The Wordloaf 2023 Book Stack

Some remaining items from my to-do list

Dec 20, 2023

With some 50-ish posts annually on Wordloaf, far too many great bread and bread-adjacent books drop each year for me to cover them here in detail. And they tend to arrive fast-and-furiously, so it can take a long time for me to get to even those I do have the space to feature. So for today’s last “substantial” post of 2023, I want to mention some books that have been on my shelves that I think you should know about (some of which I will feature here eventually), especially as we are in the middle of book-gifting season.

Niki Segnit’s The Flavor Thesaurus: More Flavors

There are a few food reference books that hold a permanent and prominent space on my shelves: Harold McGee’s On Food and Cooking, Larousse Gastronomique, Alan Davidson’s The Oxford Companion to Food, my Bread Baker’s Pocket Companion, among others. Another book on this list is Niki Segnit’s The Flavor Thesaurus, which is a dictionary of sorts of flavors. It is organized by flavor classes: spicy, citrusy, woodland, marine, sulfurous, and so on. Within each chapter, Segnit looks at the ways various pairs of flavors combine with one another—cumin & cauliflower, cumin & coriander seed, cumin & cucumber, pineapple & apple, pineapple & blue cheese, etc. Each entry considers the combination from a variety of possible angles: scientific, culinary, cultural, historical, and, in many cases, personally. Here’s but one example to give you a taste:

GRAPEFRUIT & AVOCADO This combination is a modern classic in a salad with lobster, plump shrimp or fresh crab. A café in Montpellier calls this salade fraicheur and serves it with a shot glass of gazpacho on the side. On a witheringly hot afternoon, it was enough to rehydrate the body and the soul. The brightness of the flavors is one thing, but there's also pleasure in feeling the soft butteriness of avocado against the grapefruit's vesicles, tautly rippled like wet sand after the tide's gone out.

Every entry is like a little prose poem, and if I had two copies, I’d keep one next to my bed too, since it is the sort of book you can dive into at any point and find sparkling gems like that one. Segnit’s new book, The Flavor Thesaurus: More Flavors, continues where the first volume left off, but focuses almost exclusively on plant-based ingredients. It’s equally essential reading; the two books combined are among my favorite books in any genre.

Ways of Eating, by Benjamin Wurgaft and Merry White

Ways of Eating is one I’ve only read a little bit of so far, but am looking forward to finding the time to read cover to cover. It’s an exploration of the ways humanity has been shaped by its relationship to food, written as a sort of storytelling dialogue between White, an anthropologist, and Wurgaft, a historian (who happen also to be mother and son to one another). It covers topics such as Panamanian coffee growers, medieval women beer makers, and Japanese knife forgers, tracing the ways food and culture are inextricably linked.

The Secret of Cooking, by Bee Wilson

The Secret of Cooking by Bee Wilson is one of my favorite books of 2023, by one of my favorite writers. The “secret” in question is cutting yourself some slack in the kitchen—learning to stay loose and free when it comes to cooking, where the stakes need not be high for success. Here’s a taste:

If I could beg you to do one thing and one thing only to improve your cooking life, it would be to cut yourself some slack. If you want to make cooking a regular and enjoyable part of your life and I'm assuming that you do, or else you wouldn't be reading this—you need to give yourself as much leeway as you can in how you get there. Drown out the voices that say you can't be a good cook if you ever use stock cubes or buy frozen vegetables or if you never make your own oat milk or if your knife skills are not up to scratch. Never feel the need to apologize to yourself or others for serving an imperfect meal. The only way to cook, or to live, is imperfectly. It's far better to cook and be prepared to compromise than never to cook at all because you are trying to live up to impossible standards.
Perfection is a terrible idea because it makes us feel bad and stops us from doing so many things that would make our lives better. This is as true in the kitchen as it is anywhere else.

The book contains many wonderful-sounding recipes, but even those come with advice on how to keep it free and easy. This book would make a perfect gift for just about anyone, especially those who say they are afraid to cook.

