Flavor Zone: The Best Cookbooks That Dropped in September

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 September, we learned the secrets of perfect chile oil, plotted a West African feast, made a four-hour Bolognese that was actually worth it, and began the journey towards gnocchi mastery.

My fellow cool weather enjoyers: We are (nearly) back in business. To paraphrase Jesus in The Last Temptation of Christ, it is almost accomplished. We have transitioned out of Bruce Springsteen/Dave Matthews Band season and have found ourselves well into Sufjan Stevens, Gillian Welch, and Nick Drake season (or simply remained in a never-ending The Cure season, if you’re really one of us). We’re not even thinking about tomatoes and corn anymore, because we’re too obsessed with squash, lentils, and hearty pastas right now. Fresh peaches? Forgotten. Soon, we’ll be entering full autumnal darkness, i.e., revisiting The Sopranos and mainlining soups, stews, and Indian food delivery for a few months. For those who hold onto the light, however, that might mean trips to warm places, vitamin D lamps, daily yoga, and wintery salads. In any case, all hail jacket season. Winter is coming.

On that note, September really brought it with the soul-warming comfort food cookbooks. (Wow, it’s like publishers know what kind of food people will want to eat this time of year. Amazing.) Here at VICE, we leaned into this month’s cookbooks pretty hard. We talked to Fly By Jing founder and CEO Jing Gao about her powerful new book about Sichuan food, The Book of Sichuan Chili Crisp; in it, she tells you how to make Fly By Jing faves like chile crisp, Tribute Pepper oil, Zhong sauce, mala spice mix, and much, much more. We also cooked our way through the winding, gluten-laden roads of Pasta Every Day, the vibrant debut from Pasta Social Club founder Meryl Feinstein. We even invited our friends over and cooked Dan Pelosi’s “vodka sawce” recipe from Let’s Eat. And I’m no Nostradamus (JK, I am Nostradamus), but I predict a West African feast full of jollof rice and chicken yassa is in my future. Naturally, our favorite cookbooks of the month include these bangers, and a few more. Let’s get into it.

If you love the flavors of Fly By Jing’s pantry staples—like its Sichuan Chili Crisp, Mala Spice Mix, and Tribute Pepper Oil—you’ll want to pick up founder and CEO Jing Gao’s The Book of Sichuan Chili Crisp. You’ll not only get recipes for all of the brand’s most beloved items, but you’ll be able to make a bunch of Gao’s fave classic Chinese dishes. Oh, and we talked to her about the book. “I like to call the dishes ‘Sichuan soul food.’ It’s very much comfort food—it’s easy and accessible, especially with the ease and convenience of Fly By Jing’s pantry goods and spices, it’s even more accessible to be able to make [these dishes] easily at home,” Gao told us. “I would describe [the food in the book] as rooted in tradition, but made for the way we eat today.”

“The book you are holding in your hands is not meant to show you the latest cooking trends or ground-breaking techniques used in the restaurants with the most Michelin stars in the world,” writes author Laurent Dagenais at the beginning of Always Hungry! “It reflects what you can see in my many videos on social media: unpretentious food, the promotion of quality ingredients treated with respect and the use of basic techniques done properly.” With comfort-y dishes ranging from maple parsnip soup and crayfish rolls to creamy mushroom udon noodles and barbecued sea bream with Greek salad, this one is full of simple-but-elevated rustic winners. We are indeed hungry (bordering on hangry).

Chef Pierre Thiam wants us to know and feel, as he succinctly puts it in the introduction to Simply West African, that “Africa is everywhere.” His goal? To bring us a collection of West African recipes that are full of flavor and history, but also accessible to the typical home cook. The thought of making chicken yassa (there’s also a vegan version), jollof rice, roasted eggplant in mafé peanut sauce, fufu, and so much more from the comfort of home? That’s a recipe for a nice winter.

We love Taiwanese food, and a cookbook with sections titled “Beer Food,” “Night Market,” and “Family Style” is a good way to get under our skin. Ever want to make a killer three-cup chicken or sticky rice sausage? Want to know whether blood cake can be made vegan (apparently it can here)? Made in Taiwan is the ticket.

Looking for some low-effort, high-flavor dishes for your Friday evening (or any night TBH) at home? This new classic from Adeena Sussman wants you to simply vibe while also eating good food. (So did her last one, Sababa, FWIW.) Make the extra-crispy potato kugel. And if you like it, check out a few of our other fave Jewish cookbooks here.

Meryl Feinstein’s Pasta Every Day is one of the most intuitive pasta cookbooks we’ve ever come across (we reviewed it here). It’s set up to guide you in perfectly pairing the right doughs and shapes with their tastiest preparations and sauces, giving you the freedom to truly come up with any kind of dish you want. And since Feinstein created Pasta Social Club, you know you’re in good hands and will be making some baller pasta. I made the Bolognese and paired it with potato gnocchi, and it was pretty excellent.

Love vodka sauce, meatballs, humongous sandwiches, and grandpa-style (yes, we meant to write that) pizza? Dan Pelosi—who you may know better as @grossypelosi—has a new cookbook for you. Let’s Eat shows you why Pelosi is hella famous on the internet by letting you cook his very fun and good dishes right here, in real life. Here’s a deeper dive into what makes the book so good, or just take it from me that you need to try this vodka sauce for yourself and smash that “buy now” button.

Check back next month, where we’ll give you Starbucks’ pumpkin spice latte recipe October’s best new cookbooks.

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.