasted scallop glaze (mixed with chicken stock and simmered till thick) that you can spread on buttery rolls and oxtail braised with chestnuts. (I plan to make the black truffles optional.) Take note of practical tips such as “A cake tester is a simple, perfect thing.” Besides testing texture and doneness, it’s useful for gauging temperature by touching it lightly to your lips. You might even adopt a practice from Humm’s Eleven Madison Park chefs: Keep one in your front pocket, where other people put pens. Me, I’m thinking of using a cake tester for a boutonniere.                      

The Last Course: The Desserts of Gramercy Tavern, Claudia Fleming (with Melissa Clark)

“No one likes to leave a dinner table overly full,” Claudia Fleming writes in The Last Course, a book that I, like many others, kept on my bookshelf long after it was originally published, in 2001. The reason for buying the reissue of an 18-year-old book: Fleming aims for intensity of flavor and respect for seasonality and primary ingredients over show or unrelieved sweet richness. And no one has matched her originality, a reason that dessert professionals have paid a year’s supply of Callebaut fondant for a used copy. As the pastry chef of New York’s Gramercy Tavern (whose owner, Danny Meyer, and original chef, Tom Colicchio, both contributed warmhearted introductions), Fleming introduced not just diners but also a generation of patissiers to combinations like cornmeal-nut biscotti, blueberry-cornmeal cakes, roasted apricots with chamomile, fig-cornmeal tart, roasted chestnut-honey pears, lemon macaroons, roasted pineapple with pink peppercorns, pumpkin clafouti with hazelnuts, sweet-corn ice cream, ginger ice cream, yogurt sorbet, and buttermilk panna cotta.

I pick this long list of dishes because first I want to taste them all again, but mostly because I want to show how accessible and independent of fancy technique or equipment Fleming’s recipes are. Yes, there are pastry crusts and cookie doughs and fancy “signature composed desserts.” But the clafouti, for instance, is no more complicated than a pancake batter and results in something so satisfying that, in fact, a modest number of bites will suffice. Fleming will change how you think about dessert, and give you easy go-to recipes you can proudly present to guests.

Pastry Love: A Baker’s Journal of Favorite Recipes, Joanne Chang

For out-and-out cake and cookie and pie and muffin and scone delight, buy Pastry Love, Joanne Chang’s “baking bible,” as her publisher calls it. Chang, the high-spirited creator of Flour, a string of now eight bakeries in the Boston area, is as thorough in her instructions—how long to mix a batter and in what machine or better by hand, for example—as she is generous in setting out all-too-tempting pastry cases. (Too few are the Tuesdays when I arrive in Boston to teach at the Tufts Friedman School of Nutrition and don’t prepare for class with a fat wedge of lemon meringue pie, with its miraculously crisp crust.)