Cookbooks For Two: 5 Food Writers Recommend Their Favorites

"A Place at the Table: New American Recipes from the Nation's Top Foreign-Born Chefs (PenguinRandom House, $36) is a book that celebrates new immigrant chefs and their inspiring and successful stories of making it in America! I'm honored to be part of the book, it's fun, and the recipes are made for home cooks with no professional kitchen experience.

“My chicken wings recipe is something close to my heart, it’s one of my favorite recipes to cook with my partner and friends and everyone loves it! I would love to share it with every couple who wants to make some finger-licking hot wings at home.”

-Simone Tong, owner and chef, Silver Apricot, NYC

“We are big fans of Michael Solomonov’s “Israeli Soul.”(HMH, $21). It has a number of things my husband grew up eating and some things that were new to both of us. It offers a whole array of ways to break up pandemic salad monotony, and many of the recipes can be scaled up or down so once we can have parties again we’ll quintuple our favorites.”

Sarah Archer, author of The Midcentury Kitchen

“We can’t eat at Shake Shack in 2020 due to the pandemic, so we’ve been loving Shake Shack: Recipes and Stories.”

- Jesse Hirsch, managing editor at The Counter

“I really enjoy Charlotte Druckman's Kitchen Remix,(PenguinRandom House, $28) which formulates dishes from the ingredients you already have in your kitchen. I love the grid that each recipe has, which details substitutes, tips and complements for each component in the recipe! Most of them serve four people, which is perfect for halving so they're easily amenable for two.

"I love the crab salad hand rolls recipe because I have practically all of that in my kitchen already AND it makes me think, why haven't I thought of this before."

• Esther Tseng, food writer, LA Times, Food & Wine

“I love and support La Cocina's mission and the cookbook (La Cocina, $28). As a restaurant incubator whose primary goal is to help women of color and immigrants find footholds in the highly competitive Bay Area food world, they've done great work and launched a lot of careers.

The cookbook itself is a blend of storytelling and recipes - great for a couple that wants to cook simple, compelling recipes and learn about the women behind them. I can imagine a particularly ambitious couple taking turns picking out random recipes and having one read the story behind it while the other one cooks or take turns doing that!”

PS: There’s a way to donate or do gift baskets too!

Noah Cho, food writer, Catapult