Winners

Art of Eating Prize Winner

The Winner of the 2023 Art of Eating Prize

 

The 2023 Art of Eating Prize for best food book of the year goes to Gullah Geechee Home Cooking: Recipes from the Matriarch of Edisto Island by Emily Meggett with Kayla Stewart  and Trelani Michelle. (Abrams Books)

Emily Meggett, born in 1932 on the South Carolina island of Edisto, was the pre-eminent Gullah Geechee cook of our time; she died on April 21, 2023.

“Emily Meggett and her life, her cooking, her place, deserve all the honor they receive. This book is a matriarch’s archive, a witness to a place and a people that America may have forgotten or left behind (certainly discriminated against) but who also gave the wider culture so many foodways.” Bill St. John

“This is cookbook as oral history and essential record: at once a portrait of a culture and an ode to ancestral wisdom, resilience, and the capacity to turn scarcity into abundance.” Ligaya Mishan

“I am a Canadian known for cooking Southern food (confusing I know), and this book pulls at my heartstrings. I have long preached that the food we call Southern came from enslaved West African rice farmers and that the dues we owe to the Gullah and Geechee are priceless. Emily Meggett has written a timeless gem of a book.” Hugh Acheson

“I love this book partly because Meggett was so old (89) at the time of publication, which came a year before her death almost to the day. And we live in a country that discards the elderly and disregards the value of the knowledge and community and wisdom that often come with living and enduring the way Meggett did. It’s also a country that largely seems to have no idea what a miracle it is that Gullah foodways have survived, thanks to cooks like Meggett — or how much these foodways are the very roots of so much American cooking.” Emily Nunn

“Gullah Geechee, a name that rolls off the tongue slowly like honey, conjures up ancient connections with West and Central Africa as intricate as sweetgrass baskets. I am grateful for a book that preserves the memory of this beleaguered Low Country diasporic community through the food of one of its revered matriarchs, a woman empowered by home cooking. Emily Meggett ruled her household with her spoon, and also gained the recognition of her entire community through a life of service, cooking without regrets. This is a book to savor.” Maricel Presilla

“The Gullah Geechee people were able to maintain many linguistic, cultural, and culinary remnants from their African ancestors, and it is vital that Black people as well as the wider culture respect and acknowledge the impact that this regional Southern cuisine has had on American cooking. We are all blessed to have history, memories, and recipes passed down from the late great Emily Meggett in this indispensable book.” Bryant Terry

“Gullah Geechee Home Cooking feels both delightful and important, intimate and expansive — that rare cookbook that interweaves the personal, historical, and cultural, and seasons its compelling recipes with more than a soupçon of colorful aphorisms.” Jordan Mackay

 

The Winner of the 2022 Art of Eating Prize

The 2022 Art of Eating Prize for best food book of the year goes to Bryant Terry for Black Food: Stories, Art & Recipes from Across the African Diaspora (4 Color Books). He receives $10,000 and a specially crafted hand-wrought ladle, an emblem of the prize.

Bryant Terry, who edited and curated the book, is a chef, educator, and author who lives in California. Black Food is his sixth book.


“Black Food
is important not just because of who put it together and the topic but, more than that, because it’s gorgeous and deeply interesting. Between the writings and the stories told, it goes well beyond a kitchen manual. It’s a book about food and experience and how it fits into the world.”
Sara Jenkins

“Numerous books of this kind have been published in the last few years, and this one outshines them all, particularly because of Bryant’s acute vision of bringing together a mix of voices and people who form this distinct, yet loose definition of Black Food.”
Edward Lee

“Black Food is an important and necessary book, a kaleidoscopic, almost dizzying vision of the foods of the African Diaspora that not only connects Africa and the US but reaches out to the Caribbean and Brazil. I hear the voices of a complex community of Black cooks and food writers — some seasoned professionals, others enthusiastic newcomers — who have each made sense of the African Diaspora in their own terms. Black Food is a trailblazing book on the crossroad of time and space and imbued with the irreverent eclecticism of Afrofuturism.”
Maricel Presilla

