The 12 New Cookbooks We Can’t Wait to Cook From This Fall

The fall cookbook season is here | Collage: Masood Shah We have reached that time of year again. Every good tomato suddenly prompts the pondering: Will this be the last one for the season? The heat begins to give way to crisper breezes, and we start to crave the comfort of windows fogged up from bubbling pots of soup instead of thinking about how to minimize our time in front of a hot stove.  Luckily, this season’s cookbooks offer many exciting ways to joyously warm ourselves in the kitchen, whether by baking border-traversing croissants and comforting counter cakes, or keeping the stove simmering with Dutch ovens of borscht, beef noodle soup, or budae jjigae. There are diversions from the standard cookbook on this list, too, like a divorce-inspired reflection (in which the essays are just as essential as the recipes) and a treasure trove of a garden almanac that feels like an escape into another world. I’ve compiled 12 selections from the fall cookbook season that have me especially excited to cook and read this fall and winter. Bake Sum: Asian American Pastries, Breads, and Other Treats  Joyce Tang with Soleil Ho Hardie Grant, out now If you feel like everything is an Asian American bakery now, you’re right. In the Bay Area, Bake Sum — with its Spam-musubi-esque croissants and ube pineapple buns — was an early adopter of the current trend, starting as a pandemic pop-up in 2020 before opening its Oakland location the following year. In her colorful and playful new cookbook, chief baking officer Joyce Tang pulls back the curtain on her cuisine-bending treats, like quiche inspired by chawanmushi, the Japanese savory egg custard, and danishes in the style of okonomiyaki and aloo matar, the Indian dish of spiced potatoes and peas. The bakes involving laminated dough are ambitious, weekend-worthy projects, but the book takes a welcomingly progressive approach, easing in novice bakers via puddings and jellies (its first recipe is a simple, anyone-can-do-it microwave mochi) before exploring more advanced techniques in its chapter on cakes, and then making its way to croissants. This is a book for the person who counts big baking projects among their favorite ways to spend the colder months. Bake Sum: Asian American Pastries, Breads, and Other Treats Where to Buy: $34.63 at Amazon $35 $32.62 at Bookshop Food Is a Feeling: Recipes & Stories, with Love Carla Lalli Clarkson Potter, out now Lalli, who won audiences over as Carla Lalli Music during her time at Bon Appétit, has catalogued the dissolution of her 24-year marriage in a cookbook. With its reflections on motherhood, identity, and where a background in restaurants fits into those things, Lalli continues the narrative thread of releases like Tanya Bush’s Will This Make Me Happy and Rebecca May Johnson’s Small Fires. That’s to say that you’re here as much for the essays as for the recipes.  The latter, including dishes such as “weeknight lamb chop special, for any number” and “quick beans and rice for when the avocado is ripe,” are delightfully loose and flexible. These are realistic suggestions for weeknights when you’re burnt-out, but also for those glorious instances in which you care more about getting yourself on the sand than fussing about what to make for your beach trip (for those instances: peaches with lime and salt).Many of these ideas were birthed during “separation summer,” when Lalli often found herself eating alone after years of cooking for four. These recipes (and the words that accompany them, like a list of things that “made [Lalli] feel free”) will feel useful on bad days, sick days, and anytime you need to give yourself grace, but also whenever you need to be reminded of how much pleasure life offers. Food Is a Feeling: Recipes & Stories, with Love Where to Buy: $36 $33.41 at Amazon $36 $33.55 at Bookshop Flamingo Estate Pleasure Principles: An Almanac from the Garden  Richard Christiansen  Chronicle, September 15 Pleasure Principles is the newest book from Richard Christiansen of Flamingo Estate, the Los Angeles-based lifestyle brand so luxurious and sprawling in its ambitions that even Martha Stewart has described it as “over the top.” Pleasure Principles is predictably maximalist; not specifically a cookbook, it feels like picking up a paper trail while exploring the lush thicket of Christiansen’s secret (if oft-Instagrammed) garden. Stories about the building of Christiansen’s property veer into detours about the history of camellia plants and Coco Chanel, interspersed with archival imagery and photos of flora shot in the style of high-fashion editorial. A primer about the vast range of sage plants gives way to a checklist of garden tasks for January, seasonal project ideas (“help build a bird’s nest” or “make a sage tincture”), and recipes for pasta with sage leaves embedded in the dough and vegetable broth featuring lotus petals and dried skullcap. Pleasure Principles feels like an immersive fantasy world: Open up any rand