The author of one of the season’s most heavily anticipated new cookbooks, Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat: Mastering the Elements of Good Cooking (S&S; OverDrive Sample), Samin Nosrat was featured yesterday on NPR’s food show The Salt. Libraries are seeing holds ratios well over 3:1 for the book, in one case 8:1.

Nosrat became known as the chef who taught Michael Pollan to cook after he featured her in both his book Cooked and his Netflix show of the same name. In turn, she learned her craft under the eagle eye of legendary cook Alice Waters, founder of Chez Panisse.

She tells The Salt that “The key to good cooking … is learning to balance [salt, fat, acid, and heat] and trust your instincts, rather than just follow recipes.”

In this, her first book, she seeks to revolutionize standard cookbook formats, Saving all of the recipes for the end, the first half teaches readers the basics of cooking so they can learn to trust their own senses. Nosrat also uses illustrations, rather than staged photographs so readers won’t “feel bound to my one image of a perfect dish in a perfect moment and feel like that was what you had to make … I didn’t want you to feel like you had to live up to my version of perfection.”

Reviews attest to the success of her approach. Cooking Light says it “amounts to an incredibly engaging master class that helps free you from recipes so you can improvise like a pro.” The Atlantic‘s reviewer calls it the book he is “most likely to recommend to a beginning cook.”

In addition to the NPR audio (below), Nosrat has released several videos, including the following:

The 2017 James Beard Media Awards have been announced.

The Book of the Year, as well as the winner in the American Cooking category, is Victuals: An Appalachian Journey, with Recipes by Ronni Lundy (PRH/Clarkson Potter; OverDrive Sample).

Several notable books on Southern cooking were published this year, but Lundy’s guide to the foodways of the Mountain South won out over all the others. A book rich in essays and history and as much about sharing a sense of the culture as providing recipes, it already won the IACP Award for best American cookbook, and could be called “the Hillbilly Elegy of the food world.”

Dorie Greenspan wins the Baking and Dessert category for Dorie’s Cookies (Rux Martin Books/Houghton Mifflin Harcourt; OverDrive Sample), her first all-cookie cookbook made critics drool.

Dessert fans will want to follow Greenspan in her new column for NYT Magazine. which kicks off this week with Buttermilk-Biscuit Shortcakes.

Taste of Persia: A Cook’s Travels Through Armenia, Azerbaijan, Georgia, Iran, and Kurdistan by Naomi Duguid (Workman/Artisan; OverDrive Sample) won the International category, which continues the recent fascination with that cuisine. Like Victuals, it is a double winner, having also topped the IACP Culinary Travel category.

The full list of winners is online.

While the rush of big cookbooks comes every fall, spring is also a season marked by cooking guidance, before the surge of books on grilling. As we are tracking the Spring Reading Lists for novels and nonfiction, we are making note of the cookbook selections (see links at right, under Season Previews).

Eater offers a list of “Every Spring 2017 Cookbook That Matters.” Looking at coastal cookery from both sides, they highlight “a gorgeous new volume by San Francisco pastry chef Elisabeth Prueitt of Tartine fame” and “a definitive and entertaining history of Balthazar, one of Manhattan’s most treasured restaurants.”

Tartine All Day: Modern Recipes for the Home Cook, Elisabeth Prueitt (PRH/Lorena Jones Books)

At Balthazar: The New York Brasserie at the Center of the World, Reggie Nadelson (S&S/Gallery Books)

Bon Appétit limits their picks to the “11 Spring Cookbooks You’ll Actually Cook From.”

Among their choices are In My Kitchen: A Collection of New and Favorite Vegetarian Recipes by Deborah Madison (PRH/Ten Speed; OverDrive Sample), one of the grande dames of vegetarian cooking. “When she includes a recipe for brown rice porridge with nut butter and chia seeds, it’s because she’s been eating it since before the Instagram founders were born. #respect.”

Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat: Mastering the Elements of Good Cooking by Samin Nosrat with art by Wendy MacNaughton (S&S) is also included. “This is a new kind of book. Lots of words to live by before you get to her kitchen basics and, finally, recipes more than halfway through … Just reading [it] will make you a better cook, adept at seasoning, balancing, understanding what it really is you’re doing and why.”

A foodie haven, San Francisco produces a number of cookbooks. A fact recently covered by the city’s paper, San Francisco Chronicle, “10 spring cookbooks for your Bay Area food collection.”