“The diverse cooking of delicious food inspired by all parts of the Americas, Africa, and other influences make this book one of the most important of this generation.”
Todd Richards

“Timely and innovative in structure, this is easily one of the most important cookbooks in the Black Diaspora. I’m happy to see it take the grand title.”
Kayla Stewart

“Black Food showcases the profound world of Black culture and its influence. A very important addition to this year’s offerings, historic.”
Frank Stitt

 

The Winner of the 2021 Art of Eating Prize

The 2021 Art of Eating Prize for best food book of the year goes to Durkhanai Ayubi for Parwana: Recipes and Stories from an Afghan Kitchen (Interlink Books). She receives $10,000 and a specially crafted hand-wrought ladle, an emblem of the prize.

Durkhanai Ayubi is a writer and restaurateur in Australia, where her parents, Afghani refugees, raised their family. Parwana is her first book; the recipes are by Farida Ayubi. Parwana means “butterfly,” a symbol of metamorphosis.

“Parwana is a small masterpiece. Ayubi does an amazing job of balancing the complicated history of Afghanistan with the tales of her family with a full catalogue of recipes that she presents as both familiar and new at the same time. The photography is the most beautiful.”
Edward Lee

“Parwana has been a revelation, a sincere window to a world that interests me through the experience of immigrants anchored by memory but reinventing themselves. It is a powerful story that touches me personally on many accounts; it is also beautifully written with the blend of history and personal involvement and recipes that call my name, some familiar, others that I want to discover with Parwana’s chef, a woman after my own heart.”
Maricel Presilla

“Parwana has an honesty and a sympathetic charm of sharing an extremely diverse range of food, flavors, and history. I feel it is a book that has staying power and one that I will enjoy returning to time again.”
Frank Stitt

“Parwana tells the story of a deep, lush, underacknowledged cuisine through an intimate lens of family and history. It’s a beautiful, beautiful book.”
Helen Rosner

“From the vibrant photography to the history of Afghanistan, recipes like challaw, gosheh fil, and falooda transport one to the center of a family’s restaurant and show us the power of tradition. Parwana’s stories seamlessly weave in togetherness — a masterful gift to the culinary community.”
Nicole Taylor

“The food is unapologetically exactly what it is, without guile or puns or attempts at modernity. This is the book that made me most hungry.”
David Tanis

“A really lyrical book about immigration, dispossession, food culture, and a cuisine we don’t hear a lot about. I loved the food I made. Parwana is beautifully written. The recipes are evocative; they tell a story and they work.”
Sara Jenkins

 

 

The Winner of the 2020 Art of Eating Prize

The 2020 Art of Eating Prize for best food book of the year goes to Caroline Eden for Black Sea: Dispatches and Recipes, Through Darkness and Light (Quadrille Publishing). She receives $10,000 and a specially crafted hand-wrought ladle, an emblem of the prize.

Caroline Eden is a widely published journalist and writer who focuses on countries of the former Soviet Union. Eden’s first book was Samarkind, about the food of Central Asia and the Caucasus. She lives in Edinburgh.

 

“The food in Black Sea is wonderful, but it’s Eden’s prose that really elevates this book to the extraordinary. She captures people, history, and the ineffable soul of cities with astonishing, almost novelistic precision — more than once, even in the headnotes, I felt myself getting lost in the world of the story. I can’t remember any cookbook that’s drawn me in quite like this.”
Helen Rosner

“Black Sea takes me back to Lawrence Durrell, whose writing influenced my travels and love of exploring Mediterranean culture. Black Sea inspires me to want to travel to this part of the world, and Eden’s writing is so evocative, so precise, with a rare ability to weave history into travel and an eye towards food and how cooking brings diverse people together.”
Frank Stitt

