Paula Forbes

This slender volume will revolutionize how you cook vegetables, teach you everything you need to know about Italian-American cooking, give you a new default tomato sauce, and make you wish you lived in Brooklyn.

The first cookbook I ever reviewed, but also the epitome of the gonzo chef book. This sucker is expensive, heavy, gigantic, gorgeous, egotistical, gilded, ridiculous, wonderful. I adore it.

This cookbook blew my mind when it came out, totally upending what I assumed what a cookbook had to be. Modern restaurant cookbooks would be much stuffier without Joe Beef.

If you want to learn to cook well—really well, California-well, vibrant and seasonal and light and flavorful-well—it has to be Judy Rodgers' Zuni Cafe Cookbook.

Robb Walsh's survey course of Texas cuisine is an absolute must-read for any cook looking to learn more about Lone Star cooking.

Much like the smokehouse that inspired it, Franklin Barbecue the cookbook is as good as everyone says it is. Learn to smoke meat the right way.

Need to know your Cuban sofrito from your Puerto Rican sofrito? Looking for some traditional Peruvian sauces? Or the key to a great Argentinian steak? Maricel Presilla's scholarly masterwork of the foods of Latin America has you covered.

Mostly for the cakes and cookies—solid recipes that are just old fashioned enough they seem fresh. But it was also the cookbook my grandmother used, so for that it will always have a place on my shelf.

I grew up in Wisconsin, and I'm always dismayed when people paint Midwestern food as casserole from cans and jello salad. Minnesotan Amy Thielen gets that this food can be so much more: seasonal and—dare I say—sexy.

Since its release in May 2016, I have cooked from the lively, vegetable-centric Six Seasons once a week. I own about 1500 cookbooks. Think about that.