From food bloggers' cookbook picks to regional cuisine, these were PW's top cookbooks stories of 2015.
10. Regional Cookbooks 2015: A World of Flavors
The best regional cookbooks can transport you far from your home kitchen: to childhood, perhaps, and a favorite family meal, or to a far-off country long the subject of wanderlust fantasies. For fall 2015, an array of titles focused on traditional specialties, high-end restaurant dishes, and everything in between, from across the U.S. and around the world.
9. Lonely Planet Rolling Out New Cookbook Series
While Lonely Planet has published titles on food in the past, in September the company stepped into new culinary territory with the launch of From the Source, a cookbook series that explores dishes and traveling by locale.
8. Turning a Long Lost Cookbook Into a Bestseller
A cookbook published in 1938 in Yiddish doesn’t sound like a slam dunk to be a bestseller in 2015, and yet that’s precisely what happened with The Vilna Vegetarian Cookbook: Garden-Fresh Recipes Rediscovered and Adapted for Today’s Kitchen by Fania Lewando, translated by Eve Jochnowitz (Schocken). The book, released in May, debuted at #8 on PW's cookbook bestseller list.
7. Cocktails and Finger Foods, According to Mark Bittman's Recipe Matrix
In his new cookbook, Mark Bittman's Kitchen Matrix, Bittman builds on his How to Cook Everything line of books with 400 recipes made simple, and customizable, through graphic matrices.
6. Sarah Leah Chase's Return to Cookbook Writing
After a two-decade hiatus, Sarah Leah Chase is back with a new cookbook, New England Open-House Cookbook. Chase, who launched her cookbook career in 1985 as a coauthor of the New York Times bestselling The Silver Palate Good Times Cookbook, hadn’t planned to write another cookbook after 1995's Pedaling Through Provence and Pedaling Through Burgundy.
5. Soup’s On, For a Cause: Big Time Authors Unite for Syrian Refugee Food Relief
To help the Syrian refugee crisis, Interlink Publishing published Soup for Syria: Recipes to Celebrate Our Shared Humanity, containing recipes for soups from more than 80 chefs, including Anthony Bourdain’s “Soupe au Pistou,” Alice Waters’s “Carrot Soup,” and Paula Wolfert’s “Lentil and Swiss Chard Soup.” All profits from the sale of the book will be donated to the UN refugee agency UNHCR to provide food for the refugees.
4. Atria Halts Publication of 'The Whole Pantry'
After Penguin Books Australia announced that it would be pulling Melbourne-based Belle Gibson's debut cookbook, The Whole Pantry, Gibson's U.S. publisher, Atria, has confirmed it will not not be proceeding with its own publication. Penguin scrapped the book once doubts were raised about the veracity of Gibson's story—that she was diagnosed with terminal cancer, and healthy living and natural therapies helped her treat the disease.
3. Cannabis Cooking Goes High-End, Mainstream
With marijuana now legal in 23 states and the District of Columbia, industries are cashing in on the increasing accessibility of pot. Wired outlined legal marijuana's $40 billion future, and Forbes called legal cannabis this year's "best startup opportunity." The book industry is no exception, and traditional publishers are getting in on the action in a new way, with two releasing upscale cannabis cookbooks this year.
2. Oh She Glows, Again: PW Talks to Angela Liddon
Angela Liddon, creator of Oh She Glows, the mega-popular vegan blog that garners more than six million page views a month, hit big with her first cookbook, The Oh She Glows Cookbook. Liddon chatted about what fans can expect from her next effort and about her life as a new mom, and she shared a few recipes for quick-and-easy healthy eating.
1. Food Bloggers Pick Their Most Anticipated New Cookbooks
We've named our top cookbook picks of the season, but what new titles are food bloggers most looking forward to? We asked, and here's what they said.
