The Best Cookbooks for Beginner Home Cooks

If you are looking for some cooking inspiration this weekend, look no further than these books curated by the Bravojoy review team.

Small Victories by Julia Turshen

This is a terrific book for anyone who wants to approach the seemingly monumental cooking task by breaking the process down into bite-size pieces; as its title implies, Turshen is a master of achievable recipes without being mundane. Her book’s recipes are organized into lessons designed for self-empowerment, with tips for spinning them off to make them your own. In Turshen’s hands, even the task of making homemade gravlax seems eminently doable, a small victory in and of itself.

Baking Illustrated by the Editors of Cook’s Illustrated

If cooking is daunting for beginners, then baking tends to resemble a locked black box full of fear and abject failure. But this very comprehensive — and homey — tome makes a winning case for thinking of baking as the simple byproduct of trial and error, as, uh, illustrated by the lengthy prologues that explain precisely how the editors perfected each recipe. Step-by-step illustrations of everything from chopping nuts to cutting out rounds of parchment for lining cake pans provide extra reassurance, while the recipes themselves — blueberry muffins, glazed lemon cookies, focaccia — prize simplicity over showiness.

Barefoot Contessa Family Style: Easy Ideas and Recipes That Make Everyone Feel Like Family by Ina Garten

Ina Garten’s appeal has always lived at the intersection of classy and comforting, a combination that makes many of her books ideal for any cook looking for something simple but with a little zhuzh. This book is a sound choice for the beginner confronted with the spectre of entertaining: large-format recipes like rib roast, saffron risotto, and five-cheese penne offer satisfying, unfussy solutions to the problem of how to feed people and feed them well.

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