Whether you’re eager to cook more at home, or just broke from ordering out so much, finding new recipes is a great way to get inspired to make more home-cooked meals. So, here are all the best cookbooks to buy and use for just one recipe!
Momofuku: A Cookbook, David Chang & Peter Meehan, 2009
Despite this having a lot of good recipes in it, you’ll probably just use the ramen one, which was your whole reason for buying the cookbook anyway. Other than being taken out occasionally to make this ramen recipe, this cookbook will probably live on your kitchen window sill for years to come! Yum!!!
Salt Fat Acid Heat: Mastering the Elements of Good Cooking, Samin Nosrat, 2017
The author of this book had a Netflix series in 2018, which was your primary motivation for looking at this cookbook in the first place. But once you found a recipe for an apple and frangipane tart that sounded pretty good, you decided that you needed to take the whole book home with you. You could have definitely looked this recipe up on the internet, for free, but whatever! It’s your life!
Black Food: Stories, Art, and Recipes from Across the African Diaspora, Bryant Terry, 2021
You first heard about this cookbook because of its amazing green plantain crisps recipe, but there’s also a lot of other great recipes in here, too! You’re only going to use the green plantain one though, which is so good that you’ll make it again, and again, and only that one!
The Weekday Vegetarians: 100 Recipes and a Real-Life Plan for Eating Less Meat: A Cookbook, Jenny Rosenstrach, 2021
This cookbook is perfect if you want to try being vegetarian on some crazy bookstore-induced whim! You’ll probably only use it once for the mushroom-leek galette recipe, but then you can keep it on your shelf to remind yourself about the time that you tried to go veg. Who knows! Maybe you’ll even try to do it again (you won’t)!
Joy of Cooking: 2019 Edition, Irma S. Rombauer and others, 2019
This classic cookbook has more than 4,000 recipes inside of it, but you will only make the one for banana pudding around thirty different times, and ignore all the other ones. But y’know, if it works, it works! It’s also comforting to know that this has basically any American dish you would want to make inside of it, just in case. You won’t make any of them besides the banana pudding, but it’s still sort of cool to have them on hand!
So if you’re looking to make more meals at home, but also don’t really like to try new things, pick up one of these cookbooks to make only once recipe from, and then keep on your bookshelf for an indeterminate amount of time! Just don’t have the same people over for dinner a lot because they’ll eventually catch on.
