Cookbooks & Beverages
A few years ago my employee Elizabeth and I generally unpacked UPS shipments from our book distributors and publishers around lunchtime, and we found ourselves particularly vulnerable to all the fine cookbooks arriving. This listing is by no means all of our cookbooks. It is a gathering of recent and/or interesting titles along with a few classics added to show we have grounding in our selection. My mother raised me to read cookbooks somewhat the same as a novel or a history or a biography. Pretty pictures and clever premises are not enough to stock a title. It must have accessible content as well, and a cookbook with good writing is a treasure.
The Cookie That Changed My Life
The Cookie That Changed My Life
The eagerly anticipated baking bible from America’s most respected authority: 100+ recipes for cookies, cakes, breads, breakfast pastries, and much more.
“Nancy Silverton baked a brioche so perfect that it brought Julia Child to tears…Nancy showed us how to strip away the extras and spotlight the essentials. She’s still doing that and we’re all still learning from her.” —Dorie Greenspan, author of Dorie’s Cookies
Nancy Silverton made her reputation as the original pastry chef for Wolfgang Puck’s restaurant Spago. Biting into a particularly delicious peanut butter cookie one day, she and had an epiphany: every single thing we bake should taste this good. And so she decided to return to her roots, and set to work perfecting the rest of the American baking canon.
From Lattice-Topped Apple Pie to Carrot Cake with Brown Butter Cream Cheese Frosting (the secret? Carrot puree) to Cornbread (is it too much to ask that it actually taste like corn?), she shares recipes for the platonic ideals of our most beloved baked goods.
Alongside the classics—Lemon Bars, Key Lime Pie, Layered Buttermilk Biscuits—Silverton includes a handful of her own inventions: Double-Decker Chocolate Cookies (double the fun!), Iced Raisin Bars (a better fig newton), and Chocolate Brandy Cake (chocolate and brandy!)—all sure to become future classics. With more than a hundred perfected recipes, The Cookie That Changed My Life is a veritable encyclopedia of the very best things to bake.