Buffalo for the Broken Heart

Dan O’Brien

For twenty years, Dan O’Brien struggled to make ends meet on his cattle ranch in South Dakota. But when a neighbor invited him to lend a hand at the annual buffalo roundup, O’Brien was inspired to convert his own ranch, the Broken Heart, to buffalo. Starting with thirteen calves, “short-necked, golden balls of wool,” O’Brien embarks on a personal journey that returns buffalo to his land for the first time in more than a century and a half.

Buffalo for the Broken Heart is at once a tender account of the buffaloes’ first seasons on the ranch and an engaging lesson in wildlife ecology. Whether he’s describing the grazing pattern of the buffalo, the thrill of watching a falcon hone in on its prey, or the comical spectacle of a buffalo bull wallowing in the mud, O’Brien combines a novelist’s eye for detail with a naturalist’s understanding to create an enriching, entertaining narrative.

Vanilla: The History of an Extraordinary Bean

Eric T. Jennings

The fascinating and wide-ranging history of vanilla, from the sixteenth century to today

Vanilla is one of the most expensive of flavorings—so valuable that it was smuggled or stolen by pirates in the early days—and yet it is everywhere. It is a key ingredient in dishes ranging from crème brûlée to Japanese purin. It is the quintessential ice cream flavor in the United States. Eric T. Jennings explains how the world’s only edible orchid, originally endemic to Central America, became embedded in the international culinary and cultural landscape.

In tracing vanilla’s rise, Jennings describes how in the 1840s an enslaved boy named Edmond Albius discovered a way to pollinate vanilla orchids with a toothpick or needle—an ingenious process that is still in use. This method transformed the vanilla sector by enabling the plant to be grown outside of its natural range. Jennings also looks at how the vanilla craze led to the search for now‑pervasive substitutes, and how a vanilla lobby has fought back. He further unravels how vanilla—the world’s most expensive crop and once considered its most refined fragrance—came to mean “bland.”

This tale of botany, production techniques, consumption habits, and colonial rivalry connects the Atlantic, Indian, and Pacific Oceans, revealing how vanilla has become a potent symbol of the modern global village.

The School of Essential Ingredients

Erica Bauermeister

Reminiscent of Chocolat and Like Water for Chocolate, a gorgeously written novel about life, love, and the magic of food.

The School of Essential Ingredients follows the lives of eight students who gather in Lillian’s Restaurant every Monday night for cooking class. It soon becomes clear, however, that each one seeks a recipe for something beyond the kitchen.

Students include Claire, a young mother struggling with the demands of her family; Antonia, an Italian kitchen designer learning to adapt to life in America; and Tom, a widower mourning the loss of his wife to breast cancer. Chef Lillian, a woman whose connection with food is both soulful and exacting, helps them to create dishes whose flavor and techniques expand beyond the restaurant and into the secret corners of her students’ lives.

One by one the students are transformed by the aromas, flavors, and textures of Lillian’s food, including a white-on-white cake that prompts wistful reflections on the sweet fragility of love and a peppery heirloom tomato sauce that seems to spark one romance but end another. Brought together by the power of food and companionship, the lives of the characters mingle and intertwine, united by the revealing nature of what can be created in the kitchen.

Borderlands: Recipes and Stories from the Rio Grande to the Pacific

Hank Shaw

A creative, culinary road map for easy-to-follow borderlands cuisine from James Beard Award-winning author Hank Shaw of Hunter Angler Gardener Cook.

The people and the foods along both sides of the border between the United States and Mexico are special, drawing from not only each other’s cultures, but also those of the peoples who have lived there long before European contact, as well as from the waves of later immigrants settling the often arid lands between the mouth of the Rio Grande and the shores of the Pacific.

Borderlands: Recipes and Stories from the Rio Grande to the Pacific transports you to this region, with more than 125 recipes and nearly 300 photographs from every part of the border.

Shaw’s approachable recipes include tried-and-true standards like Fish Tacos, Chimichangas, and Carne Asada, unusual border specialties like Discada, Mollejas, and Empalmes, vegetarian standouts like Caldo de Queso, Cactus Salad, Nopales Navegantes, and Mushroom Tacos, as well as deeply personal dishes like the Death Bed Taco, a life-changing taco made for him by a dear friend on his birthday years ago.