“For me, Eden does the impossible. She manages to pull the lens back and tell the story of a geographic region, while at the same time she tells stories that are fine-tuned, full of history, facts, and wonder. Her prose at its best reminds me of Lawrence Durrell’s travel writing: taut, colorful, opinionated and full of zest. She interprets her recipes just enough so they are tuned in to what a modern eater would want to make, while at the same time she presents a world of decaying riches and lost histories. The book is a reflection of a place that will probably not be there in quite the same way a decade from now and Eden does a remarkable job of including us in the emotional experience of her travels.”
Edward Lee

“Black Sea stood out for me among this year’s finalists for the fascinating framing of its subject, and its vivid, fluent, often beautiful writing.”
Harold McGee

“A book that expands and reorients our understanding and our empathy for a region through its food.”
John Birdsall

“I really loved it — a beautiful travelogue and an interesting take on a mostly ignored geographic area.”
Sara Jenkins

 

The Winner of the 2019 Art of Eating Prize

The 2019 Art of Eating Prize for best food book of the year goes to Brooks Headley for Superiority Burger Cookbook: The Vegetarian Hamburger Is Now Delicious (W.W. Norton). The book was written with Julia Goldberg, Gabe Rosner, Matthew Silverstein, and Matt Sweeney, and the photographs are by Sunny Shokrae. Headley receives $10,000 and a specially crafted hand-wrought ladle, an emblem of the prize.

 

Photo by Jason Fulford

Brooks Headley is a New York City chef and a punk and indie musician. In 2013, the James Beard Foundation named him best pastry chef in the United States; he is the author of Brooks Headley’s Fancy Desserts. In 2015, he opened Superiority Burger, a vegetarian restaurant.

 

Superiority Burger Cookbook is a weird, brilliant, funny, utterly intoxicating book that creeps up on you like a fever. It’s bold and clever in both its palate and its perspective, a cockeyed manifesto for vegan junk food that’s also one of the most profound roadmaps I’ve seen for reaching a culinary future that’s both sustainable (environmentally, socially, individually) and full of joy.
Helen Rosner

“Superiority Burger makes a real contribution (I’m quoting Julia here) to the large, urgent conversation about what we eat (or should eat), without being preachy in the slightest. In fact, it’s witty, usable, and has that vital quality of making you actually want to cook that few cookbooks have.”
Tse Wei Lim

“Few restaurant cookbooks do — or even aim to do — what this prize wants, which is for the work to ‘add to the wide culture of food and, ideally, to the depth of our shared knowledge.’ Brooks Headley brings the ethos of Superiority Burger to this project, but doesn’t require that the reader be familiar with the restaurant in order to understand that this food is not only forward-thinking but also delicious. Superiority Burger Cookbook absolutely contributes to a larger conversation about what we should eat (though Headley would never ‘should’ anyone) without being preachy in the slightest.”
Julia Bainbridge

“The restaurant represented something more than just its namesake when it opened, and the book does that real justice. But if we look beyond words to style, ideas, presentation, and relevance, we find something more substantial. Its food styling and photography are deliberately confrontational (in the manner of washed out, punk portraits of drugged out East Village rockers and party kids from the 80s), and its recipes are simple, sometimes brilliant mashups. They’re also practical, modern, intriguing, and delicious, with a certain rawness of intent and execution.”
Jordan Mackay

“Such creative and ground-breaking vegetarian cooking. There is an emphasis on the sensuality of food that is presented in a new way. Superiority Burger Cookbook leads us into a more vegetarian world with a big dose of lusciousness. Brilliant.”
Frank Stitt

 

The Winner of the 2018 Art of Eating Prize

The 2018 Art of Eating Prize for best food book of the year goes to Leela Punyaratabandhu for Bangkok: Recipes and Stories from the Heart of Thailand (Ten Speed Press). She receives $10,000 and a specially crafted hand-wrought ladle, an emblem of the prize.