The titles listed will appeal to regions beyond the Bay area, including  Nopalito: A Mexican Kitchen by Gonzalo Guzman with Stacy Adimando (PRH/Ten Speed; OverDrive Sample) “a worthy addition to your home library.” Picking up on the national trend of Asian cookery, the paper also features Burma Superstar: Addictive Recipes From the Crossroads of Southeast Asia by Desmond Tan and Kate Leahy (PRH/Ten Speed; OverDrive Sample), “A celebration of Burmese culture and foods.”

Publishers Weekly underscores the continuing interest in cookbooks through multiple lists (scroll to the end of the main article for the full range). Addressing the question of why cookbooks are still popular even though so much information is available for free online, Abrams cookbook editor Camaren Subhiyah says, “There are millions of recipes and video tutorials at our fingertips … but it’s not always the best format for learning and you’re not always getting quality information from a credible source.”

Titles range from books that address the fundamentals, such as Patricia Wells’ distillation of a life time of teaching in My Master Recipes (Harper/Morrow) to single focus titles such as The Book of Cheese: The Essential Guide to Discovering Cheeses You’ll Love by Liz Thorpe (Macmillan/Flatiron) and Perfect Plates in 5 Ingredients by John Whaite (Kyle), a winner of The Great British Bake Off  who offers “Pared-down recipes [that] aim for less-stressful home cooking.”

Princess Pamela’s Soul Food Cookbook: A Mouth-Watering Treasury of Afro-American Recipes by Pamela Strobel, Matt Lee, Ted Lee (Rizzoli) is rising on Amazon’s sales rankings after NPR’s All Things Considered featured the newly rediscovered cookbook. It jumped from #6,945 to #94.

In the 1960s Pamela Strobel was an early version of a celebrity chef. Her NYC restaurant, Little Kitchen, was a such a hit she was featured on TV and published a cookbook. NPR reports the restaurant “was basically a speakeasy. You had to know to ring the bell to be let in.” She did not let just anyone in.

Between then and now, the restaurant closed, Strobel’s fame faded, and the cookbook went out of print.

Now it is back, because Ted and Matt Lee “found a ragged copy at a vintage booksellers.” The Lee brothers are the force behind several cookbooks, including the 2007 James Beard Cook Book of the Year, The Lee Bros. Southern Cookbook: Stories and Recipes for Southerners and Would-be Southerners.

They met Strobel long ago when they were starting up their business selling Southern food via mail order. Matt Lee tells NPR:

“we knocked on her door. It said please knock. It was always locked, and she peeled back the curtain and sized us up, cracked the door open. And we gave our pitch, and she was like no, thanks and closed the door. And that was our one experience with the great Princess Pamela.”

After they found her book they spent years working on her story. Where she is now and what happened to her is a mystery. Even a private detective has been unable to locate her or determine what became of her.

She is no mystery to the cooking world, however. Confirming her star power, Carla Hall, Ruth Reichl, and Marcus Samuellson offer blurbs.

The cookbook is the first of a new imprint, the Lee Brothers Library Series, and is published complete with the poetry Strobel included with nearly every recipe.

A favorite dish from Vietnam has found wide press coverage in the US thanks to The Pho Cookbook: Easy to Adventurous Recipes for Vietnam’s Favorite Soup and Noodle by Andrea Nguyen (PRH/Ten Speed Press; OverDrive Sample).

The NYT highlights the book in Florence Fabricant’s “Front Burner” column, WSJ runs a piece by Nguyen exploring its many variations, and foodie sites such as Lucky Peach, Epicurious, and Chowhound have also featured it.

Nguyen is considered one of the foremost experts on Vietnamese cookery. In a recent interview on San Francisco’s public radio station she shared her philosophy about teaching others to cook, “There’s so much intimidation about this. I try to take a certain Home Depot approach, like ‘You can do it, and I can help!’ As a cookbook author, you’re really just there to coach people along. If they’re happy, I’m thrilled.”

Her book is getting stellar reviews. Food & Wine writes “Nguyen is a master teacher when it comes to Vietnam’s national dish, and in her new book she provides meticulously clear instructions for every imaginable variety—we recommend you cook through every chapter.”

Proving Pho’s entry into the wider foodie culture, Target carries the book.

Oprah’s first cookbook and the first book under her new imprint with Flatiron, Food, Health and Happiness: 115 On-Point Recipes for Great Meals and a Better Life (Macmillan/Flatiron; OverDrive Sample) debuts on the new USA Today best seller list at #4.

