Top 15 in Cooking
Week of July 27, 2026
by Marty Nachel
Get hoppin’ with this guide to microbrewing your own beer Thinking of brewing your own beer or want to know how it’s done? Homebrewing For Dummies is for you. If you’re ready to take a crack at making your own brew, you’ll need this guide to the supplies, ingredients, and process of crafting the perfect beer. Follow our recipes for lager, porter, stout, and other brew types—or invent your own. When you’ve tasted your perfect creation (and after the hangover wears off), we’ve got you covered with ideas for entering your beer into homebrewing competitions and selling your beer. This new edition keeps pace with the exciting world of small-batch beer, introducing you to new flavors and varieties that are popular on the microbrew circuit. We’ve also got the details on the latest at-home brewing equipment, software and apps, and resources you can tap (get it?) to make a better beer. Not an IPA person? Not to worry! You can also make your own hard seltzers, flavored malt beverages, and juice drinks with this handy how-to. Get recipes and instructions for brewing lagers, porters, and other beers at home Enhance the quality of your small-batch brews and make your operations more eco friendly Enter homebrewing competitions with your beer, hard seltzer, and malt beverages Discover new gadgets, apps, and resources that can make home brewing even easier Homebrewing For Dummies is for anyone looking for a fun and easy-to-use guide to the exciting, rewarding, and refreshing hobby of beer br
by Kevin R. Kosar
You might think moonshine only comes from ramshackle stills hidden away in the Appalachian Mountains, but the fact of the matter is we’ve been improvising spirits all around the world for centuries. No matter where you go, there is a local bootleg liquor, whether it’s bathtub gin, peatreek, or hjemmebrent. In this book, Kevin R. Kosar tells the colorful and, at times, blinding history of moonshine, a history that’s always been about the people: from crusading lawmen and clever tinkerers to sly smugglers and ruthless gangsters, from pontificating poets and mountain men to beleaguered day-laborers and foolhardy frat boys. Kosar first surveys all the things we’ve made moonshine from, including grapes, grains, sugar, tree bark, horse milk, and much more. But despite the diversity of its possible ingredients, all moonshine has two characteristics: it is extremely alcoholic, and it is, in most places, illegal. Indeed, the history of DIY distilling is a history of criminality and the human ingenuity that has prevailed out of officials’ sights: from cleverly designed stills to the secret smuggling operations that got the goods to market. Kosar also highlights the dark side: completely unregulated, many moonshines are downright toxic and dangerous to drink. Spanning the centuries and the globe, this entertaining book will appeal to any food and drink lover who enjoys a little mischief.

by Beth Hensperger
This book unlocks the rice cooker's true potential. It thoroughly explains how this appliance works and how to prepare every kind of rice, grain, and dried bean.

by Fannie Merritt Farmer
A cookbook classic, acclaimed for such innovations as simple directions, concern with nutrition and terms now standard in American cooking. Detailed methods for preparing soups, seafood, meat, vegetables, poultry, salads, hot and cold desserts, and many other dishes. A delightful repository of information for nostalgia buffs and a useful aid for today's homemaker.

by Fred William Sauceman
This book, the first of two volumes, chronicles a highly personal journey, with plenty of loafing stops along the way, through the hills and hollows of Southern Appalachia, in search of the tastes that define and sustain the region's people. Join food writer Fred Sauceman as the sorghum syrup thickens in September, as the First Family of Country Music repeats the late summer ritual of making the vinegary, vegetable-packed relish called chow-chow in Virginia, and as ramps, audacious cousins to the green onion, first push through winter's leaves on the forest floor near the Cherokee reservation in North Carolina. Learn pimento cheese techniques from octogenarian pharmacists, eat gas station pizza off a warm car hood, and revel in the simple but ingenious concoction called Beans All the Way.

by Alex Maltman
This pioneering book explains geology wholly in the context of wine, including how it works in vineyards and its possible effects on wine taste.

by Michael Pollan
Offers insight into food consumption in the twenty-first century, explaining how an abundance of unlimited food varieties reveals the responsibilities of consumers to protect their health and the environment.