Punyaratabandhu lives in Chicago and Bangkok, where she was born. In 2008, she began to write the blog She Simmers, and her first book, Simple Thai Food, was published in 2012. Bangkok presents the food of the Thai capital, from iconic dishes to little known, through highly accessible recipes aimed at cooks everywhere.

“Both authoritative and exciting. I found myself thoroughly fascinated by the descriptions of techniques and ingredients that were wholly new to me. That pastry on the curry puffs? The recipe is three dense pages long, yet I read every word, entranced. I’ll add my appreciation for its stories. The young man named Warlord who cries because he misses his mom’s eel-and-banana-heart (I, for one, did not know bananas had hearts) curry? The Death Railway that serves a delicious fried rice? I found these memoir passages moving and intriguing.”
Lisa Abend

“Bangkok is full of engaging stories, hungry-making pictures, and reassuringly precise and well-presented guidance. Most important, it passes the I-want-to-cook-everything test.”  
Adam Sachs

“Charming and illuminating.”
Eric Asimov

“Bangkok is brilliant. The headnotes entice, tell the story, and set the stage, while the recipes almost explode with the aromas of the ingredients. There is a passion and intellectual depth that is warm and friendly, along with a sensual attentiveness to the multitude of tiny details of cooking. Phenomenal book.”
Frank Stitt

“For a cookbook to successfully translate a cuisine for a foreign audience, the author must be intimately familiar with both cultures. As a Bangkok native who spent her formative childhood years in Thailand and her professional adult years in the United States, Leela Punyaratabandhu was uniquely positioned to write Bangkok. The recipes are accessible but not dumbed down. The stories are exotic but relatable. You’ll come away with a deeper understanding of a multi-cultural, dynamic city. And most importantly, you’ll eat very, very well.”
J. Kenji Lopez-Alt

“I was born and raised in Bangkok. I admit to having been long annoyed by people touting regional Thai food as interesting and Central Thai or Bangkok food as boring when all they know of it is what they regularly order in from generic Thai restaurants while no one’s looking. This book does justice to the mélange of regional, ethnic, and socioeconomic influences that comprise the cuisine of the fascinating city that, for over 200 years, has been the beating heart of Thailand. The recipe instructions are clear and workable while not being at all coy about the complexities. I will recommend the book to anyone who asks me about a Thai cookbook.”
Pim Techamuanvivit

 

The Winner of the 2017 Art of Eating Prize

The 2017 Art of Eating Prize for best food book of the year goes to Marlene Matar for The Aleppo Cookbook: Celebrating the Legendary Cuisine of Syria (Interlink Books). She receives $10,000 and a specially crafted hand-wrought ladle, an emblem of the prize.

Marlene Mater lives in Beirut, where she teaches international cooking; her mother’s background is Syrian. She is the author of two previous cookbooks and has appeared often on Lebanese television. This latest, most ambitious book presents the food of the ancient city of Aleppo, now all but destroyed.

 

“What becomes clear from this collection of recipes is how significant this crossroads city has been to so many people and so many cultures through the ages and how important it is to have this record of the vibrant and richly textured culinary legacy of Aleppo.”
Winnie Yang

“I love Matar’s sentiment: ‘It is natural to seek comfort in the fact that, over the millennia, Aleppo has been rebuilt time and again after periods of great turbulence and loss. But when Aleppo reconstructs this time… can the spirit, understanding, and know-how that created this heritage of traditional marketplace and cuisine be recovered and preserved as well? Hopefully, this collection of Aleppian recipes can serve as one small contribution to that venture.’ It’s a wonderful look at a cuisine and a timely reminder of the joy that comes from simple pleasures that cannot be taken for granted.”
Jordan Mackay

“I am so moved by it every time I open it that I have a hard time keeping a dry eye. Just the idea that it was finished before the souk was destroyed, and that its author deals with the destruction of Aleppo so… somehow gracefully… in the introductory text. It seems a truly important book. I like its terseness, which I find elegant, and find its recipes good and easy to follow.”
Tamar Adler

