Best cookbooks of 2022
Looking back at our favorite cookbooks of the year, their depth and scope is impressive. Among the authors are chefs, home cooks, photographers, bloggers and other storytellers. They shine a light on the best of what cookbooks can be. The top picks of the Los Angeles Times Food writers and editors speak to comfort cooking, baking, barbecuing, longevity, the immigrant experience, identity and activism — to show that food truly is a lens through which we can better understand the world, ourselves and each other.
"Arabiyya: Recipes From the Life of an Arab Diaspora" by Reem Assil (Ten Speed Press)
If you know of Reem Assil — and of her restaurant Reem’s in San Francisco’s Mission District, inspired by the tradition of corner bakeries across the Arab world — you’re probably aware she brings more to the food space than first-rate baking skills. She was a labor and community organizer before becoming a full-time chef, and she brings an activist’s soul as well to her culinary career. Beyond converting Reem’s to a worker-owned model in an effort to capsize hierarchical restaurant models, Assil has the courage to be outspoken on many topics: among them Palestinian rights, the intersection of food and social justice, and the many ills of capitalism.
She pours the whole of her experience into her first cookbook. Detailed, lucid instructions for delving into the baking customs of Belad al Sham (the Greater Syria region) anchor “Arabiyya,” including Assil’s secrets to mana’eesh fragrant with za’atar and olive oil, ring-shaped ka’ak crusted with sesame seeds and tutorials on spinach-stuffed fatayer and other savory turnovers. Subsequent chapters detail vegetable-rich feasts and meatier dishes ideal for family or company: djej mahshi (chicken stuffed with spiced rice); shakriyah (spiced lamb and yogurt stew); clay pot shrimp scented with garlic and dried dill in the style of Gaza; and dinner party centerpieces such as stuffed squid in arak-spiked tomato sauce.
Equally compelling are the essays that frame each section of the book. She writes forthrightly of her family’s immigrant experience and the nuances of isolation, assimilation and resistance she’s faced to achieve a sense of belonging. Part 1 opens with memories of summertime family visits to Los Angeles but segues to her grandmother’s exodus from Palestine in 1948 during the creation of Israel. A later piece details a family trip to Lebanon and her father’s ancestral home in Damascus, Syria, that lit her professional pursuit of baking. “I remember,” she writes, “the revelation that a bakery can spark life even in places where life had been most depleted. I knew then that my ancestors were trying to tell me something: my community back in California needed an Arab street corner bakery.” Yes, we did, and we needed this book too. — Bill Addison
"Bludso's BBQ Cookbook" by Kevin Bludso with Noah Galuten (Ten Speed Press)
“Cayenne pepper, baby. If it ain’t hot, it ain’t me.” That’s Kevin Bludso transforming the usual pro forma pantry section of a cookbook into his own vivid expression of low-and-slow barbecue love. If you’ve ever eaten Bludso’s barbecue — either at his now-shuttered original spot in Compton or the thriving La Brea Avenue restaurant and bar — you know the value of the lessons in heat and smoke this legendary pitmaster has to offer in his memoir-style cookbook. Among them: Don’t disrespect the rub with wet meat; instead of a beautiful crust you’ll get lumpy, caked-on spices.
Bludso is a conduit for generations of barbecue know-how, mostly through the summers he spent in Corsicana, Texas, at the “illegal, bootleg BBQ stand” run by Willie Mae Fields, the great-aunt he called Grannie. He also learned from his mother, who Bludso says could barbecue better than his father, and his Uncle Kaiser and Aunt Beulah.
“I don’t want the BBQ in this book to be like some kind of damn algebra class,”
