Best Cookbooks of 2025

January 30, 2026 by Jane

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…and the top-rated book around the world in 2025 is Good Things – Recipes and Rituals to Share with the People You Love by Samin Nosrat

This is our 17th year of compiling the Best of the Best. We search the globe to come up with the definitive list of the best books on food and drink of the year. Not just one reviewer’s opinion but an amalgamation of every list we could find.

In this year’s Best of the Best list we combined 358 best food and drink books of 2025 lists from TV, Radio, Newspapers, Magazines, Websites, Blogs and Booksellers across the world (there are links to all of them below).

For those of you interested in data:

From 358 lists there were 3,670 votes
789 different books made the list
321 books had only one vote

Check out the Best cookbooks of 2024, 2023, 2022, 2021, 2020, 2019, 2018, 2017, 2016, 2015, 2014, 2013, 2012, 2011, 2010 and 2009 lists.

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1. Good Things – Recipes and Rituals to Share with the People You Love by Samin Nosrat is an essential, joyful guide to cooking and living. Here you’ll find go-to recipes along with plenty of tips, techniques, and lessons, from how to buy olive oil to when to splurge to the best uses for your pressure cooker. As usual with Samin, this book is a stellar offering.

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2. Boustany: A Celebration of Vegetables from my Palestine by Sami Tamimi delivers over 100 recipes wrapped in Palestinian culture, from building your mooneh, or pantry, to lining the dinner table with a variety of salads and condiments reflective of a love for fresh and vibrant food. Bold, inspiring and ever-evolving, Boustany picks up where Falastin left off, with flavour-packed, colourful and simple vegetable- and grain-led dishes

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3. Something from Nothing by Alison Roman makes the most of your pantry with 120 deceptively simple, casually stylish, and impossibly delicious recipes. Utilizing your shelf-stable bottles, bags, jars, and cans, Alison shows you how to cook as she does – loosely, intuitively, and with maximum flavor. With each recipe you’ll fall deeper in love with the magic of pantry cooking by using flavorful, hardworking ingredients that you can keep on hand, leaving you to ask, “How did something so wonderful come from basically nothing?”

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4. Linger – Salads, Sweets, and Stories to Savor by Hetty Lui McKinnon is still focused on salads but this time, the author invited friends into her home, to share salads, sweets and stories around her dining room table. Linger documents these intimate gatherings, with vegetable-laden, loosely seasonal menus enjoyed and photographed in real time. Through her inventive recipes for meal-worthy salads, smaller bites and simple sweets, Hetty invites you to become a part of an unforgettable shared experience of community, food and friendship.

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5. Baking & the Meaning of Life: How to Find Joy in 100 Recipes by Helen Goh is indeed a joyful collection of recipes that continues where Sweet ended – bringing more inspiration and delicious offerings to kitchens worldwide. The recipes in this book reflect Helen’s culture, experience and love of connection. She offers preparation and serving tips throughout along with a unique and varied collection of recipes.

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6. Lugma: Abundant Dishes and Stories From My Middle East by Noor Murad offers over 100 recipe winners as an ode to the food the author grew up eating. Here is a mix of food from Bahrain and the surrounding Middle East with a slightly westernized slant, thanks to her English roots (her mother is English). Bahraini food pulls on many culinary influences – an abundance of herbs, dried limes and sour flavours from Iran, liberal spice and chile heat from India, the elaborate rice dishes from the region, and the flavors of the Levant that are world-renowned–to create a unique and flavor-packed cuisine.

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=7. Recipes from the American South by Michael W. Twitty explores the broad culinary sweep that Southern history and its many cultures represent. Recipes for breads and biscuits, mains and sides, stews, sauces, and sweets feature insightful headnotes and clear, step-by-step instructions. A masterful storyteller, Twitty enriches his extensive recipe collection with lyrical, deeply researched essays that celebrate the region’s “multicultural gumbo” of influences from immigrants from across the globe. Vibrant food photography adds further color to the fascinating narrative.

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-7. Six Seasons of Pasta: A New Way with Everyone’s Favorite Food by Joshua McFadden and Martha Holmberg brings noodles front an center as a showcase for each season’s bounty of produce. There are more than 125 recipes organized by season, plus the Italian classics that everyone should have in their repertoire. This book does so much more than pair noodles with seasonal produce, it teaches home cooks how to intuitively build a pasta dish from scratch using McFadden’s tried and true “building-in-the-skillet” method. Cooking pasta is never as simple as it seems, so he walks the reader through every step, from boiling water to marrying the noodles with the sauce. McFadden’s time-tested technique will always result in a satisfying and delicious bowl of pasta.

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9. Dorie’s Anytime Cakes by Dorie Greenspan delivers 100 recipes for easy-to-make and easy-to-love cakes. Along with evocative writing, expert advice, and gorgeous illustrations by Nancy Pappas, Dorie’s Anytime Cakes celebrates the simple art of cake baking. There are recipes for all kinds of cakes, including loaves and rounds, muffins, crumbles, and Bundts – even savory cakes plus frostings, fillings, and other flourishes.

