The Ten Best Books About Food of 2024

One of the easiest and most fun ways to learn about a place is through its food. And when you aren’t able to actually travel to a destination, the next best thing is to read about its cuisine, and perhaps to cook it yourself.

Good food books make cultural dishes and history jump off the page, and our favorites of this year manage to do just that. These ten titles are bursting with tasty food, from rugelach to pho, as well as amusing and captivating storytelling on everything from the history of refrigeration to Julia Child’s kitchen, transporting readers from Cambodia to Bethlehem to McDonald’s franchise locations around the globe.

McAtlas: A Global Guide to the Golden Arches by Gary He

When James Beard Award-winning photographer Gary He found himself eating an iftar meal at a McDonald’s in Marrakesh, Morocco, in 2018, an idea was born. He spent the next several years traveling to 50 countries on six continents to visit architecturally distinctive McDonald’s locations—from a ski-thru lodge-style restaurant in Lindvallen, Sweden, and one inside an old DC-3 airplane in Taupo, New Zealand—and sample special menu items. According to He, localized menu items, like the McBaguette in France and shawarma-style Chicken McArabia in Saudia Arabia, account for about 30 percent of McDonald’s systemwide sales. McAtlas, which is not endorsed by McDonald’s (the fast-food chain had no involvement or input), is a volume filled with hundreds of non-stylized photos showcasing these unique outposts and offerings of the Golden Arches. Perhaps this isn’t news to you, but Hong Kong locations serve macaroni soup, a pasta topped with ham in a bowl of beef or chicken broth traditionally found at local cafes known as cha chaan teng.

Julia Child’s Kitchen: The Design, Tools, Stories and Legacy of an Iconic Space by Paula Johnson

This volume by Paula Johnson, project director and co-curator of the exhibition “Food: Transforming the American Table” at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History, examines the kitchen of one of the 20th century’s most famous and beloved chefs. A respectful homage to Julia Child’s legacy through interviews with those who knew her, a compelling narrative and beautiful photography, the book scrutinizes Child’s recipe test lab—once in her home in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and now fully intact at the museum. The workspace includes her favorite tools and gadgets, appliances, artwork and décor, books, and more. A foreword by French chef and television personality Jacques Pépin is a cherry on top.

A Call to Farms: Reconnecting to Nature, Food and Community in a Modern World by Jennifer Grayson

Investigative journalist Jennifer Grayson embedded herself in a training program for new farmers in central Oregon during the thick of the Covid-19 pandemic. Her purpose was to explore how the newest generation of farmers are working to create a more sustainable and regenerative agriculture when things are only getting more expensive, soil is more degraded, and food systems are more industrial. In A Call to Farms, readers meet numerous farmers and food activists across the United States—a couple farming a one-acre plot in Oregon, a woman teaching other Black women how to grow crops for their communities in South Carolina, the director of a permaculture school in North Carolina and more. Together, Grayson’s portraits paint a picture of the future of American farming.

Our South: Black Food Through My Lens by Ashleigh Shanti

Born in St. Mary’s, Georgia, and raised in Virginia Beach, Ashleigh Shanti followed her culinary career dreams to North Carolina. She won a James Beard Rising Star Chef Award for her time at Benne on Eagle in Asheville, North Carolina, and competed on season 19 of “Top Chef” before opening her own restaurant in Asheville, called Good Hot Fish, earlier this year. Shanti’s aim with this cookbook is to expound on the complexities of Black food, stating plainly that it’s not a Southern cookbook, Appalachian cookbook or soul food cookbook. Instead, it is cooking through her lens, which encompasses all of those and more, making it difficult to put it into a simple box. Our South has sections devoted to Backcountry, Lowcountry, Midlands, Lowlands and Homeland, with recipes like stewed rabbit with preserved carrot purée, blackened flounder chowder with turkey tails, buckwheat noodle bowls, and her mom’s sausage and rice stuffed eggplant with tomato-peanut gravy.

