The last week of the year has a special gift for the
cookbook-obsessed: perspective. From our vantage point at the very
end of a long, busy year of food publishing, we can see trends that
weren't so obvious before. There was a great swell of
Mediterranean cookbooks, including a sudden spate of rustic
Italian. There were long, loving glimpses of the home
kitchens of chefs. And there were mountains of cookies.
But as I sort through the piles, I notice one usually-stalwart
category was missing in American cookbook publishing in
2011--Chinese cuisine. I think Terry Tan published an
important Szechuan cookbook in the UK, though I never saw it here,
and there were a few quick-and-easy generic Asian books. 
But
nothing on the order of Grace Young's marvelous Stir-Frying to the
Sky's Edge (2010) , Eileen Yin-Fei Lo's Mastering the Art
of Chinese Cooking (2009) or Fuchsia Dunlop's Revolutionary
Chinese Cookbook (2007). I guess I'd gotten a bit
spoiled, expecting another blockbuster, world-changing Chinese
cookbook (preferably addressing a neglected region of that vast
terrain) every year.
But I see Fuchsia Dunlop's got another title coming in 2012, so
there's hope. And while I'm making my next year's list, Santa, I
could use some more in-depth books on Indian cooking, a book just
for layer cakes--not too simple and not too complicated either--and
anything focused on West or East African cuisines. Also a
really good shellfish book.
How about you? Is there a gap in your cookbook shelf that
just cries out to be filled? Or is there that one category
that never seems to have enough books?
