The Best New Books on Food & Drink

Our pick of the best new books about food and drink.

With his keenly anticipated follow-up to The Hunter Chef Cookbook: Hunt, Fish, and Forage in Over 100 Recipes, Michael Hunter has taken his game and wild food cookery outside and returned it to its primeval birthplace, the firepit. This seems an obvious choice. In practice, though, it is an ambitious plan. Every good cook with wild game experience knows that, for all their extra flavour and character, these meats are also lean and unforgiving when it comes to cuisson and far easier to manage with sous-vide and other modern trickery than on open fire. But Hunter takes up the challenge and runs with it, making the process look easy and the results irresistible. At the simple end of the spectrum, there’s charcoal-grilled Chinook salmon with garlic compound butter and spring peas. Seasoned hunters should try steak au poivre made from a thick slice of the breast of sandhill crane — a.k.a. “the rib-eye in the sky.” Or maple-glazed black-bear ribs, and an open-fire adaptation of the classic roast woodcock with its innards smeared on toast. The book is rich with useful how-tos (from cleaning geoduck to making Euro-style big-game mounts). Above all, though, it’s a comprehensive and compelling culinary ode to our great outdoors. –JACOB RICHLER

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As both an investigative journalist and a professional forester, Peter Kuitenbrouwer is uniquely qualified to tell the definitive story of “the national lifeblood that is maple syrup.” His book spans the centuries from pre-colonial Indigenous techniques to pioneer priests sprinkling trees with holy water to help the sap run, to the threat climate change now poses to maple syrup’s existence. The reporter’s enthusiasm for detail takes us deep into the sticky politics of the syrup business, with its co-ops, cartels, thieves and rebels, and embraces the science of sugaring off — now we know why the Maillard reaction is so vital to a syrup’s ultimate flavour. Running through it all is Kuitenbrouwer’s own relationship with the sweet stuff: he grew up tapping trees on the family’s West Quebec farm and now has his own sugar bush in Ontario. –JAMES CHATTO

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Sean Sherman’s Owamni restaurant in Minneapolis was named the James Beard Best New Restaurant in 2022 — a first for an Indigenous-run restaurant and, more impressively, for a restaurant that focuses on decolonized cuisine. For Sherman, that means no Eurocentric ingredients, such as dairy, wheat, cane sugar, pork, beef and chicken. Turtle Island is way more than a collection of recipes. It’s a meticulously researched compendium of historical essays broken into 13 geographical regions to reflect the 13 plates on the turtle shell that gives Turtle Island — a.k.a. North America — its name. Sherman makes room for other Indigenous chefs and experts, including Canadians Tawnya Brant and Shane Chartrand, while conceding that his colleagues might not share his strict ethos. He’s not about “cooking like it’s 1491,” as he likes to say, but, rather, reintroducing the role of food in nourishing community and harmonizing with Mother Nature. His book is beautifully illustrated and a good read. There’s positivity here, and the recipes are fascinating and challenging. Good luck sourcing some of the ingredients. –DICK SNYDER

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Food blogger–turned–cookbook author Mimi Thorisson’s latest tome is as much a practical guide to Italian regional cuisine as it is a meditation on the pleasures of the table — in particular, her family’s, charmingly described as “old, with scars, and ready to give.” A fair portion of the recipes, organized by season and enticingly photographed by husband Oddur, are dishes she cooks for their (many) children. Venetian rice and peas, stuffed chicken in a creamy Parmesan sauce, and a collection of inventive ways of resurrecting a bowl of leftover pasta are in the “kiddie food” category, “best eaten in the kitchen.” Others she calls “granny” (or nonna) treats — time-honoured sweets for hungry schoolchildren. Her casatiello (meat-stuffed bread embedded with dough-wrapped eggs) is more elaborate, while the unusual torta di crespelle e pomodori — crepe-style pancakes layered, torte-like, with ripe tomatoes — is the dish Thorisson declares her favourite. The author’s passion for Italy — its seasons, ingredients, farmers and purveyors — is clear on every pretty page, while well-researched headnotes, written in a breezy tone, lend historical and regional perspective. –ANNE DESBRISAY

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Known as one of Canada’s most trusted baking authorities, Anna Olson brings that same clarity to the everyday cooking she does at home in Anna Cooks. With her characteristic warmth and practicality, she unpacks the less structured world of cooking, where instinct often trumps exactness. To set readers up for success, Olson sprinkles her pages with DLTSY (“don’t let that stop you”) notes offering tips and substitutions that highlight the fluid, flexible nature of recipes. Opening with thumbnail photos of every dish — almost like scrolling a website — the book lets you see its breadth at a glance. Recipes reflect how Anna and her husband, chef instructor Michael Olson, truly cook and eat, with dishes inspired by their travels alongside menus for every kind of gathering. The result is both manual and mentor — a generous, approachable collection for bakers broadening their skills and for home cooks seeking confidence and inspiration in the kitchen. –ESHUN MOTT

