BUDMO!: Recipes from a Ukrainian Kitchen

In this colorful  cookbook  you’ll find recipes for dishes like cold borscht, dark cherry varenyky and sweet pumpkin rice kasha from Ukrainian native Anna Voloshyna, who moved to California in 2011. Known for hosting pop-up dinners and cooking classes,  Voloshyna is also a food stylist, photographer and blogger. In her debut cookbook, she offers modern and American spins on the typical dishes she grew up with, and she also includes details like food origins, customs and traditions in each recipe’s headnote. Budmo, which is how Ukrainians say “cheers,” shares the country’s complicated history that has led up to the current war, while simultaneously celebrating its varied and vibrant cuisine.

A Waiter in Paris: Adventures in the Dark Heart of the City

“It’s the boundary between two worlds: the Paris you see and the Paris you don’t,” writes Edward Chisholm, an Englishman who moved to Paris in 2012 and spent several years as a waiter while trying to build up his writing career. Now, his debut book, a no-holds-barred memoir detailing his time waiting tables in one of the world’s hottest restaurant cities, reveals what really goes on behind the scenes of fine dining establishments. This book is the next generation of Anthony Bourdain’s Kitchen Confidentialand Stephanie Danler’s Sweetbitter, with Chisholm exposing the often-shocking mayhem of the restaurant kitchen in visceral detail. He deftly uses the Parisian restaurant as a microcosm for France as a whole, with immigrants, people of color and blue-collar workers at the bottom of the food chain.

Sweet Land of Liberty: A History of America in 11 Pies

Ever wonder how apple pie became a symbol of America? Food writer and editor Rossi Anastopoulo slices into the history of pie in the good ol’ US of A, from pumpkin pie on Thanksgiving to apple pie on Independence Day, using the iconic American dessert to tell the story of a country. Still, it’s not all sweet, as she details how molasses pie traces its origin to slavery and Jell-O pie reveals the history of gender disparity in our country. All in all, Anastopoulo shares interesting facts behind 11 all-American pies, like how the first recipe for American apple pie appeared in a 1796 cookbook called American Cookery, which is believed to be the first cookbook ever published in the newly minted United States. The book includes a recipe for each pie, too.

Diasporican: A Puerto Rican Cookbook

Part memoir and part cookbook, this debut from our country’s first Puerto Rican food columnist Illyanna Maisonet dives into the author’s personal family recipes, which she painstakingly documented from her extended relatives through the years, and also includes her interpretation of dishes by Puerto Rican friends, chefs and roadside food vendors. There are 90 recipes including traditional Puerto Rican dishes like tostones, pernil and mofongo. Other highlights include sloppy joes and sancocho. But more than just the recipes, Maisonet shares how migration and colonization have influenced and progressed Puerto Rican food, ingredients and techniques. In explaining why her family wraps their pasteles in foil, Maisonet writes in her intimate, conversational style, “When you think of my grandma coming to Sacramento as a 17-year-old mother of two in 1956, you have to wonder where the hell would she have found banana leaves in Northern California?” She posits that this progression is no less authentic than the original method, and that the resourcefulness of Puerto Ricans has evolved their cuisine into what it is today: dynamic and delicious.

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