Up until a couple of years ago, or perhaps right up to this very moment, you'd imagine that a cookbook with “Southern Chef” in the title would mean beans and cornbread, ham hocks and collards. This particular chef grew up in Gujarat, India, cooking with his large family before moving to America, and eventually finding his place as a chef with the City Grocery Restaurant Group and chef de cuisine at their restaurant, Snackbar. At the restaurant, the menu—and this collection of recipes—feels like looking at food through Indian and Southern lenses one at a time, then together. I made chicken cafreal, marinating thighs in ingredients like cilantro, ginger, jalapeño, and garam masala, then cooked them in a skillet. Soon after, my sister and I made Bhatt’s pork tenderloin with tandoori spices alongside a sweet potato and peanut salad, serving them with some simple greens—and, man, did that dinner strike a chord. The recipes do the talking here, and for that dinner, it wasn't just that it was particularly Southern or Indian or all that complex, but it was good food, well prepared and pleasingly adult. 

I would have written about this book even if Celia Sack hadn't sung its praises and all it contained was recipes for homemade blue-and-yellow Peeps. Yet I was surprised at how many recipe pages I dog-eared, and how much I immediately cooked from it to test, more than was strictly necessary for sure. I started with cold borscht, or kholodnyk, and even in the chilly fall, my wife Elisabeth and I devoured the wildly saturated pink soup flecked with dill, parsley, and crispy cucumber slices and topped with hard-boiled eggs and sour cream. "Eating borscht without smetana [sour cream] is a crime against borscht," Voloshyna half-jokes. I loved making herring with pickled onions and new potatoes, the spuds lightly coated with sour cream and dill. The most fun so far has been the pickles, sauces, and drinks section that includes a dish where cooked eggplant, carrots, onions, and bell pepper ferement in sunflower oil. My single favorite recipe might be Voloshyna's mom's spicy and sour tomatoes, which share three days in a Ball jar with herbs, chiles, garlic, oil, and vinegar, at which point you might just sit down and demolish them in one sitting.

My memory isn't the greatest, but I'm pretty sure I don't recall any cookbook that needed a family timeline, along with a who's who in its opening pages. Woks, which was born from the Leung's beautiful, expansive blog, uses them to lay out the family history and set the stage for the food to come. Living in the United States, food is a link to their Shanghainese and Cantonese ancestors and to each other. Flip through the pages to see if you're up to the challenge. In one motivated evening, following a trip to Seattle's Uwajimaya Asian Market, I made an edamame and tofu stir-fry, that was simpler and more exotic than most of my stir-fries, along with a funky veg stock with kombu and fermented bean curd, and finished out with chili oil. I also threw together an easy sauce that I thought was going to be a nothing burger, but turned out to be the Royale with Cheese of dips for dumplings. In Eric Kim's excellent Korean American, a favorite from earlier this year, you read along and get sucked right into his family story; with the Leungs' book, you join by cooking.

“Aren't we over sourdough?” is a perfectly legitimate question in the wake of the pandemic. This book would certainly have garnered much more attention if it had come out in late 2019, but I cracked it open, and it quickly started answering questions and explaining things in a surprisingly approachable way. Part of this is a nice authorly tone, but a lot of it is design. There’s not too much information on each page, it’s broken down into manageable chunks, and graphics help with heavy lifting. It’s like a textbook you use at a late-night study session, then realize you’re enjoying it so much that it becomes bedtime reading. Two winters ago, making sourdough starter really baked my noodle. I'm typically a no-knead bread kind of guy, but I took a few stabs at a starter, and both times it came out smelling of Elmer's Glue, leaving me to wonder where I'd gone wrong. In Perfect, instructions are spaced out, including charts, photographs, and a day-by-day breakdown of what to look for, including troubleshooting and what Leo calls “signs of ripeness.” Early on, the book divides users between total beginners and seasoned bread bakers, but really, it's by an expert who is an enthusiast, and made for enthusiasts, or those soon to be.

With a fun retro design, Modern Classic Cocktails looks at the best drinks created in the last few decades. These aren't house specials but the drinks that started at one bar, and eventually spread to others across the country and around the world. As Simonson says, “Brothers and sisters in armbands like it, drink it, and freely acknowledge that one of their colleagues has cooked up something unusually good.” To wit, there's Toby Cecchini's Cosmopolitan, along with the Oaxaca old-fashioned and mezcal mule, both from Death & Co in New York. Fly to Chicago for a paper plane, equal parts of bourbon, Amaro Nonino, Aperol, and lemon juice, created by Sam Ross at The Violet Hour. You'll also learn that the currently trendy mix of espresso, vodka, and simple syrup with a coffee-bean garnish got its start with bartender Dick Bradsell at London's Soho Brasserie in the 1980s, percolating away and being tinkered with as the “vodka espresso” until much more recently, when it really caught on under its current handle, the espresso martini.

I thought I would be highlighting just one booze book this time around, but these two go together like dancing partners. What intrigued me most about Pour Me Another was how much of it could really be called Modernized Classic Cocktails. A recent trip to Puerto Rico had Elisabeth and I wondering why piña coladas have fallen out of fashion, and returning to the mainland showed us why: They're too sweet! Instead of the traditional, cloying Coco Lopez (cream of coconut), Hirsch took inspiration from a 1930s version of the drink that uses coconut milk to bring it up to date. He's similarly decrufted the Bloody Mary, hacking away at the ingredient list and garnishes, returning to vegetable juice and vodka as the main ingredients, then adding a delicate hit of coconut water to add a tropical flourish. 

I have a funny relationship with Yotam Ottolenghi's recipes. They're beautiful and delicious but often fussy and time-consuming; a favorite example in that vein might be the tempura lemon-wheel garnish on an already complex polenta recipe in Plenty More. He seems to be aware of this, naming his 2018 cookbook Simple, and ever since, I can never keep myself from being lured back in for another try. With Extra Good Things, the Ottolenghi Test Kitchen leans on the pantry-themed cookbook trend, which has left me happily long on fenugreek and chili oil. Here, you make the pantry-style condiments, of course, but you are drawn in by the lovely recipes. I made the corn Dutch baby with salsa rosa and curtido, the latter being a fermented pantry item, and the whole shebang is a riff on Salvadoran pupusas. It was a fair effort to make all of the elements, but the process was dramatic and beautiful, the batter swooping upward from its large cast-iron pan as it cooks. With the crunchy curtido and homemade sauce, it's a perfect date-night meal to have with your sweetie. So good, in fact, that I've got plans to make the roasted tomato and eggplant soup with anchovy aioli, and maybe the Iraqi dish that features fenugreek.