The Food52 Cookbook: 140 Winning Recipes from Exceptional Home Cooks

The Best Cooks Are Home Cooks

Accomplished food writers and editors Amanda Hesser and Merrill Stubbs had a mission: to discover and celebrate the best home cooks in the country. Each week for fifty-two weeks, they ran recipe contests on their website, Food52.com, and the 140 winning recipes make up this book. They include:

• Double Chocolate Espresso Cookies
• Secret Ingredient Beef Stew
• Simple Summer Peach Cake
• Wishbone Roast Chicken with Herb Butter

These recipes prove the truth that great home cooking doesn’t have to be complicated or precious to be memorable. This book captures the community spirit that has made Food52 a success. It features Amanda’s and Merrill’s thoughts and tips on every recipe, plus behind-the-scenes photos, reader comments, and portraits of the contributors—putting you right in the kitchen with America’s most talented cooks.

"While working on The Essential New York Times Cookbook, Hesser (Cooking for Mr. Latte) and Stubbs realized that some of the best recipes come from home cooks, and launched food52.com-a site that encourages home cooks to share recipes and tips. Each week, they challenged visitors to come up with a recipe based on a certain theme or ingredient: best shrimp recipe, best holiday cookies, best baked pasta dish, and so forth. Here, they collect a year's worth of those recipes, accompanied by comments from fellow foodies, as well as tips and trivia. Grouped by season, Hesser and Stubbs highlight each week's winning recipe, including the story behind it, why it was picked, a short bio of the recipe's creator, and some encouraging words on why you should try the dish. Even readers with a shelf full of cookbooks will appreciate the book's broad, creative collection: from Pink Bolognese (a merging of the creamy vodka sauce with classic Bolognese), to a simple Ginger Sangria, to more ambitious fare, such as a stuffed manicotti with homemade pasta, DIY Merguez sausage, and a Caramelized Pork Báhn Mì sandwich. Cooks of all skill levels will find plenty of room to stretch. "
Publishers Weekly (Starred Review) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

“I’ve been a judge on Food52, and let me just say, the recipes are excellent!”

—Gwyneth Paltrow

The Food 52 Cookbook is the first-ever online community cookbook, based on the popular Food52.com website (“Best of the Web” —Saveur) by bestselling author Amanda Hesser and food writer Merrill Stubbs. The beautifully photographed pages are filled with more than 140 delicious seasonal recipes from the most inventive home cooks in America. The Food 52 Cookbook is a feast for the senses, tantalizing with scrumptious culinary delights like Lamb Burgers with Cilantro Yogurt and Strawberries with Lavender Biscuits.

Amanda Hesser has been named one of fifty women game-changers in food by Gourmet. A longtime writer and editor for the New York Times, Hesser has written the award-winning books Cooking for Mr. Latte and The Cook and the Gardener, and edited the essay collection, Eat, Memory. Her latest book, a New York Times bestseller and the winner of a James Beard Award, is The Essential New York Times Cookbook. Amanda lives in Brooklyn with her husband, Tad Friend, and their two children.

Merrill Stubbs is a graduate of Le Cordon Bleu in London. She has written for various publications, including the New York Times’ “T Living,” Edible Brooklyn, Body+Soul, and Culinate.com, and she was the food editor for the Herb Quarterly magazine. She lives in Brooklyn with her husband.

Food52.com features more than 12,000 recipes and receives half a million visitors per month.