Present Guide 2023: 9 Small-Batch Cookbooks That Feel Handmade

Keep in mind the cookbooks your granny had? Spiral-bound and splotched, frequently keepsakes from roadside pubs or inns, they felt handmade and individual, never ever mass-produced or expensive, and the very same held true for the dishes inside.

Much of our preferred cookbooks this year go back to that small-batch design. Spiral-bound (benefit: they lay flat on the counter), separately released, or with hand-drawn illustrations in the margins, they’re more like assemblages of individual dishes and notes than weighty, technical tomes.

Choose among the 9 on our list, connect it with kitchen area twine, and, presto: an ideal present.

apartamento’s eighth annual cookbook is tuber or not tuber?, and it 14 — Above: Apartamento’s 8th yearly cookbook is *Root or Not Root?*, and it’s as profane as you may anticipate, with illustrations, root veggies aplenty, and bulb and tuber-adjacent dishes by renowned cooks and artists (this one is by baker-to-the-royals Claire Ptak). The book is EUR30 from Apartamento.

[] is a breakfast food cookbook by marjory sweet 15

[] is a breakfast food cookbook by marjory sweet 16

Above: The cookbook that began us seeing a shift to the intimate and poetic over refined and packaged: [ ] Is a Breakfast Food by Marjory Sugary Food. More than a cookbook, it’s “a discussion about what to consume in the early morning. Breakfast as a state of mind, a memory, a minute, an ordinary regimen, a significant routine”; for anybody “who has actually awakened and questioned what to consume, or who has actually simply awakened and questioned.” It’s $65 from Vestige. (While you’re at it, take a look at Marjory’s “ghostly” Maine rental home here)