Ottolenghi is Still the Top in Cookbooks at EYB
I am a loyal subscriber for 13 years to Eat Your Books, a cookbook indexing service, or portal to 172,152 cookbooks as of this moment. I have brutally whittled my collection down to 225 which amounts to some 65,000 recipes in my house. When you want to make a lemon tart or Bolognese sauce, where is your recipe? That’s the premise behind the EYB business started in 2010: how to find the recipe you want quickly when you own a ton of books. These days they offer much more of the culinary world and a much more quality search result, particularly for online recipes, than the standard Gx$?&* search.
The most popular author in the EYB collection is Yotam Ottolenghi with three books ranked #1 Plenty, #2 Jerusalem, #3 Simple of the top ten and he has five books in the top ten. Plenty is on 14,530 bookshelves today. Samin Nosrat is the next most popular author and her book Salt, fat, Acid, Heat is on 8,812 bookshelves. Julia Child with about 35 years more in the market place with her one of her big hits, Mastering the Art of French Cooking, is close behind newcomer Nosrat with 8,048 bookshelves.
EYB Top 10 most popular books (by number of members who own them)
Plenty - Yotam Ottolenghi
Jerusalem - Yotam Ottolenghi
Ottolenghi Simple – Yotam Ottolenghi
Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat - Samin Nosrat
Mastering the Art of French Cooking #1– Julia Child, Louisette Bertholle and Simone Beck
Plenty More - Yotam Ottolenghi
Essentials of Classic Italian Cooking – Marcella Hazan
Ottolenghi – The Cookbook – Yotam Ottolenghi
The Silver Palate Cookbook – Julee Rosso and Sheila Lukins
The Food Lab: Better Home Cooking Through Science – J. Kenji Lopez-Alt
My 10 favorite books at EYB from their most popular rankings
Plenty - Yotam Ottolenghi
Jerusalem - Yotam Ottolenghi
Mastering the Art of French Cooking #1 – Julia Childs and Simone Beck
The Food Lab: Better Home Cooking Through Science – J. Kenji Lopez-Alt
Dining In: – Melissa Roman
Dinner: Changing the Game - Melissa Clark
My Paris Kitchen - David Lebovitz
Bistro Cooking – Patricia Wells
Pok Pok: - Ricker and Goode
Dinner in French: - Melissa Clark
When I sorted my bookshelf by the most popular and reviewed the results, I decided to exclude the books I don’t use now or haven’t used much in my life. A good example is The Silver Palate Cookbook – Julee Rosso and Sheila Lukins. It was wildly popular when I was young in New York. I visited their deli and took out the famous chicken salad for a picnic in Central Park like thousands of others and bought the book. I may have made a few recipes then, if so, I don’t remember what. I own Volume 2 of Mastering the Art of French Cooking but it has not captured my attention. I use Julia Child’s The Way to Cook much more but that doesn’t rank as high with the EYB group.
I continue to cook from all the books on my list, plus many that didn’t make the top ten, like Curaté. I own two more Ottolenghi books than I listed, Plenty More and Simple. I work with each new Ottolenghi book as it comes out but seldom go back to it. That’s his problem with being so prolific and being a newspaper columnist (over 1100 online recipes from the Guardian are available at EYB). He provides so many new things to try all the time without buying a book. As of December 2024 he's given up the weekly Guardian recipe and is going to a quarterly model as well as started a Substack newsletter. I’m happy for his success and think he deserves all the accolades. His food from his books is good. Although I haven’t eaten at any of his places in London because I haven’t visited there in many years, I send people and they report back favorably.
“My favorite recipes from Jerusalem are:
Chicken with Caramelized Onion and Cardamom Rice, Prawns, Scallops and Clams, Root Vegetable Slaw, and Mixed Bean Salad.”
I depend on David Lebovitz whose Substack I subscribe to and think he’s worth every penny, plus he has a brilliant web site with recipes, Paris restaurants and travel trips. Melissa Clark is my favorite NYT food writer with many recipes in my recipe box and I buy her books. I like Alison Roman but she has become an exclusively subscriber business and she charges more than I want to pay. I do miss her cooking videos. I am a huge fan of Kenji Lopez-Alt from the old days at Serious Eats and The Food Lab, is my favorite reference book. His last two books on single subjects (woks and pizza) weren’t of interest to me as I already had them covered and didn’t use them. I enjoy his once a month column in the NYT. I follow all of them on Facebook and Instagram. I have become quite a fan of David Tanis who also publishes a column monthly in the NYT. He is an alumni, like David Lebovitz, of Chez Panisse restaurant in Berkely CA, and is working again with Alice Waters at Lulu restaurant in the Armand Hammer Museum in LA.
Seeing some of the abandoned authors on my list and how I’m moving away from others I once reverred, I felt particularly guilty that I threw Marcella Hazan off the truck as I was devoted several decades ago. To learn why she is so beloved watch the trailer at marcellafilm.com. I own several of her books that are well splattered and spent an afternoon with her and her husband Victor at the Hollywood Farmers Market selling Marcella Cucina. The event was memorable for all the uber cool Angelenos who ignore movie stars but walked by our table pointed at her and said out loud, “Look who that is!” So I have to accept that no one stays on top forever—except it appears that Ottolenghi is showing stamina.