I’m posting this a little later than planned because life is LIFING right now. I still wanted to do my annual round-up of my favorite cookbooks and other food-related reads for 2025, because I love sharing books, people seem to enjoy it and on the Dutch-side it tends to make me about a quarter of the cost to keep this website in the air (recipe writing and cookbook hoarding notwithstanding). So here we are.
As per usual these are books I read this year, not necessarily books that came out this year. Of course the year isn’t over yet and there are many exciting reads still on my stack, but I tried to take it from where I left off in 2024.
I will try and keep it brief, though I may fail at this.
My favorite cookbooks of 2025
Paon – Tjok Maya Kerthyasa and I Wayan Kresna Yasa
Kin: Caribbean Recipes for the Modern Kitchen – Marie Mitchell
I’d seen Kin: Caribbean Recipes for the Modern Kitchen making the rounds online, and when I saw Kin in person I had to have it because it struck me as so clearly unique. When we got home I read it from front to back and it did not disappoint.
With Kin Marie Mitchell manages to mix the deeply personal, with both her, her family’s and Caribbean history, with original and largely accessible recipes for the home cook. It was such a comforting read and just what I needed at the time. I have since made Marie’s best ever banana bread many times and am still hoping to get round to more. The naughty pork bites, pumpkin fritters, aubergine curry with dark chocolate and Mitchell curry chicken are especially calling my name.
Kokki Bitja: A Book About the Oldest Indonesian Cookbook – Marjolein Kokosky Deforchaux Kelderman
For seven years, Marjolein Kokosky Deforchaux-Kelderman, who worked as a bookseller in Amsterdam for many years and has since been running the renowned Ap Halen take-away in Rotterdam with her husband, worked on translating recipes from the first Indonesian cookbook, printed back in 1843 in what was then known as Batavia (now Jakarta) in the Dutch East Indies (now Indonesia). The small book, Kokki Bitja, approximately 13×20 cm, containing 215 recipes, was reprinted in various incarnations until 1941.
With her translation Marjolein shows how the dishes in this book reflect the cultural diversity of the city of Batavia in the mid-19th century and offers unique insight into the history of Indonesian cuisine. Full disclosure: I contributed a re-translation of one of the recipes to the book. You can read more about Kokki Bitja here.
The Levantine Vegetarian: Recipes from the Middle East – Salma Hage
I’m going to be perfectly honest, it’s been and continues to be a very eventful year so I can’t really remember why I loved The Levantine Vegetarian by Salma Hage, except that I want to cook everything from it. There’s all sorts of sweet and savoury pastries, a whole bunch of lunch inspiration, lots of stuff with beans and pickles, all that good Levantine stuff without the meat.
One thing I am hoping to make once I get back home, for example, is the cumin squash stew with cauliflower and a pine nut crumble (hello?!) and maybe some pickles so I always have a good veg to go on the side.
Hokkaido: Recipes from the Seas, Fields and Farmlands of Northern Japan – Tim Anderson
I am going to perfectly honest, it is kind of unlikely I will cook a lot from Tim Anderson‘s Hokkaido. A lot of the recipes are quite involved or the ingredients are a little hard to come by in rural France and I am a pretty lazy cook. That said this book is SUCH an amazing love letter to a region, it will make you become as obsessed as Tim is, and at the very least want to visit Hokkaido to eat all the food you’re too lazy to make at home.
Still, there’s a lot I jotted down anyway to maybe make, should the time and energy strike me. Such as the crab grilled in its shell, stuffed squid, Hokkaido style karaage and potato cheese dumplings.
Full disclosure: Tim sent me a copy of Hokkaido.
Kung Pao & Beyond: Fried Chicken Recipes from East and Southeast Asia – Susan Jung
I don’t know where I saw this first, but I remember Kung Pao &Beyond: Fried Chicken Recipes from East and Southeast Asia by Susan Jung being on my hitlist for a while. I really did think “How can good can a book about such a specific topic be?”. But then I leafed through it in one of my favorite London book stores and I just had to have it.
This is a very specific and brilliant little book. It explains the science behind the crispiest fried chicken, but if you’re not into all that sciencey you can just skip the food bro intel and go straight through to the recipes for pretty much all the East and Southeast Asian fried (and stir-fried) chicken recipes that you can think of (or have never heard of, but these are the regions that fry chicken best so get with it).
Turkish Express: Snel Klaar, Vol Smaak, Puur Turks – Hale Amus
So Turkish Express: Snel Klaar, Vol Smaak, Puur Turks (ready quickly, full of flavor, pure Turkish) by Hale Amus isn’t available in English (yet) but I adored this book. Hale really made an effort to make a lot of Turkish classics (and newbies) available for when you’re exhausted. You will need a Turkish shop near you for some of the supplies, but once you get the basics in you’re good to go. I really want to make the cauliflower manti, all the soups, the easy lahmacun, the Turkish beans on toast and the fennel salad with apple and pomegranate, among others.
Full disclosure: Hale sent me a copy of this book.
