Our Favourite Fall and Winter Cookbooks of 2020

This fall and winter's cookbooks are all about coziness, convenience and escape. Treat a loved one—or yourself—to one of this season’s most anticipated titles.

Modern Comfort Food
Ina Garten, $47 Garten’s recipes are considered gold standard among Chatelaine editors for a reason: they’re clear, thoroughly tested, and always delicious. The Contessa’s latest offering goes heavy on American comfort food: Boston cream pie, chutney grilled cheese, smashed burgers, black and white cookies, and cocktails. (Sadly, there is no recipe for her massive, Internet-famous quarantine Cosmopolitan.)

Snacking Cakes
Yossy Arefi, $32 Dense, delicious, and requiring just one bowl and a handful of pantry ingredients, snacking cakes are a time-strapped dessert-lover’s dream. With flavour combos like ginger-sweet potato and nectarine cornmeal, Arefi’s recipes prove that this weeknight-friendly dessert needn’t be humble.

Chaat
Maneet Chauhan and Jody Eddy, $42.50 Named after the savoury snack often served as an appetizer in restaurants and food stalls across India, this book is full of bright, textured recipes that are as diverse and regionally unique as its eponymous dish.

In Bibi’s Kitchen
Hawa Hassan and Julia Turshen, $45 Somali cook and hot sauce entrepreneur Hawa Hassan celebrates the vibrant cooking traditions of east Africa by drawing on the wisdom of bibis (grandmothers) from South Africa, Mozambique, Madagascar, Comoros, Tanzania, Kenya, Somalia, and Eritrea.

The Flavour Equation
Nik Sharma, $50 Fans of Samin Nosrat’s Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat will love Sharma’s building-blocks approach to cooking. The former molecular biologist uses fundamental aspects of our sensory experience—sight, sound, mouthfeel, aroma and taste—to explain how flavour works in cooking, and how to coax more of it out of every dish.

You Wanna Piece of Me?
Jenell Parsons, $35 After building a successful, bakery and catering business in Vancouver, The Pie Hole owner Parsons offers readers the secrets behind her Guy Fieri-approved savoury and sweet pies. From bacon cheeseburgers to raspberry crumble plus an Elvis-inspired confection and even a poutine pie, no flavour combo is off the table.

Baking Day
Anna Olson, $40 Canada’s queen of homemade desserts returns with 120 new baking recipes, each codified by skill level and designed to be made with friends and family—particularly young ones fresh off a MasterChef Junior or Nailed It! binge watch.

The Double Happiness Cookbook
Trevor Lui, January 2021, $40 Veteran event producer, Cityline regular and restaurateur Lui’s first cookbook draws recipe inspiration from his childhood spent eating in Toronto’s multiple Chinatowns and an adulthood spent cooking in restaurants and pop-ups across the GTA.

Time To Eat
Nadiya Hussain, $42.95 Since her name-making Great British Bake Off win in 2015, Hussain has established herself as a home cookery authority, having produced five cookbooks and nine cooking shows in under five years. Her latest Canadian release—a guide to truly delicious, genuinely quick weeknight dinners—may partly explain how she finds time to do it all.

The Pasta Codex
Vincenzo Buonassisi, $68 First published in Milan in 1974, this 1,001-recipe tome is considered the guide to la bella pasta—but has never before been translated to English. Whether you’re looking to make noodles from scratch or learn how to best cook and choose sauce for each shape, this codex has the answers.

Cooking From Home Dara Sutin, from $25 Chef, food stylist and author Dara Sutin teams up with Not9to5—a Canadian non-profit that provides mental health and substance abuse resources for people working in the hospitality, food and beverage industries—to produce a quarantine kitchen-themed book of home recipes from chefs and food writers across the country. Digital versions of the book are available for donations of $25 and up.