Start Here: Instructions for Becoming a Better Cook: More than 200 Recipes—and Techniques—for Cooking with Creativity and Confidence

Chef and recipe developer El-Waylly offers a prodigious guide to ramping up one’s culinary skill in her impressive and thorough debut. She sets out to arm home cooks with both “foundational techniques and basic food science,” going a few steps beyond the “do this” mentality of many cookbooks to offer insight into why a particular approach is necessary or relevant to each dish. Each chapter focuses on an essential technique; some, such as learning to taste your food or cooking grains, beans, and pasta, may seem basic, but El-Waylly illuminates how these simple steps are actually vital to quality cooking. The recipes themselves are appetizing and low fuss, including cannellini beany melt (“it’s just like the tuna melt you know and love, but made with beans instead of tuna”), four-fat jammy egg tacos with nuts and avocado, and charred lemon risotto. El-Waylly also provides tips on maintaining kitchen utensils, from cutting boards to cast iron pans, sharpening knives, and approaching each night’s meal with a “game plan” to cut down on both time and clean up. As tasty and appealing as it is informative, this is the ideal handbook for those starting out in the kitchen. Agent: Katherine Cowles, Cowles Agency. (Oct.)