Food and Wine Presents Best of the Best: The Best Recipes from the Year's 25 Best Cookbooks

Food & Wine magazine has poured over a thousand of the past year's cookbooks, looking for the very best - the best chefs, the best sellers, the best techniques, the best ideas. The result is a one-of-a-kind sampler of twenty-five outstanding publications.

Included are recipes from Julia Child and Jacques Pepin, Martha Stewart, Emeril Lagasse, Bobby Flay, Thomas Keller, Daniel Boulud, Charlie Trotter, and many, many more. With interesting introductory pages, cooking tips, and a helpful recipe index, Best of the Best offers a taste tour of today's top cookbooks. And who better to guide you than Food & Wine magazine?

The third edition of Food & Wine magazine's The Best of the Best furthers a smart tradition. Like its predecessors, it presents the best recipes from the year's 25 best cookbooks, as chosen by the magazine. These include a stellar assortment culled from restaurant cookbooks, books by TV cooks, dessert books, and a miscellaneous gathering of other favorites. The range is wide and encompasses such dishes as Emeril Lagasse's Garlic Meatball Poorboys, Julia Child's Pot Roast, B. Smith's Jerked Roast Turkey, and Ming Tsai's Spicy Black Bean Mussels with Rice Stick Noodles. (Full disclosure: this reviewer coauthored Tsai's book Blue Ginger.) Readers searching for dishes of proven taste and workability should welcome this collection.

Including dozens of recipes for hors d'oeuvres and first courses through main dishes of all kinds and desserts, Best offers its selections with informative notes that reveal why the book was written, its special dishes, and why it was chosen for the collection, among other data. Thus readers discover, for example, that Learning to Cook with Marion Cunnigham, whose books include the complete revision of The Fannie Farmer Cookbook, was selected because it offered "basics in a way so calm, comforting, and complete that even the most skittish newcomer will be lulled into competency." Cunningham's recipe for Almond Butter Cake is a sure winner, as are other end-of-meal inclusions like François Payard's Warm Chocolate Tart and Alice Medrich's Apricot Lemon Bars. With a list of editor's choices (their year's best recipe is Café Boulud Cookbook's luscious Potato Gratin Forestier), color photos throughout, and a guide to the recipes' publishers, the book makes it easier than ever to cook the very best. --Arthur Boehm