Spoonable Wonders: Cookbooks to Carry You Through the Cold Months

A fig tree beside my building fruits in late August. If both hands are free, and private property isn’t sacred to you, either, you can munch figs while plucking their Matisse-shaped leaves to wrap fish in for dinner later. Fall begins when the fruits shrivel and plop to the sidewalk. This is now. Nature is telegraphing that it’s time for soaking beans, preheating ovens and waking the heavy beast that is the cast iron pot.

Staying warm indoors is the goal of autumn cooking. So too, perhaps, is making a meal that requires one table setting: a spoon. For that, you cannot go wrong with the books of Madhur Jaffrey, the cook, writer and actor who has patiently and generously introduced South Asian cuisine to North Americans for decades. An Invitation to Indian Cooking (the 50th Anniversary Edition is out on November 21) is a terrific place to start for curries, dals, rice and other aromatic dishes that can be eaten good and hot—hopefully seated near a window so you can watch the changing trees. Hawa Hassan’s In Bibi's Kitchen is similarly invaluable in the fall, featuring warming East African recipes that are spoonable wonders like cornmeal porridge, sweet and sour tamarind lamb and milky spiced tea.

How about soup? Tamar Adler’s The Everlasting Meal Cookbook: Leftovers A–Z—an adaptation of An Everlasting Meal: Cooking with Economy and Grace—invites you to boil a humble pot of salted water and take it from there. With some assertive seasoning, Adler insists, refrigerator rejects (the leftover sweet potato, the remains of a rotisserie chicken, the fainting parsley) will be revived and ready to nourish.

Any kind of soup is enhanced by fresh bread, noodles or dumplings; something starchy to line the stomach. Yasmin Khan’s Zaitoun makes the case for adding maftool (Palestinian couscous) or croutons seasoned with za’atar to your next bowl (the croutons you can honestly eat like potato chips). Hannah Che’s The Vegan Chinese Kitchen invites you to make Sichuan chili-oil wontons from scratch—their extraordinary spice will heat you from the inside out. Even low-threshold bakers will be surprised at the ease and rich rewards of making Marcella Hazan’s Essentials of Classic Italian Cooking fresh focaccia recipe—rip off a corner to dip into brothy beans (try a recipe from Cool Beans by Joe Yonan) or saw it in half and layer with vegetables, cheese and pickles or an overturned tin of sardines. Bonus: Hazan’s writing is wonderful. Each recipe is a set of instructions in prose, verbs firmly in the imperative case.

Recipes online are like singles, a hit without context; cookbooks are the whole album with liner notes. Testing out different cuisines is one of the great pleasures of borrowing cookbooks from the library. Look out for new, soon-to-be favorites, including My Everyday Lagos Kitchen: Nigerian Cooking at Home and in the Diaspora by Yewande Komolafe (she’s a former recipe tester and it shows—her instructions are impeccable) or Yossy Arefi’s Snacking Bakes. Let’s say it’s dark, cold and you don’t especially feel like throwing a trench coat over your pajamas to fetch an ingredient a dessert recipe requires; Arefi saves you the trip by offering sweet, simple treats made from items you likely already have in your pantry.

And let the library offer you a double whammy: not just cookbooks but books about food. Try listening to an eAudiobook of Isak Dinesen’s mysterious and extraordinary Babette's Feast while you settle into your kitchen to peacefully cook.