Flavor Zone: The Best Cookbooks That Dropped in June

Welcome to Flavor Zone, a monthly column in which your kitchen-savvy VICE editors recommend the tastiest, juiciest, most appetizing new cookbooks on the shelves. This June, we flipped through wild veggie burger recipes, made some dank naan, cut down on food waste, and finally learned what to do with our honey (besides mainlining Hot Toddies).

No disrespect to Blood Meridian (RIP Cormac), but cookbooks are my favorite kind of book. This wasn’t always true—not back when I was still obsessed with reading ~*serious things*~ like critical theory, Raymond Carver (still love him though), and jazz musician biographies, and certainly not when I tried to read all of Karl Ove Knausgaard’s My Struggle series (I failed have yet to succeed). Lately, however, I spend my time trying to enjoy life, which entails a lot of cooking, entertaining, staying active, and taking in our world’s great cinema (aka browsing Maangchi cooking videos and rewatching Girls). Suffice it to say, the older I get, the more I simply love cookbooks.

To me, cookbooks are one of the keys to living a good life at home (the others being owning a Nintendo Switch and an espresso machine). Cookbooks give us ideas for exciting dishes to eat and share, and show us the techniques needed to cook and plate them; cookbooks not only expose us to new cuisines, but if you look beyond the food, they include cool tableware, FOMO-inducing photography, interesting bottles of wine, novel ways of entertaining and impressing friends, and, perhaps most importantly, ways of thinking and living that can inspire us to further hone our own vibes. In that sense, they’re windows into the lives and homes of great cooks and writers whose work we enjoy, and that’s the kind of book I always feel like checking out (now that I’ve given up on Knausgaard). On that note, with my ever-growing collection, I’m getting close to needing David Harbour’s massive, hall-length shelves (as well as his body and life).

Now let’s cut the maudlin bullshit, smash two beers over our heads like “Stone Cold” Steve Austin, and get to the damn list of this month’s best cookbooks. June is sort of a weird month, because it’s not really spring anymore, but it’s also not exactly full-throttle grilling time yet (especially if your backyard, like mine, is currently a smoky, dystopian nightmare); we aren’t yet in the balmy tomato paradise of August, and, at least here in Chicago, we seem to barely even be hitting peach season (my CSA this week included cherries, peas, red raspberries, and strawberries [reaches for new pie cookbook that will be mentioned imminently]). Still, this month brought a colorful Indian street food extravaganza and the reissue of a book chronicling one man’s quest to create a bunch of truly wild veggie burgers. Thanks to A24’s hysterical new cookbook about deranged movie meals, Paul Thomas Anderson fans (aka some of your most aggravating friends) can go ahead and make Freddie’s moonshine from The Master and Reynolds Woodcock’s (Phantom Thread) delicious-but-poisonous mushroom omelette, while a fun new book about food waste teaches us, among other things, how to avoid poisonous mushrooms altogether. Also, if you have even one square foot of backyard (or have a beloved gardening freak in your life), this reissued masterpiece about growing veggies at home should definitely be on your shelf. Here are our favorite cookbooks that dropped in June.

[Gazing towards Nick DiGiovanni’s knife] Are you OK? Is he hurting you? Like, what is this man’s budget for knives, whetstones, and cutting boards? It’s got to be astronomical. (His opening bit involves throwing his knife at his cutting board like he’s John Wick.) Anyway, DiGiovanni was a sympathetic and legitimately watchable contestant on MasterChef; he didn’t win the show, but he did win the long game by going viral, securing over 11 million followers on TikTok and almost 2 million on Instagram—so it doesn’t seem like he’s sweating it. Knife Drop is this young chef’s first cookbook, and it’s about as fun as you’d expect. If you don’t buy it, DiGiovanni’s friend Gordon Ramsay will find you.

Lukas Volger, co-founder of award-winning queer food journal Jarry and author of the popular cookbook Snacks for Dinner (a pretty self-explanatory title, I think), is back this month with a reissue of his obsessive loving spotlight on veggie burgers. Just one look at the table of contents tells us that we’re not talkin’ about the bean burgers, soy isolate patties, and grilled portobellos your uncle makes fun of you for eating at family barbecues; no, this bad boy features recipes for everything from baked falafel burgers and spicy peanut and carrot burgers to seitan burgers with mango barbecue sauce. Naturally, there’s also a massive list of salads, sides, and condiments (in case you’re too good for mayo and mustard).