USA Today says it is “not an official Weight Watchers cookbook” although Winfrey is “a Weight Watchers investor and spokesperson who has been appearing in the program’s commercials.”

Winfrey has been made appearances on several shows to promote the book, including CBS This Morning, Rachel Ray, Dr. Oz, and Stephen Colbert. Many media outlets, such as Parade, are featuring recipes. Eater features it as well, linking it to other celebrity cookbooks.

UPDATE: Oprah is featured on the cover of the new issue of People magazine. The story (not currently available online) focuses on Weight Watchers, but also features her cookbook.

Libraries generally bought in large numbers and holds are hovering at 3:1 ratios or below.

Librarians might remember that the first cookbook associated with Oprah did very well. USA Today points out that In the Kitchen with Rosie: Oprah’s Favorite Recipes, by her personal chef Rosie Daley, “was No. 1 on USA TODAY’s list for a remarkable 16 straight weeks.”

Soup for Syria: Recipes to Celebrate Our Shared Humanity, collected and photographed by Barbara Abdeni Massed, published last year by indie press, Interlink, is soaring on Amazon’s sales rankings. The jump, from #7,866 to a well-placed #45, coincides with a feature on NPR’s All Things Considered.

An effort by celebrity chefs to help relieve some of the Syrian refugee’s suffering, it’s a foodie version of Live Aid.

Barbara Massaad, a cookbook writer living in Beirut, visited one of the refugee camps and decided she had to help. Along with a friend who runs a farmers market, they started making soups to give away to those in need. “Soup is universal comfort food,” says Massad, “It’s special, soup.”

Deciding to take the project further, she reached out to colleagues around the world, asking for recipes for a fundraiser. Alice Waters sent in one for carrot soup. Anthony Bourdain offers soup au pistou, “with white beans, leeks, fennel and zucchini.” The team behind the popular Jerusalem cookbook, Yotam Ottolenghi and Sami Tamimi, submitted one as well. Claudia Rodan and Mark Bittman also pitched in.

In addition to the recipes, the book is full of photos of the Syrians living in the camps.

The collection has raised more than $300,000 for food relief programs, “with very little attention or publicity.”

The lack of PR seems to have changed now that NPR has spread the word. The book is temporarily out of stock on Amazon and B&N and is on back order through wholesalers. It is currently shown as available for purchase directly from publisher Interlink.

Libraries have generally bought few, if any copies. Those that did are showing a mix of available copies and moderate holds.

“An Oprah Book” will be the name of Oprah Winfrey’s new imprint with Macmillan/Flatiron Books (not to be confused with an “Oprah’s Book Club Selection,” as she styles her sporadic personal selections of books to recommend).

Oprah will select nonfiction titles for the new line with the first to be one of her own, a cookbook entitled Food, Health and Happiness: 115 On-Point Recipes for Great Meals and a Better Life (Macmillan/Flatiron Books; Jan. 3).

As we wrote in June, it is connected to her role as a Weight Watchers spokesperson as well as her investment in the company.

Oprah picked the cookbook as one of her Favorite Things for gift giving this year, even though it won’t be available until after the holidays (those who preorder it will get “a special note and gift … while supplies last” to wrap). 

The second book will be The Black Angels: The Untold Story of the Nurses Who Helped Cure Tuberculosis by Maria Smilios (as yet no cover, pub. date, or ISBN is available).

According to Bustle, “the microhistory tells the story of 300 black nurses who worked in the tuberculosis ward at Staten Island’s Sea View Hospital, caring for patients few would dare to be around.”

According to the New York Daily News, “Fear of TB was so rampant at the time that the city had trouble hiring nurses for Sea View and ultimately recruited hundreds of black women, many from the South, to fill the ranks.” Oprah says it is a story that needs “to be shared.”

Bustle reports the account will be Smilios’ first book and will release in 2018.

The Associated Press picked up the story, and as the AP is widely syndicated, it is appearing in national as well as local outlets.

Thus far, however, word has not spread that far. A check of holds across the country shows only moderate demand on strong orders for the new cookbook.

What is the perfect election night dessert? NPR’s The Salt suggests it could be American cake, rather than the more expected American pie.