by Maria Dembinska
Topics examined include not just the personal eating habits of kings, queens, and nobles but also those of the peasants, monks, and other social groups not generally considered in medieval food studies."--BOOK JACKET.
by Mrs Abby Fisher
What Mrs. Fisher Knows About Old Southern Cooking, written in 1881, is one of the oldest cookbooks published by an African American. This great collection of southern recipes includes breads, pickles, preserves, pies, soups, and more.
by Diane Morgan
The ultimate pizza cookbook with more than sixty classic and creative recipes from a thirteen-time World Pizza Champion and a James Beard Award–winning author. Pizza master Tony Gemignani teams up with acclaimed cookbook author Diane Morgan to offer the definitive tome on the art of pizza-making. There are more than sixty selections on the menu, including the thick, rounded-edge crust of classic Neapolitan pizza Margherita, the thin crust New York style Italian Sausage and Three Pepper Pizza, and the stick-to-your-ribs, deep-dish kind, smothered in spinach and mozzarella. There are also plenty of new-fangled pizzas: layered with Thai curry flavored chicken or pineapple; cooked on the grill; even quick and easy versions using store-bought crust. Aficionados will find six pizza dough recipes ready to suit anyone's crust preferences. Dough-tossing techniques and tips on using peels, stones, tiles, pans, grills, ovens, and more make this a complete pizza package.

by Braiden Rex-Johnson
For close to 100 years, Seattle's Pike Place Public Market has been a favorite destination for food-loving locals and tourists alike. Packed with stalls offering the best quality and selection of fish found on the West Coast, restaurants serving up Pacific Northwest cuisine, and culinary shops of every persuasion, the market is a fish-lover's paradise. In this colorful gift edition cookbook, best-selling author Braiden Rex-Johnson shares shopping tips, cooking techniques, mail-order sources, and more than 50 recipes for fish and shellfish from the chefs, restaurateurs, and fishmongers who represent the market community. Filled with candid, colorful photos, the PIKE PLACE PUBLIC MARKET SEAFOOD COOKBOOK is the perfect gift for any seafood-loving soul and a great souvenir to bring the best of the market home. • A full-color, gift edition seafood cookbook from Seattle's Pike Place Public Market, including 50 recipes and 50 vibrant photographs of the market's people, sites, and seafood. • Features information on sustainable fisheries and preservation. • Includes a brief history of the Pike Place Public Market. • Recipe highlights include Broiled Halibut with Sundried Tomato Tapenade; Balsamic Glazed Salmon; Mussels Provençal; Shellfish Risotto; and such simple, tasty sauces as Champagne Sauce, Simple Soy Glaze, and classic Romesco.

by Leigh Anne Wilkes
Create fantastic holiday fare with a twist fit for any celebration with Holiday Slow Cooker. Have more room for other dishes in or eliminate using your oven by having a slow cooker take on some of the elements. Leigh Anne Wilkes created 100 recipes that are extravagant and gourmet, yet easy to make for festivities. Make parties and entertaining less stressful on your oven by leaving your slow cooker in charge. Create feasts for summer holidays with the BBQ Brisket and Triple Berry Crisp; in the fall and winter, there’s Cornbread and Sausage Dressing and Herbed Turkey Breast. Also included are recipes for Valentine’s Day Dinner, Chinese New Year, St. Patrick’s Day, Easter, Cinco de Mayo and even recipes for appetizers and breakfast. This book features 100 delicious recipes and 60 mouth-watering photos.
by M. F. K. Fisher
"M.F.K Fisher’s latest excursion into the art or science of gastronomy is more an anthology of the finest writing on the subject than strictly a text of her own composition . . . A royal feast, indeed!" —The New York Times Betty Fussell—winner of the James Beard Foundation’s journalism award, and whose essays on food, travel, and the arts have appeared in The New York Times, The New Yorker, Saveur, and Vogue—is the perfect writer to introduce M.F.K Fisher’s Here Let Us Feast, first published in 1946. The author of Eat, Live, Love, Die has penned a brilliant introduction to this fabulous anthology of gastronomic writing, selected and with commentary from the inimitable M.F.K. Fisher. The celebrated author of such books as The Art of Eating, The Cooking of Provincial France, and With Bold Knife and Fork, Fisher knows how to prepare a feast of reading as no other. Excerpting descriptions of bountiful meals from classic works of British and American literature, Fisher weaves them into a profound discussion of feasting. She also traces gluttony through the Old and New Testaments of the Bible, and claims that the story of a nation's life is charted by its gastronomy. M.F.K. Fisher has arranged everything perfectly, and the result is a succession of unforgettable courses that will entice the most reluctant epicure.

by Sally Fallon
Recalling the culinary customs of our ancestors and looking ahead to a future of robust good health for young and old, this book offers modern families a fascinating guide to wise food choices and proper preparation techniques.

by Andrew F. Smith
This ready reference explores the American obsession with junk food and fast food through products, corporations and entrepreneurs, social history, popular culture, organizations, issues, politics, commercialism and consumerism, and much more.