The League of Kitchens Cookbook: Brilliant Tips, Secret Methods & Favorite Family Recipes From Around the World by Lisa Kyung Gross

The League of Kitchens is a cooking school in New York City. But instead of stuffy instructors from intimidating backgrounds, the teachers there are women who immigrated from around the world and landed in New York, who want to share their native cuisine. Founded in 2014 by Lisa Kyung Gross, the daughter of a Korean immigrant and a Jewish New Yorker, the League of Kitchens offers connection and cultural engagement through cooking. The League of Kitchens Cookbook mixes profiles of some of its instructors with a hefty helping of their cherished family recipes. From murgir mangsho (Bangladeshi chicken and potato curry), to huevos con tocino y habanero (Mexican eggs with bacon and habanero chiles), to dadar jagung (Indonesian corn fritters with shrimp), to sharlotka s yablokami (Russian apple charlotte cake), it’s a real smorgasbord of different cuisines.

Bethlehem: A Celebration of Palestinian Food by Fadi Kattan

Fadi Kattan is a Franco-Palestinian chef and hotelier who was born and raised in Bethlehem. Today, he co-owns the six-room boutique hotel Kassa in Bethlehem and the restaurant Akub in London, which serves modern Palestinian food. His debut cookbook, Bethlehem: A Celebration of Palestinian Food, is a tribute to Palestinian farmers and food artisans, with vivid profiles of some of them appearing in the book alongside his recipes. A mix of family treasures and those served at Akub and Kassa, the dishes include kofta in grape leaves, purslane dip, and ka’ek al-quds and eggs, the sesame-covered bread seen all over Jerusalem and here filled with baked eggs and za’atar spice.

Dac Biet: An Extra-Special Vietnamese Cookbook by Nini Nguyen with Sarah Zorn

Learn to cook three variations of pho with all the trimmings, a Viet Cajun seafood boil and an addictive ginger scallion sauce you’ll want on just about anything, all in this cookbook by two-time “Top Chef” contestant Nini Nguyen. Dac biet means “special” in Vietnamese, and Nguyen, born and raised in New Orleans by Vietnamese immigrants, uses the title to highlight her special twists on classic Vietnamese and Cajun dishes in the 100 recipes inside the book. Her distinctive point of view shines in culinary inventions like coconut crispy rice crepes and a banh mi-po’ boy mash-up.

Frostbite: How Refrigeration Changed Our Food, Our Planet and Ourselves by Nicola Twilley

While it’s probably hard for most of us to imagine life without a refrigerator and freezer, there was a time not too long ago when these luxuries didn’t exist. In Frostbite, journalist and podcast host Nicola Twilley dives into the history of refrigeration and takes readers on a tour of the so-called cold chain, the network of refrigerated trucks, rail cars, shipping containers and warehouses that fruits and vegetables typically travel before hitting a grocery store’s produce section. This illuminating title details the immense impact this innovation has on everything from our health to global economics to the environment, revealing that it’s not all positive.

Slow Noodles: A Cambodian Memoir of Love, Loss and Family Recipes by Chantha Nguon

When Chantha Nguon was 9 years old, her life was upended by Pol Pot’s genocide and civil war in Cambodia in the 1970s. She was able to move to Saigon in neighboring Vietnam, but lost much of her family, and eventually fled to Thailand, where she survived by cooking in a brothel, selling street food and taking on other jobs. In this heartbreaking memoir, she recounts her incredible struggle and perseverance, telling tales of her homeland before it was torn apart and recreating around 20 recipes of her youth—green papaya pickles, Khmer curries, handmade banh canh noodles and more—as a means of staying connected to her past.

My Life in Recipes: Food, Family and Memories by Joan Nathan

Best-selling cookbook author and Jewish food authority Joan Nathan published her latest book earlier this year, using more of a memoir format to share her personal history with her ancestral cuisine. Nathan, now 81 years old, traces her family’s history from their arrival in the United States from Germany to her own childhood in New York and Rhode Island through her years living in Paris, New York, Israel and Washington, D.C., sharing more than 100 recipes and food histories along the way. Recipes include salmon baked with preserved lemon and za’atar; Moroccan chicken with almonds, chestnuts, cinnamon and couscous; and her mother’s family recipe for brisket, which first appeared in her 1994 book Jewish Cooking in America.

Devorah Lev-Tov | READ MORE

Devorah Lev-Tov is a food and travel journalist living in Brooklyn with her husband, two kids and senior dog. She has been published in The New York Times, National Geographic, Travel + Leisure, Bon Appetit and Food & Wine.