The foodie site focuses on Anne Byrn’s American Cake: From Colonial Gingerbread to Classic Layer, the Stories and Recipes Behind More Than 125 of Our Best-Loved Cakes (Macmillan/Rodale; OverDrive Sample).

Byrn is best known for her Cake Mix Doctor baking books but here turns her attention to the history of American cakes and the way their flavors and ingredients reflect the changes in our history.

The Salt turns that culinary history lesson into a moment to celebrate not just cakes, but their presidential role and the way they reflect our immigrant foundations.

Calling the book a “a coast-to-coast trail of crumbs,” the site says “American Cake takes the reader on a flour-dusted, chronological journey from the era of colonial gingerbread to today’s over-frosted towers. Byrn makes for an expert guide, deftly folding history, literary trivia, Americana and origin stories for 125 iconic cakes, while providing modernized recipes for each of them.”

Byrn says “Cake is an icon of American culture,” and The Salt ends the story with a listing of favorite presidential treats. Bill Clinton loves carrot cake while Andrew Jackson favored Blackberry jam cake (Byrn has recipes for both).

Some presidents liked pie best. Abraham Lincoln enjoyed peach while Barack Obama turns to nectarine (sadly, Byrn follows the current political divide and provides no recipes for pie).

Readers are voting with holds. At every library we checked, all copies are in circulation and reserve lists are present, some topping 3:1 ratios.

Vegan cooking got a huge boost yesterday from NPR’s Fresh Air.

The lauded chefs and owners of Philadelphia’s Vedge and V Street restaurants, Rich Landau and Kate Jacoby, join host Terry Gross in a lengthy interview that sent both of their books, each named after their eateries, soaring up the Amazon rankings.

Their newest book, V Street: 100 Globe-Hopping Plates on the Cutting Edge of Vegetable Cooking (HarperCollins/Morrow Cookbooks) rose from #1,703 to #12 while their 2013 title, Vedge: 100 Plates Large and Small That Redefine Vegetable Cooking (Workman/The Experiment), rose from #56,116 to #334.

Gross opens the show by introducing the married couple as “two vegan chefs who are working to redefine cooking with vegetables to make the food exciting and satisfying, even for meat eaters.”

Landau says, “I’ve told people for years it’s not really meat that tastes so good. It’s what chefs do to it that tastes so good. And we’re trying to put that same attention into vegetables.”

Asked about the story behind V Street,”inspired by street food from around the world” Jacoby says they have found “really interesting cultural food experiences that complemented the fine dining” they experienced while travelling. The couple has been drawn to Japanese food, finding it the most seasonal, and also to Moroccan dishes.

Landau says “The flavors were just so amazing. It was kind of like Indian food in the sense that they used all these spices, and yet, you never really tasted one spice in the final dish. You tasted this kind of … great symbiosis of all these spices working together to make one final beautiful flavor.”

The entire conversation ranges from eating vegan on the road, to allergies, to food porn, to the value of creating food you believe in.

Eater gives a sense of the foodie world’s reception to the couple’s approach.

Alton Brown is still remembered by fans for Good Eats, a cult hit from the early days of the Food Network, currently available for binge watching on Netflix. Now best known for the culinary contest show, Cutthroat Kitchen, he has just published his next book, Alton Brown: EveryDayCook PRH/Ballantine Books).

The tag on the cover, “This time, it’s personal,” is proving a focus for media coverage. Written after his divorce from his second wife, the NYT calls it “a midlife-crisis book.”  In a profile in the WSJ Brown provides a short, sorrowful, summary of his childhood and career.

Described by the NYT as “an eclectic and appealing collection of 70 recipes in Mr. Brown’s regular rotation and another 30 he created to bring the book to a respectable size,” it is on the first two previews of best cookbooks of season, leading the NYT‘s list and also one of  People‘s “25 New Fall Cookbooks That Deserve a Spot in Your Kitchen”

In systems we checked, holds are topping 10:1 ratios where libraries have bought very low and are exceeding orders where libraries bought multiple copies.

Oprah Winfrey’s memoir, The Life You Want, has been postponed indefinitely according to the LA Times. We wrote about the deal, worth eight figures, last December.

The memoir was intended to launch Oprah’s new imprint with Flatiron Books, a division of Macmillan, a line of nonfiction titles hand picked by Oprah herself. Instead, it will launch with Oprah’s new cookbook, Food, Health and Happiness: ‘On Point’ Recipes for Great Meals and a Better Life. It is planned for Jan. 3, 2017 (as yet no cover or ISBN is available).

