The Best Cookbooks for Kids This Year

If you are looking for some cooking inspiration with the kids this weekend, look no further than these books curated by the Bravojoy review team. It’s never too early to get in the kitchen!

The Complete Cookbook for Young Chefs at Amazon

Recipes like blueberry pancakes and avocado toast with fried eggs will get young chefs excited to help with meals.

Food Network Magazine The Big, Fun Kids Cookbook at Amazon

This covers it all, from breakfast through dessert, and has color photos, cooking tips, fun food games, coloring pages, and more.

In the French Kitchen with Kids at Amazon

Make French classics approachable for young cooks—like omelettes, croque monsieurs, profiteroles, and crème brûlée.

The Forest Feast for Kids at Amazon

Thoughtfully designed to combine mouthwatering photos with creative illustrations and fun fonts.

Super Foods for Super Kids Cookbook at Amazon

This book stresses ‘super’ foods like avocados and walnuts and includes tasty ways for kids to incorporate them into cooking.

The Complete Baking Book for Young Chefs at Amazon

This book also helps kids learn counting, reading, science, self-confidence, and patience—all key skills.

For more great cooking reads and eBooks, check out Bravojoy.

Make great recipes from these great cookbooks

Here are some great cookbooks from the Bravojoy review team.

“Momofuku,” by David Chang and Peter Meehan (2009)

For many accomplished restaurant chefs, authoring a cookbook is just another checkbox on the to-do list of culinary celebrities, which fit in after headlining a charity auction but before doing a stint on reality TV. Accordingly, countless celebrity-chef cookbooks consist of little more than dinner-party recipes sprinkled with pleasantly superficial biography. David Chang, whose Momofuku restaurants blew up American restaurant culture and then rebuilt it again in a decidedly hipper, more global, more postmodern form, did something similarly upending with his Momofuku book. Co-written with Peter Meehan, who later became Chang’s collaborator on the now-defunct food magazine Lucky Peach, the book is sometimes brilliantly cookable—see the dazzlingly effective method cast-iron ribeye, or the near-instant ginger-scallion sauce, which tastes good on almost anything. Other times, by design, it is impossible, outlining finicky and complicated recipes that are best suited for a brigade of swaggering line cooks. (I love the headline for the frozen foie-gras torchon, which advices you not to make the dish.) Throughout the volume, Chang spends time grappling with what was, at the time, the central drama of his career: initially, the proud outsider, devoted to rejecting the restaurant world’s stodgy establishment, Momofuku’s culinary subversion was so forceful (and so appealing) that it became an establishment of its own.

“Modernist Cuisine: The Art and Science of Cooking,” by Nathan Myhrvold, Chris Young, and Maxime Bilet (2011)

The molecular-gastronomy movement was in full swing in 2011—you could hardly snap a napkin in a top-tier restaurant without hitting a specified cocktail and disrupting a stabilized emulsion or two. Into the haze of edible smoke thudded Nathan Myhrvold’s five-volume, 2,438-page, several-hundred-dollar magnum opus, the result of three years of testing in a full-time, fully staffed research kitchen. (Myhrvold, a technologist and former Microsoft C.T.O.has a habit of professionalizing his extracurricular interests.) “Modernist Cuisine” strapped turbo boosters to the slow, iterative experiments that had been happening in restaurant kitchens, delivering hundreds of ideas, models, and scientific answers on a scale that had been previously unthinkable. (For those of more modest culinary means, there’s also the companion volume “Modernist Cuisine at Home.”) Curiously, almost as soon as the book landed, high-end chefs’ attention moved elsewhere—the mad-scientist era of gels and foams gave way to the more anthropological, emotional sense-of-place cooking spearheaded by chefs like René Redzepi, of Noma. “Modernist Cuisine,” it seems, had explored its subject so comprehensively that there was little ground left to cover.