Stacey Mei Yan Fong’s 50 Pies, 50 States is a fine example of how I wish more people approached writing cookbooks: by asking me to cook and eat a bunch of pie, but also by having an extremely unique, gripping, fun story to tell. Fong was born in Singapore, but grew up loving American films and music; once she moved to the U.S., she got to know the country by traveling around and, eventually, making the essential pies from each state. I really hope she’s planning a sequel, but with pizza (and please HMU if you need help testing ‘em).

This new honey-centric cookbook is less Pablo Honey and more “Honey” by Robyn, which is to say that it will make you horny for one of nature’s greatest delights. I was recently at a dinner party where a friend’s husband talked for literally an hour about how his father had become a beekeeper, so maybe I have a soft spot for this one, but I love the idea of a whole book dedicated to the art of beekeeping and its delicious produce. We probably have a lot to learn from this one on many levels.

“Middle Eastern food” is a major player in a ton of cookbooks, but how many of them really delve deep into the region’s characteristics and history to offer actually compelling background (and recipes, of course) for everything from spices to preservation methods? A Middle Eastern Pantry goes far, far beyond the “keep tahini and chickpeas on the shelf at all times for hummus LOL!” that so many books settle for; so if you want to be not only stocked up, but a tenured professor of Middle Eastern flavors (think dukkah, za’atar, olives, dried fruit, and beyond), this one’s for you.

Food waste sucks… and if you waste food, you suck, too! Just kidding, we’re all guilty of it from time to time. Margaret and Irene Li, authors of Double Awesome Chinese Food and co-founders of popular Boston dumpling and sandwich eatery Mei Mei, understand this. Their excellent new book, Perfectly Good Food (which we reviewed here), gives a compelling argument about why we should be more sustainable with the food we buy (and it’s not just because those tomatoes you bought at the farmers market looked pretty good and now you’re mad that they’re mushy). Perfectly Good Food is a killer book to have on the shelf, whether it’s to look for recipes, get ideas for reorganizing your fridge, or figure out what to do with those dang carrot scraps.

As author Maunika Gowardhan explains early on in Tandoori Home Cooking, the tandoor is a straw-strengthened clay vessel that’s used to bake and cook. What follows is a whirlwind of rustic Indian cooking: grilled breads, chutneys, spiced butter chicken—in fact many of these dishes begin with “spiced” or “spicy,” so if that entices you, smash that “Buy Now” button, fellow flavor enjoyer—various skewers and tikkas, and an onslaught of creative, drool-worthy veggie dishes. I love how herbaceous and powerful all the flavors in this book are; and, most importantly, it makes me feel like I could actually make some great naan.

Ever wanted to actually try Mrs. Kim’s ram-don from Parasite? Or Kip’s nachos from Napoleon Dynamite? Interested in creating a drinking game with Freddie’s homemade moonshine from The Master (which definitely has paint thinner in it)? Your most annoying film friend’s favorite studio, A24, has put together a new cookbook with some of cinema’s weirdest and most memorable meals. Is the Christmas feast from Fanny and Alexander (aka the greatest movie meal of all time) in here? No, but Tom Hanks’ fish from Cast Away is. (Spoiler alert: the recipe simply calls for one raw fish!) Scrounging is part cookbook, part joke gift, and 100% a Criterion Collection stan’s wet dream.

A new edition of 2019’s immensely popular food gardening guide, Veg in One Bed is the perfect volume for anyone interested in growing produce throughout the year. This is like some Vince McMahon meme template-level stuff. A cookbook? I’m intrigued. About gardening? Yes. And it’s stuff you can grow and eat all year? Hell yeah. Over 5,000 reviews on Amazon with an average of 4.6 stars? Wow! Sold.

Let me know what time to come over for dinner—I can bring a bottle of wine.

The Rec Room staff independently selected all of the stuff featured in this story. Want more reviews, recommendations, and red-hot deals? Sign up for our newsletter.