Last Minute Cookbook Gift Ideas 
(a.k.a. our favorite new cookbooks of the year)

For the sweet tooth:

Mast Brothers Chocolate: A Family Cookbook - The Mast Brothers are pioneers of the bean-to-bar craft chocolate movement and men-about-Brooklyn. For those who covet their seemingly curated lifestyle, there is "Mast Brothers Chocolate: A Family Cookbook" where they share their unique story and recipes for classic American desserts like chocolate cookies and cakes, brownies, bars, milkshakes, and, yes, whoopie pie. Known for the quality and creativity of their generous staff lunches, it is no surprise that there are mouthwatering savory dishes as well, like Pan-seared Scallops with Cocoa Nibs and Cocoa Coq au Vin. This book is the book for the chocolate lover in your life.

Sweet - This is one of those cookbooks that is destined to become a well-worn classic, with home cooks passing down their butter-stained,  dogeared copies from generation to generation. Haven’t had the pleasure? Well, Valerie Gordon, the cookbook’s author, is the Los Angeles based creator of award-winning sweets and baked goods sold at two new restaurants, a longstanding boutique, and multiple farmer’s market booths. “Sweet” is filled with a comprehensive collection of her favorite desserts like petits fours, cakes, truffles, and cookies that have been gilded with the addition of candied rose petals, atomized chocolate, fleur de sel, matcha tea, and other special ingredients. Our favorite part of the book, Valerie’s re-discovered desserts from some of Los Angeles’ most iconic and bygone restaurants like Chasen’s and the Brown Derby. Brilliant.

The Four & Twenty Blackbirds Pie Book - From Melissa and Emily Elsen, the talented sisters who own and operate the renowned Brooklyn pie shop and cafe Four & Twenty Blackbirds comes the ultimate pie-baking book. Despite being focused on one of the most humble of desserts, the pie, Melissa and Emily have put together a pie-baking book that’s anything but. This groundbreaking collection features a detailed and informative techniques section and more than one dozen pie recipes for each season of the year. These are unique and mouthwatering creations such as Salted Caramel Apple, Green Chili Chocolate, Black Currant Lemon Chiffon, and, a customer favorite, Salty Honey.

From the standard bearers:

Manresa: An Edible Reflection - There isn’t much to write about David Kinch that hasn’t already been written. Kinch is, in a word, influential. His Northern California restaurant is lauded as one of the best in the world and he is genuinely kind and humble. In his first cookbook, “Manresa: An Edible Reflection” Chef David Kinch details the creativity behind the food of Manresa and its profound connection to the land and sea of Northern California. Featuring more than 300 pages of recipes, stories, and exquisite images of the ingredients, dishes, and surrounding landscape that make the restaurant a true culinary destination, this cookbook is a testament to Kinch’s passion and creativity. 

Coi: Stories and Recipes - There is no restaurant in the United States that is more intimately tied to its chef than Coi and Daniel Patterson. To step into the dining room at Coi is to step into the mind of one of the most curious and creative chefs in the world. Patterson’s cookbook, “Coi: Stories and Recipes” tells the story of this restaurant, its dishes and Patterson’s philosophy. Beginning with a look at California - how Patterson arrived there and its influence on Coi - the book takes the reader into the Coi kitchen, and through an eleven course Coi tasting menu. It does so by way of a series of short and engaging essays, which reveal the story and inspiration behind the restaurant’s creative dishes. The stories behind a further fifty selected dishes are also narrated, and are accompanied by conversational recipes. 

D.O.M. Rediscovering Brazilian Ingredients - Once described by Chef David Chang as more interesting than the Dos Equis Most Interesting Man in the Word, Atala is renowned for a devotion to regional cuisine using indigenous Brazilian ingredients. Atala works closely with anthropologists and scientists to discover and classify new foods from the Amazonian region and bring then into fine dining. His new cookbook is a testament to and a journal chronicling those discoveries. It tells the individual stories of 65 of the unique ingredients that are used in the kitchens at D.O.M., located in São Paulo, Brazil, and Alex’s relationship with them. Each ingredient will be accompanied by a recipe for one of the dishes in which it is utilized and a beautiful image of both the ingredient and the finished dish. 

From the heart:

L.A. Son: My Life, My City, My Food - In the fall of 2008, Chef Roy Choi burst onto the Los Angeles dining scene with his now world-famous Kogi BBQ. But this wasn’t any ordinary restaurant with chairs and tables or even walls and a door. Nope, Choi was cooking some of the city’s best food out of a roving taco truck, offering Korean barbecue tacos and quesadillas out on the streets of L.A. to one and all. With his first cookbook, Choi pays homage to the city he loves, capturing the inventive, creative, and border crossing spirit of our spenser’s hometown, Los Angeles. A gritty love letter to the City of Angels, “L.A. Son” is the story of Choi’s love of food and his evolution as a chef. It includes sixty inspired recipes for everything from kalbi and kimchi to chorizo and carne asada. It is a transporting, multifaceted story that tells the unlikely tale of how a Korean-American kid went from troublemaking in the streets of L.A. to becoming an acclaimed chef.

Ivan Ramen: Love, Obession and Recipes - This book is being marketed as the be-all-end-all guide to ramen from Ivan Orkin, the New York-born owner of one of Tokyo’s top ramen shops. And it’s certainly that. Orkin’s passion for ramen is contagious, his story fascinating, and his recipes to-die-for, including master recipes (and we mean master) for the fundamental types of ramen (Orkin’s principal ramen recipe in the book is 36 pages long), with variations on each. But the book is much more. The book also chronicles Orkin’s circuitous and heart-wrenching journey from dyed-in-the-wool New Yorker working at restaurants, like Lutèce and Mesa Grill, to the chef and owner of one of Japan’s most-loved ramen restaurants. After experiencing the tragic loss of a wife, who was Japanese, and unborn child, Orkin learns that fear of failure was something to be pushed aside. He had already suffered the worst in life and this was the catalyst that led him from New York back to Tokyo, in search of that cultural connection to a country he so dearly loves.

For the history buff:

Historic Heston - Flipping through this latest book from master British chef Heston Blumenthal, one might think of the chef’s creativity and obsession as something akin to the madness of King George. Or, as the New York Times calls it, “a headfirst dive down the rabbit hole, with Blumenthal as the Mad Hatter.” The enormous book, which weighs upwards of 8 lbs., charts a quest for identity through the history of British cooking that stretches from medieval to late-Victorian recipes. Start with thirty historic dishes, take them apart, put them together again using modern ingredients and technique, and what have you got? A sublime twenty-first-century take on delicacies including meat fruit (1500), quaking pudding (1660), and mock-turtle soup (1892). Heston examines the history behind each one’s invention and the science that makes it work. He puts these dishes in their social context and follows obscure culinary trails, ferreting out such curious sources as The Queen-like Closet from 1672 (which offers an excellent method for drying goose if you were every wondering). What it adds up to is an idiosyncratic culinary history of Britain.