It also features an array of wild food recipes and techniques for using the surprisingly rich natural bounty of the borderlands, from mesquite to wild greens to native pine nuts, Texas ebony beans, cholla, and beyond. Hunters and anglers will love how prominently game features in border cuisine, and Borderlands includes visual icons to help cooks mix and match various types of wild and domesticated meat, fish and fowl.

You’ll come away from Borderlands with a new perspective on la frontera, one that’s rich, wild — and tasty! Buen provecho, y’all!

Red, White, and Drunk All Over: A Wine-Soaked Journey from Grape to Glass

Natalie MacLean

Natalie MacLean spent three years sipping her way through sun-drenched vineyards and cobwebbed cellars to bring us this witty, knowledgeable book about the world of wine. In the ancient vineyards of Burgundy she uncovers the secrets of Pinot Noir, then moves on to the labyrinthine cellars of Champagne to examine the mystique of luxury bubbly. She compares notes with novelist Jay McInerney at a bacchanalian dinner, goes undercover as a sommelier in a five-star restaurant, and explores the influence of powerful critics Jancis Robinson and Robert Parker. You may have a head for wine, but Red, White and Drunk All Over will show you its heart.

Tender at the Bone: Growing Up at the Table

Ruth Reichl

At an early age, Ruth Reichl discovered that “food could be a way of making sense of the world. If you watched people as they ate, you could find out who they were.” Her deliciously crafted memoir Tender at the Bone is the story of a life defined, determined, and enhanced in equal measure by a passion for food, by unforgettable people, and by the love of tales well told.

Beginning with her mother, the notorious food-poisoner known as the Queen of Mold, Reichl introduces us to the fascinating characters who shaped her world and tastes, from the gourmand Monsieur du Croix, who served Reichl her first foie gras, to those at her politically correct table in Berkeley who championed the organic food revolution in the 1970s.

Spiced with Reichl’s infectious humor and sprinkled with her favorite recipes, Tender at the Bone is a witty and compelling chronicle of a culinary sensualist’s coming-of-age.

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • The debut memoir from the renowned author of Save Me the Plums, about the people who “steered her on the path to fulfill her destiny as one of the world’s leading food writers” (Chicago Sun-Times).

“An absolute delight to read . . . How lucky we are that [Reichl] had the courage to follow her appetite.” (Newsday)

National Dish: Around the World in Search of Food, History, and the Meaning of Home

Anya von Bremzen

In this engrossing and timely journey to the crossroads of food and identity, award-winning writer Anya von Bremzen explores six of the world’s most fascinating and iconic culinary cultures—France, Italy, Japan, Spain, Mexico, and Turkey—brilliantly weaving cuisine, history, and politics into a work of scintillating connoisseurship and charm

We all have an idea in our heads about what French food is—or Italian, or Japanese, or Mexican, or . . . But where did those ideas come from? Who decides what makes a national food canon? Anya von Bremzen has won three James Beard Awards and written several definitive cookbooks, as well as her internationally acclaimed memoir Mastering the Art of Soviet Cooking. In National Dish, she investigates the truth behind the eternal cliché—“we are what we eat”—traveling to six storied food capitals, going high and low, from world-famous chefs to culinary scholars to strangers in bars, in search of how cuisine became connected to place and identity.

A unique and magical cook’s tour of the world, National Dish brings us to a deep appreciation of how the country makes the food, and the food the country.

Named a Best Book of 2023 by Financial Times, The Guardian, and BBC’s The Food Programme

“Anya von Bremzen, already a legend of food writing and a storytelling inspiration to me, has done her best work yet. National Dish is a must-read for all those who believe in building longer tables where food is what bring us all together.” — José Andrés

“If you’ve ever contemplated the origins and iconography of classic foods, then National Dish is the sensory-driven, historical deep dive for you . . . [an] evocative, gorgeously layered exercise in place-making and cultural exploration, nuanced and rich as any of the dishes captured within.” — Boston Globe