Betty Crocker’s Cookbook is still in my mom’s kitchen, worn with bits of flour between the pages. And the index card for “Louanna’s Hot Rolls” is a favorite too (but if you know, you know they’re really “Mamaw’s Rolls”).

Not always on our lists of favorite books, odds are some of the more used, treasured, and memory-bound books in your home are cookbooks. Which explains, at least in part, why we buy so many of them.

The staples are unforgettable. Like Joy of Cooking — one of the first cookbooks I bought for myself and the one I still go to for chocolate chip cookies. Mastering the Art of French Cooking — the one I haven’t been brave enough yet to use but enjoy having on my shelf nonetheless. Betty Crocker’s Cookbook is still in my mom’s kitchen, worn with bits of flour between the pages. And the index card for “Louanna’s Hot Rolls” is a favorite too (but if you know, you know they’re really “Mamaw’s Rolls”). It’s typewritten, with a short list of ingredients and minimal instruction, but we still know what to do. You’ve got these too.

Cookbooks promise to let you in on a secret: “Traditionally, the art of cooking, like other mechanical arts, was passed on from the master to the apprentice orally without the use of books,” Henry Notaker writes in his History of Cookbooks. And sometimes they serve as less of a formula than a dose of comfort and a taste of something familiar: “​​The recipes in these books are meant to be leafed through and read sitting on a sofa or an easy chair rather than followed step by step over the kitchen stove.”

Even the market for them has only flourished, Notaker writes: “During the first five hundred years of printing, cookbook publishing grew from a minor business into a mass-market industry.”

In 2024, they’re not going anywhere. “They are the fourth largest category of nonfiction that we sell here in the United States,” Kristen McClean, book market analyst, told marketplace.org last year.

We’ve even made space for them on TikTok: “A new hotbed for BookTok influencers has been cookbooks, where the top four bestsellers in the category have benefited from exposure on social media,” Publisher’s Weekly reported in March.

Print instructions in a YouTube world? Cookbooks tell us that taste transcends words. And time, too

Cookbooks in the year 2024

According to Food & Wine, these are the best new cookbooks of spring:

Anything’s Pastable: 81 Inventive Pasta Recipes for Saucy People by Dan Pashman

Koreaworld: A Cookbook by Deuki Hong and Matt Rodbard

Cooking in Real Life: Delicious & Doable Recipes for Every Day by Lidey Heuck

If you’re looking for timeless, some classics we at Common Good recommend:

Larousse Gastronomique:
The World’s Greatest Culinary Encyclopedia

The America’s Test Kitchen
Family Cookbook (any edition)

The New York Times Cookbook by Craig Claiborne

Mastering the Art of French Cooking by Julia Child