The Best Cookbooks of 2025

Good Food

KCRW

Society & Culture

4.5 • 1K Ratings

🗓️ 28 November 2025

⏱️ 58 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

It's a cookbook bonanza!

Celia Sack of Omnivore Books on Food shares a roundup of the year's best cookbooks, including graphic novel memoirs and one of the only Cambodian cookbooks written in English.
Bee Wilson explores how quotidian kitchen items become powerful symbols, representing friendship, grief, love, superstition, safety, and even political resistance.
Design curator and writer Corinne Mynatt became fascinated with culinary objects she found at flea markets and began researching their history and function.
New York Times reporter Rukmini Callimachi follows a Haviland china set that has graced the table of five generations of women.

Connect with Good Food host Evan Kleiman on Substack.

Transcript

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0:00.0	From KCRW, I'm Evan Klyman, and this is Good Food. We made it through Thanksgiving,
0:07.6	ate through the leftovers, now comes perhaps the most American part of the holiday season,
0:13.8	buying stuff, gifts for your loved ones, gifts for yourself. Unsurprisingly, here at Good Food,
0:20.6	we like to give books, specifically
0:22.6	cookbooks. Every year, the list of titles grows longer and the subjects more varied.
0:28.8	It's a tradition here on Good Food to invite Celia Sack of Omnivore Books on Food in San Francisco
0:34.5	to help us wade through this year's offerings. I can't wait to hear what she
0:40.1	loved, what she deems essential, and what I managed to miss. Because there's always those,
0:49.4	right, Celia? Absolutely. I mean, there's so many. I miss half of them. I can't believe how many times I walk by another bookstore and in the window they've got all these cookbooks I've never even seen or heard about.
1:00.9	I know. It's really amazing. Let's start with a broad question. What trends have you seen in cookbooks in the last year?
1:08.4	Well, I have to say, I think home cooking is back. There's really no love lost for
1:14.5	those super fancy restaurant cookbooks this year. People are loving comfort and security. And, you know,
1:22.0	it's not surprising. I mean, this is a super stressful year. I mean, and obviously the publishers
1:27.1	couldn't have seen that starting, you know,
1:30.0	two years ago when they started to acquire them.
1:32.2	But somehow these are the books that are winning the day.
1:36.1	Okay.
1:36.6	So let's start with cookbooks that center on various cuisines, countries, and regions.
1:43.7	What books in this genre stood out to you in
1:47.8	2025 and what cuisines seem to be underrepresented for you in the cookbook world? But let's take the
1:54.9	first one. What surprised me sort of out of nowhere this fall, suddenly Greek cookbooks are picking up steam.
2:02.5	So I know Diane Cochillas has a new one out called Athens, Food Stories, Love.
	...

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