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10. Turtle Island: Foods and Traditions of the Indigenous Peoples of North America by Sean Sherman uncovers the stories behind the foods that have linked the natural environments, traditions, and histories of Indigenous peoples across North America for millennia through more than 150 ancestral and modern recipes. Organized by region, this book delves into the rich culinary landscapes of Turtle Island – as many Indigenous cultures call this continent. Learn to eat with the seasons, consume meat and fish nose-to-tail, focus on plant-forward dishes, and discover how to better feed yourself.

Runners Up

Fat + Flour by Nicole Rucker
Umma by America’s Test Kitchen and Sarah Ahn and Nam Soon Ahn
By Heart: Recipes to Hold Near and Dear by Hailee Catalano
Sabzi: Fresh Vegetarian Recipes for Every Day by Yasmin Khan
Salsa Daddy: Dip Your Way into Mexican Cooking by Rick Martinez

Top British/Irish Picks

1. Boustany by Sami Tamimi
=2. Lugma by Noor Murad
=2. How I Cook by Ben Lippett
4. Padella by Tim Siadatan
=5. Good Things by Samin Nosrat
=5. Around the Table by Diana Henry
7. Baking & the Meaning of Life by Helen Goh
=8. Food You Want to Eat by Thomas Straker
=8. Bold Beanco – Full of Beans by Amelia Christie-Miller
=10. Kapusta by Alissa Timoshkina
=10. All Consuming by Ruby Tandoh
=10. Fusão by Ixta Belfrage
=10. Mexican Table by Thomasina Miers

Top Australian/New Zealand Picks

1. Baking & the Meaning of Life by Helen Goh
=2. Linger by Hetty Lui McKinnon
=2. Thai Anywhere and Everywhere by Nat Thaipun
=4. Good Things by Samin Nosrat
=4. Something from Nothing by Alison Roman
=4. The Japanese Pantry by Emiko Davies
=4. The Weekly Grocery Shop by Nabula El Mourid
=8. Boustany by Sami Tamimi
=8. The Talisman of Happiness by Ada Boni
=8. Secret Sauce by Rosheen Kaul
=8. Lankan Filling by O Tama Carey
=8. On Trac by Christian Petracca
=8. What We Call Masala by Sarina Kamini

Top Canadian Picks

=1. Boustany by Sami Tamimi
=1. Tahini Baby by Eden Grinshpan
3. Good Things by Samin Nosrat
4. The Essential Cottage Cookbook by Andrea Buckett
5. Two Chefs in the Garden by Lynn Crawford & Lora Kirk
=6. Anna Cooks by Anna Olson
=6. Chop Chop by Ozoz Sokoh
=8. Arthurs: Home of the Nosh by Raegan Steinberg, Alexander Cohen & Evelyne Eng
=8. Crave by Carolyne McIntyre Jackson & Jodi Willoughby
=8. My Cypriot Table by Irene Matys
=8. My New Indian Kitchen by Vikram Vij
=8. Wood, Fire & Smoke by Michael Smith

Top Drink Books

1. Three Cheers by Kaitlyn Stewart
=2. Both Sides of the Glass by Neil Patrick Harris & David Burtka
=2. Cocktails Illustrated by America’s Test Kitchen
=2. Wine Pairing for the People by Cha McCoy
=2. WINE: Everything You Need to Know by Olly Smith
=6. A Taste for Wine by Rose Murray Brown
=6. Hugh Johnson’s Pocket Wine Book 2026
=6. The Cocktail Diaries by Sam Heughan
=6. The Japanese Way of Whisky by Dave Broom
=6. The Madrusan Cocktail Companion by Michael & Zara Madrusan
=6. The World Atlas of Whisky by Dave Broom

Top Baking & Bread Books

1. Baking & the Meaning of Life by Helen Goh
2. Dorie’s Anytime Cakes by Dorie Greenspan
3. Fat + Flour by Nicole Rucker
4. Sally’s Baking 101 by Sally McKenney
5. The Art of Gluten-free Bread by Aran Goyoaga
6. Ready for Dessert (Revised) by David Lebovitz
=7. Cookies by Vaughn Vreeland & NYT Cooking
=7. Dobre Dobre by Laurel Kratochvila
9. Lebanese Baking by Maureen Abood
10. Celebrate by Paul Hollywood

Top Vegetarian & Vegan Books

1. Boustany by Sami Tamimi
2. Linger by Hetty Lui McKinnon
3. Sabzi by Yasmin Khan
4. Dinner by Meera Sodha (US release)
5. Tahini Baby by Eden Grinshpan
6. The Korean Vegan Homemade by Joanne Lee Molinaro
=7. Big Veg Energy by Christina Soteriou
=7. Cooking Fast and Slow by Natalia Rudin
=7. Korean Temple Cooking by Hoo Nam Seelmann
=7. Vegana Italiana by Tara Punzone