Let's Bake Bread!, by Bonnie Ohara

Let’s Bake Bread is the second book from Bonnie Ohara, the author of Bread Baking for Beginners, one of the best introductory books to bread baking around. This book is focused on baking bread with children, and contains many recipes, along with advice on how to turn baking them into experiences for joy and wonder for children of all ages. I especially like that it includes formulas for sourdough, something that one cannot get started on too early in life. The book would make a great gift for the kids in your life, or adults with kids. I plan to share a chat with Bonnie and recipes from Let’s Bake Bread sometime early next year.

Scandinavian From Scratch, by Nichole Accettola

Nichole Accettola is the owner of Kantine Bakery in San Francisco, and Scandinavian From Scratch is her first cookbook. Accettola is an American chef and baker who lived in Denmark for 15 years; after returning to the states, she poured everything she learned about Scandi baking into Kantine, and the book is a love letter to the baking of the area and a guide to making her treats at home. I haven’t baked from it yet, but I’m obsessed with Scandinavian breads and pastries, and I cannot wait to dive into this beautiful book. (This is another one I plan to feature here next year too.)

Natasha Pickowicz’s More than Cake

I am an incompetent-at-best cake baker myself; one of the many reasons I love bread baking is that—unlike with cakes and many other pastries—the expansion of the dough during proofing and baking usually sands away the lack of precision in the hands of the maker. Nevertheless, I love a good cake, and I knew I had to have a copy of Natasha Pickowicz’s More than Cake from day one. It’s a gorgeous book, and chock full of inventive and whimsical approaches to cake making and decorating, along with detailed advice and images for understanding exactly how to pull off the recipes, even for a pastry clod like me. The book is indeed about more than cake, and includes recipes for pies, tarts, crackers, and even yeasted breads and buns. This book would make a perfect gift for the pastry chefs in your life, right alongside Rose Wilde’s Bread and Roses.

Pasta Every Day, by Meryl Feinstein

As I mentioned on Monday, I got to spend most of last Sunday watching

Meryl Feinstein

teach a room full of folks how to make ravioli. The recipes she taught that day were pulled from her new book, Pasta Every Day, which is a comprehensive guide to making fresh pasta at home, along with sauces to pair them with. Like More than Cake, it is vividly illustrated and detailed with all the information you’ll need to make pastas of all kinds, both simple and complex. I’ve owned a number of books on making pasta, some of them great, but this one tops them all with its thoroughness, clarity, and expertise. Highly recommended for the pasta-lovers in your life, including yourself. (Stay tuned for a full feature of PAD here next year.)

A Middle Eastern Pantry, by Lior Lev Sercarz

Lior Lev Sercarz is the owner of La Boîte, a NY-based spice merchant, and his book A Middle Eastern Pantry is a comprehensive guide to using spices and pantry staples from the Middle East in cooking and baking, both sweet and savory, from apricots to za’atar, and everything in between. There are recipes for using them, along with advice for incorporating them into your own cooking. There is a recipe for Aysh el-Saraya, a Lebanese bread “pudding” that looks like a cross between baklava and tiramisu that I am dying to try soon.

The Global Pantry Cookbook, by Scott Mowbray and Ann Taylor Pittman

The Global Pantry Cookbook, by Scott Mowbray and Ann Taylor Pittman, is like A Middle Eastern Pantry, but for the entire globe. Here the focus is more on prepared sauces, spice blends, and condiments, but it also includes lesser-known pantry items like black walnuts and curry leaves. After a detailed description of each the 50+ ingredients featured—everything from anchovies to yuzu—the book is organized by types of recipes: snacks, salads, proteins, breakfast, and so on. This one would make a great choice for anyone with a pantry or fridge full of sauces and condiments they don’t know what to do with.

Start Here: Instructions for Becoming a Better Cook, by Sohla El-Waylly

Finally, there’s

Sohla El-Waylly

’s Start Here: Instructions for Becoming a Better Cook, a hefty, nearly 600 page tome that is meant to serve as a culinary degree in book form. It covers many of the basic (and advanced) skills one needs for success in the kitchen: how to taste food so you know it’s good, cooking with water, stewing and braising, steaming and poaching, working with butter, and on and on. There’s even a chapter on working with dough, including simple bread recipes for things like roti, pita, focaccia, and donuts. This book would make a great gift for the aspiring cook in your life, or someone you want to inspire to cook for you.

—Andrew