As the AP reports, Oprah, who is not only the latest Weight Watchers spokesperson, but also an investor, owning an estimated 10% of Weight Watchers stock, said of her new effort:

“In the past several months on Weight Watchers, I have worked with wonderful chefs to make healthier versions of my favorite meals. When people come to my house for lunch or dinner, the number one thing they ask is, ‘How is this so delicious and still healthy?’ So I decided to answer that question with recipes everyone can enjoy.”

If this sounds familiar, back in the late ’90’s, Oprah co-authored a book with her trainer, Bob Greene, Make the Connection: Ten Steps To A Better Body — And A Better Life.

An instant No. 1 New York Times bestseller, it launched Greene’s weight-loss empire. But in January 2009, a much heavier Oprah was featured on the cover of O, The Oprah Magazine with the headline, “How did I let this happen again?”

Zahav: A World of Israeli Cooking, Michael Solomonov and Steven Cook (HMH/Rux Martin), has won the 2016 James Beard Book of the Year award.

Chef Solomonov is no stranger to the Beard honors. In 2011 he won the James Beard Award for Best Chef: Mid-Atlantic. Now his debut cookbook, which highlights the pleasures of Israeli food and profiles his restaurant and life journey, gets similar accolades.

The James Beard Awards, billed as the Oscars of the food world, are given for 14 book categories (as well as for chefs, journalists, TV shows and more). Zahav also took home the International book award.

Deborah Madison won the Cookbook Hall of Fame category. Her most recent title is The New Vegetarian Cooking for Everyone (RH/Ten Speed).

The very timely Soda Politics: Taking on Big Soda (and Winning) by Marion Nestle (Oxford UP) won for Writing and Literature while The Beetlebung Farm Cookbook by Chris Fischer with Catherine Young (Hachette/Little, Brown) took the prize for American Cooking. V Is for Vegetables: Inspired Recipes & Techniques for Home Cooks — from Artichokes to Zucchini by  Michael Anthony with Dorothy Kalins (Hachette/Little, Brown) won for Vegetable Focused and Vegetarian.

Best seller The Food Lab: Better Home Cooking Through Science, J. Kenji López-Alt (Norton) topped the General Cooking category. It won the IACP Cookbook of the Year award earlier this month (see our coverage here).

Other than The Food Lab there are no overlapping winners between the two highly regarded food awards.

The full list of James Beard winners is available online.

The International Association of Culinary Professionals (IACP) has announced their awards for 2016 and the big winner is The Food Lab: Better Home Cooking Through Science, J. Kenji López-Alt (Norton), which took home honors as both Cookbook of the Year and winner in the American category.

The book is already a hitl. It is a NYT Best Seller, entering the list at #4 in October and currently at #10 after 10 weeks.

Familiar names Madhur Jaffrey and Andrew Weil also took home prizes. Jaffrey for Vegetarian India: A Journey Through the Best of Indian Home Cooking (PRH/Knopf), which won the Single Subject category and Weil for Fast Food, Good Food: More Than 150 Quick and Easy Ways to Put Healthy, Delicious Food on the Table (Hachette/Little, Brown), which won the Health & Special Diet category.

Tacos were big winners with Alex Stupak and Jordana Rothman winning the Chefs and Restaurants category for Tacos: Recipes and Provocations (PRH/Clarkson Potter) and Deborah Holtz and Juan Carlos Mena winning the Reference & Technical category for Tacopedia (Phaidon).

The winners in all the book categories are listed with ordering information and alternate formats, on our downloadable spreadsheet, IACP 2016 Cookbook Awards.

Michael Pollan’s fame is about to spread to Netflix with the series Cooked set to debut this coming Friday, Jan 19.

Directed by Alex Gibney (Going Clear: Scientology and the Prison of Belief), it explores how human developed their relationship to food, a subject Pollan wrote about in his 2013 book Cooked: A Natural History of Transformation (Penguin; OverDrive Sample). The four-episode YV series will be a mix of culinary travelogue, anthropology lessons, and sessions in Pollan’s home kitchen.

No tie-in is planned but the book is available in various print editions and in eBook.

The stirring trailer was released recently and showcases Pollan’s approach to the powerful emotions surrounding food, the connections food has to tradition and family, and the ways the modern food industry has separated us from the real heart of cooking, which, says Pollan works to “undermine cooking as an everyday practice.”