French cookbooks
Since I’ve moved to France I’ve tried to find good French cookbooks. While my French may now be good enough to read cookbooks in French, if I find French cookbooks to my liking in English or Dutch, I do like to recommend them here, as I find them to be quite a rarity with a lot of foreigners like me spending seriously not enough time in France to undertake anything that can be remotely sold as a ‘French’ cookbook. This year I did run into some good ones though. Probably because two of these authors (partially) grew up in France and the other lived in France for decades before writing his.
French Cooking for One – Michèle Roberts
French classics usually aren’t made for one, but in French Cooking for One by Michèle Roberts you’ll find nice and easy eating strategies for the solo diner written in the kind of classical prose that will leave you comforted before you ever even set out to cook. Think salad nicoise, ratatouille, onion soup, fish soup, all in portions much more manageable for when you’re eating alone.
Floyd on France – Keith Floyd
I don’t remember where I got this, but I found an old copy of Floyd on France and finally read it this year. It smelled so badly of smoke I could only read a few pages at a time, but recipe-wise this book is a treasure.
I will mainly be trying the Charentaise recipes from this book, as that’s the region where I live. Leek pie, cepes with potato and garlic, and coq au pineau are especially appealing to me and of the season, so I am hoping to get round to them this winter.
The French Kitchen: 200 Recipes From the Master of French Cooking – Michel Roux Jr.
Michel Roux Jr.‘s The French Kitchen can lean a bit towards the cheffy side, with recipes translated from his now-shuttered Le Gavroche for the (sometimes more ambitious) home cook. There’s a lot of background and enough recipes that veer more on the easy side of things, though this remains more of a ‘cooking for a dinner party’ kind of book.
I’ve enjoyed the œufs en cocotte au mais et chorizo for many a lunch now, but am also looking forward to making Michel’s croque monsieur, his bœuf bourguignon and sweetbread and roquefort salad, among others.
Food culture, memoir, literature and history
An A-Z of Chinese Food (Recipes not included) – Jenny Lau
This book probably isn’t for everyone but that’s probably also why you should read it. Jenny Lau isn’t one to mince words and is happy to make you uncomfortable to consider how we talk about ‘other’ cultures (or experience being talked about as being from an ‘other’ culture). This book offers an excellent sampling of Lau’s essays, in various forms and on various topics, though always related to food and Otherness.
An A-Z of Chinese Food may make you uncomfortable at times, for using terms you maybe hadn’t really considered, or attitudes you didn’t realize you had, but even if you don’t always agree with where Lau lands this book will give you excellent food for thought.
Care and Feeding: A Memoir – Laurie Woolever
While I didn’t work for all kinds of famous brilliant and less brilliant men, nor in food, as Laurie Woolever did (she worked for should-still-be-disgraced Mario Batalli and for the still very much missed Anthony Bourdain), I found her memoir Care and Feeding extremely compelling and at times awfully recognisable. It’s one of those books you cannot put down and if you’re a woman who’s started any kind of career in the late 90’s and early 00’s it will probably ring a few painful bells.
Butter –
I think every foodie had read Asako Yuzuki’s novel Butter in the past couple of years so I couldn’t stay behind. It was great reading a proper novel again. While on a more superficial level this may satisfy the (true) crime and the ‘I won’t read anything unless there’s food involved’-crowd, Butter is a great probe into Japanese (and perhaps even global) views on women, food and family.
De Wereldgeschiedenis in 12 bonen – Joël Broekaert
Joël Broekaert is one of the Netherlands’ more well-known food writers and with De Wereldgeschiedenis in 12 Bonen (A History of the World in 12 Beans) he really delivered. A fun ‘does what it says on the tin’ collection of essays of beans and their influence on global history. I can also highly recommend his book Eet eens een wasbeer (Try racoon sometime), an exploration of invasive species and their edibility in the Netherlands.
Both these books are currently not available in English, but De Wereldgeschiedenis in 12 Bonen is available in German.
Honorable mention
Some other books I read this year that I enjoyed.
You Gotta Eat: Real Life Strategies for Feeding Yourself by Margaret Eby is a great little tome for anyone struggling to feed themselves. As I have long lived with chronic illness and a desire to eat, I already knew most of these strategies but this is a great gift for any of your overwhelmed slash chronically ill friends who are struggling to eat.
Long Day? Cook This: Easy Asian Recipes with a Twist by Justin Tsang is a wonderful book and I can’t stop making his garlic butter salmon bites for dinner. Recipes are a bit more involved than I would like for a book with ‘easy’ in the title, and the write-up sometimes feels a bit odd, with ingredients listed in a different order from the way they come up in the recipe for example, but there’s so much I want to cook from this I can’t fault it otherwise. There’s miso mushroom udon, miso grilled cabbage with coriander yoghurt and crispy chorizo and chili butter chicken with fennel salad, among other things.
Sabrina Ghayour proved once again that you cannot go wrong with any of her cookbooks with Persiana Easy (sent to me by her Dutch publisher) and I found Molly Baz‘s Cook This Book very inspiring and pretty much lived off her peach, tomato and halloumi salad all summer.
That’s it for this year. What are the best cook- and food related books you read this year?
