@beacooks
cookbooks I actually cook from
10 items
- 01Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat - Samin Nosrat↗
- 02The Food Lab - J. Kenji Lopez-Alt
- 03Six Seasons - Joshua McFadden
- ··7 more entries
19101
📚the cookbooks Kenji López-Alt tells people to buy
The gift-guide page where Kenji López-Alt names the cookbooks that shaped how he cooks. Skipping his own three since this is about who he reads, not what he wrote. Pulled from his site in September 2026.
01
On Food and Cooking by Harold McGee (1984, revised 2004)
science bible, dense but you'll go back to it
02
Jacques Pépin's Complete Techniques (1976, revised 2012)
more diagrams than words, which is the point
03
Mastering the Art of French Cooking, Vol. 1 & 2 by Julia Child, Louisette Bertholle and Simone Beck (1961 & 1970)
04
Essentials of Classic Italian Cooking by Marcella Hazan (1992)
still the one people mean when they say the Italian cookbook
05
Good Meat by Deborah Krasner (2010)
06
The River Cottage Cookbook by Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall (2001)
seasonal, from scratch, very British about it
07
Flour Water Salt Yeast by Ken Forkish (2012)
this is where half the sourdough people I know started
08
The Meathead Method by Meathead Goldwyn (2024)
09
Plenty by Yotam Ottolenghi (2010)
the one that got vegetables taken seriously again
10
Tenderheart by Hetty Lui McKinnon (2023)
11
Veg-Table by Nik Sharma (2023)
science-forward like Kenji's own stuff, makes sense he'd like it
12
The Moosewood Cookbook by Mollie Katzen (1977, revised)
13
An Invitation to Indian Cooking by Madhur Jaffrey (1973)
introduced a lot of Americans to Indian food, full stop
14
Stir-Frying to the Sky's Edge by Grace Young (2010)
15
The Art of Mexican Cooking by Diana Kennedy (1989)
Kennedy spent decades documenting this before anyone else bothered
16
Mexico: One Plate at a Time by Rick Bayless (2000)
17
Gran Cocina Latina by Maricel Presilla (2012)
huge scope, Central and South America and the Caribbean all in one book
Or start a list of your own. Free, it takes a minute.