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Adjectives are very handy in summarizing the first cookbook from Cosimo Mammoliti, co-founder and unstinting spiritual guide of Terroni, the legendary Toronto-based international restaurant group. Candid, colourful, comprehensive and compelling, La Cucina di Terroni gifts all who have tried — and mostly failed — to recreate the chain’s signature funghi assoluti and spaghetti al limone with detailed recipes backed by hard-won caveats. Organized like a menu, this book also offers instructions on Terroni’s foundational elements such as pizza dough, tomato sauce and even its panettone, which requires four days’ prep. Before serving up the recipes, Mammoliti recounts Terroni’s origin story and his harrowing cancer battle, making the read as intimate as a tiramisù shared with a delicate grappa. Rather like Gruppo Terroni’s footprint — which includes retail and wine importing and extends across North America — the book is huge. It’s also essential for Terroni fans — from Queen West in Toronto to L.A.’s Beverly Boulevard. –KIM HUGHES

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When it comes to live-fire cooking, Argentina has Francis Mallmann and the Maritimes has Michael Smith. The veteran chef has become an expert since taking over PEI’s Inn at Bay Fortune with his wife, Chastity, a decade ago. They build at least a dozen cooking fires daily during the season, from the Inn’s historic kitchen hearth to the outdoor smokehouse and firepits. Guests are offered a smoky cornucopia that includes ember-roasted oysters bubbling with lovage butter, and sizzling pork skewers seared over binchō-tan charcoal. There might be a lamb spatchcocked in the asador shed, wood-fired split bone marrow, even smoky loaves of sourdough. And you can bet there are freshly made marshmallows for roasting. The Inn’s team go so far as to make their own charcoal from local oak. All the know-how is captured in this cookbook, Smith’s 13th, alongside more than 80 recipes. It’s an exhaustive resource for anyone looking to cook food over fire. –IVY KNIGHT

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The aphorism “Tell me what you eat and I will tell you who you are” applies equally to global food chains. The Lobster Trap charts the dramatic rise and fall of a commodity first buoyed and now threatened by warming waters and the fishing pressures of “ceaseless global demand.” Veteran Globe and Mail reporter and East Coast native Greg Mercer interviews countless fishermen to reveal the precariousness of their livelihood. Boats get rammed, fishermen get shot, and nearly a third of all wild seafood ends up on the black market. Meanwhile, the lobsters themselves are disappearing from warmer American waters and thriving (for now) in Newfoundland. As an ectotherm, a lobster’s temperature is regulated by the water that surrounds it; even minute changes in temperature can affect its behaviour. It’s an apt metaphor for the interconnectedness of the modern world: a banquet in Beijing may ultimately affect the lives of people in small towns on Canada’s East Coast, not to mention the benthic ecosystems they have come to depend on. –SASHA CHAPMAN

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James Beard Award–winning culinary historian Michael W.Twitty achieves the near-impossible task of capturing the gastronomy of the vast, multifaceted American South in a single book. His solution is to avoid cliché and stereotypes, instead front-loading each of his 260-plus recipes with a precise provenance, fun fact or personal memory. So we learn what makes hush puppies from Eastern North Carolina special, what differentiates okra dishes Limping Susan from Limping Kate, or who first came up with the idea of collard greens empanadas. More than just a tangle of foodways from disparate cultures, Southern food, says Twitty, is “soaked in Native removal, racial caste and social justice, gender roles, ability issues, sexuality and class.” It’s also delicious, as these tempting and approachable recipes prove. –JAMES CHATTO

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Describing the fare at Rustic Canyon, his Californian restaurant, Jeremy Fox (author of On Vegetables) says: “The food looks like itself but tastes like a better version of itself.” It’s a reminder that simplicity and refinement often go hand in hand, and Fox has applied this outlook and dedication to his new book, On Meat. Larded with beautiful pictures, it’s also full of instructions that both the home cook and the professional chef will find useful—how to make and stuff sausages, for instance, or how to fold a cartouche. I loved the simple recipes for matzo ball soup, herb-butter-roasted chicken and pork chops with sauce charcutière, but what really got me excited was the “Deli Case” chapter. I can’t wait to try my hand at the beef-tendon terrine, wild leek cotechino or the pork-blood and buckwheat kishka. A book destined to be a classic. –JESSE VALLINS

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Any new cocktail book needs something to set it apart. Renowned Canadian mixologist Kaitlyn Stewart (2017 World Class bartending champion) chooses 55 classic cocktails, then sets each recipe next to an evolved variation and a third, non-alcoholic version. It’s an interesting idea that catches today’s taste for low-or no-alc options. Included are lucid recipes for homemade syrups, infusions and other ingredients, and a useful primer on basic tools and tips for anyone setting up their first home bar. –JAMES CHATTO

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