“Zahav: A World of Israeli Cooking,” by Michael Solomonov and Steven Cook (2015)

This book isn’t responsible for the new trendiness of Middle Eastern food—that honor belongs, arguably, to the collected works of Yotam Ottolenghi and his artful deployment of pomegranate seeds and tahini. But, in my mind, Ottolenghi’s books make better sources of inspiration than instruction or learning. For the latter, there’s Michael Solomonov. “Zahav,” like “Momofuku,” is a restaurant cookbook that avoids the clichés of restaurant cookbooks—it’s based on the menu of Solomonov’s Philadelphia restaurant of the same name, where the kitchen specializes in what he calls “modern Israeli cuisine,” a patchwork of Levantine, Maghrebi, Persian, Egyptian, Yemeni, and Eastern European influences. The book goes both deep (into Solomonov’s own life story, marked by significant loss) and broad (addressing the cultural and political complexities of considering Israel as a culinary entity). It’s also a patient and encouraging guide to Solomonov’s dazzling recipes. It is worth the price of entry for almost any single chapter alone, especially those covering Solomonov’s magnificent salatim (dips, salads, and other small vegetable plates) and his approach to open-fire grilling.

For more great cooking books and reviews, check out Bravojoy.

Cookbooks to add to your pantry now

Here are some great cookbooks from the Bravojoy review team.

“The River Cottage Cookbook,” by Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall (2001)

Changing one’s relationship with food “involves no sacrifice, no hardship or discomfort,” Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall writes, in his poetic ode to the hands-on, homestead-ish life. His prescription is simple: get in there and do it yourself—grow your food, meet your meat, learn the colors and patterns of the landscape around you through all its seasons. Years before “farm to table” was a buzzword and Michael Pollan a household name, Fearnley-Whittingstall was urging readers to move away from industrial food systems and reacquaint themselves with lo-fi self-sufficiency: he will teach you how to cultivate your berry brambles, trap your eels (this is a very British book), and raise (and slaughter) your pigs. The idea that pastoral practices can be pleasurable instead of burdensome is old news for the many home cooks today who know how to spot ramps in the wild and whip up D.I.Y. ricotta. But “The River Cottage Cookbook” ’s ideas (and straightforward, elegant recipes) remain striking reminders that what we eat isn’t just food on a plate but part of a thrilling natural cycle, our human lives brushing up against countless others, plant and animal alike.

“The Zuni Café Cookbook,” by Judy Rodgers (2002)

Since its introduction, in the late nineteen-eighties, the roast chicken served at San Francisco’s Zuni Café has earned a reputation as the best roast chicken in the world—crisp-skinned, impossibly juicy, served atop a salad of torn bread and bitter greens whose tart vinaigrette blends with the fatty, golden drippings. That recipe alone would land this book on any list of the great and essential, but the rest of the volume has magic, as well. Judy Rodgers got her culinary footing in France, living for a year with the family of the chef Jean Troisgros, and in Berkeley, where she cooked at Chez Panisse, and this five-hundred-page manifesto draws on those threads of experience (and others). The result is a remarkable collection of emphatic culinary opinions, several hundred of which are disguised as recipes: the merits of some soft cheeses over others, the precise way to dress a salad, the non-negotiable importance of salting raw beef and fowl a day or more before it’s cooked. The book’s magnificent opening chapter, “What to Think About Before You Start, & While You Are Cooking,” lays out the philosophical blueprint for every New American and California-casual cookbook that followed.

“Baking: From My Home to Yours,” by Dorie Greenspan (2006)

It’s true, unfortunately, that the art of baking is more rigid and exacting than that of stovetop cooking. The whims of a search-engine algorithm won’t cut it if you want your biscuits perfectly fluffy, your cakes precisely lofty yet moist, and your cookies angelic; a baker, more than any other cook, needs a recipe writer she can truly trust. To my mind, there is none more reliable than Dorie Greenspan; a lapsed academic who found her calling in cakes and pastries and built a career writing uncommonly precise road maps for replicating her success. With her as a guide, there is no room for self-destructive improvisation: her stylish, rigorous, cheerful recipes work because she tells her reader exactly how to make them work, anticipating our errors and our questions, building contingencies, alternatives, and solutions right into the text, and manifesting soothing flexibility. (If the ganache at the bottom of a layered pudding spills up the sides of the cup, “it’s pretty; if it doesn't, the chocolate will be a surprise.”) And if you only have one Greenspan book, it should be this one, a masterwork spanning breakfast to midnight snacks—not to mention her famous World Peace Cookies.

For more great cooking books and reviews, check out Bravojoy.