“It is precisely Aleppo’s restraint that I find compelling. I opened it expecting impassioned writing on atrocity and tragedy, and was surprised to find concise recipes with minimal or no headnotes and none of the usual heartwarming paeans to childhood memory or heart-wrenching eulogies to things and people lost. In its precision, I find evidence of the book’s urgency. There is just enough writing in it to make the importance of doing so clear.”
Lisa Abend

“The Aleppo Cookbook is carefully researched and beautifully written, with precision and specificity. Matar recognized that Aleppo, its people and its culture, were in immediate danger. She methodically recorded recipes, putting faith in the fact that the city ‘has been rebuilt time and again after periods of great turbulence and loss.’ And every time Matar recorded and celebrated a dish, like the simple herb-filled omelet ujjet baqdoones, she also resisted its loss. The book isn’t just a collection of clear, delicious recipes from the great home cooks and restaurant chefs of Aleppo, but also a guide to understanding, preserving, and rebuilding a food culture.”
Tejal Rao

“The book is restrained and beautiful. I feel a stronger sense of urgency now more than ever to pay attention to the small details in our kitchens and our lives that may not survive these turbulent times. I felt completely seduced by the story, and the recipes are cohesive so that most cooks will feel the invitation to explore the history, geography, ingredients, techniques and even language presented within.”
Michael Anthony

“Even the brief head notes, along with the recipes, combine to give us a sense of the place, people, and culture. I vote for The Aleppo Cookbook for its freshness, timeliness, riskiness and fascination. I do not recall seeing a book like this. I do not know whether it will change the way people eat, but I do believe it will change the way people think.”
Eric Asimov

The Winner of the 2016 Art of Eating Prize

The 2016 Art of Eating Prize for best food book of the year goes to Toni Tipton-Martin for The Jemima Code: Two Centuries of African American Cookbooks (University of Texas Press). She receives $10,000 and a specially crafted hand-wrought ladle, an emblem of the prize.

Toni Tipton-Martin_Author PhotoToni Tipton-Martin writes about food and nutrition and she is an activist. She founded the nonprofit SANDE Youth Project; she is  a co-founder of the Southern Foodways Alliance and a founder of Foodways Texas. In 2015, she hosted Soul Summit: A Conversation About Race, Identity, Power and Food, a three-day event held in Austin, Texas. She is also the owner of a rare collection of more than 300 African-American cookbooks.

“Many people who are less familiar with the country’s culinary and racial history (and their many intersections) will be pretty amazed… and a bit shocked. Very powerful stuff. I’d love to see this book on hundreds of curricula for courses on so many subjects, many not even food-related.”
Garrett Oliver

“This book is vital and so beautifully done. At first I wished there was more essay to read between the book reviews, but as I went along it became clear that the whole structure of the book was working to support and complicate that introduction. The research tells the story and it’s a very powerful format. I loved this.”
Tejal Rao

“Who knew that an annotated bibliography could fascinate, appall, amuse, move, and make a major contribution to our understanding of American culinary history? The Jemima Code does it all with its vivid sketches of more than a hundred forgotten books and the African American cooks, mostly women, who wrote or inspired them.”
Harold McGee 

“Jemima” is an inspiring work of scholarship. The research is framed beautifully. The premise, in the best tradition of social history, illuminates what has been hidden in plain sight. You scratch your head and say, ‘Why hasn’t anybody thought of doing that before?’ And then you realize that’s part of its genius, the fresh look at seemingly well-trodden ground.”
Eric Asimov

“I was particularly impressed by its sophisticated analysis of just what went on behind the rubric of ‘Southern’ cuisine. And as Eric says, I think opens new pathways for research and will therefore continue to have great impact down the line.”
Lisa Abend

“I think “the Jemima Code” is brilliant and subversive and, from an American point of view, perhaps the most important book released last year.”
Daniel Patterson

“It continues to move me every time I pick it up. I gave a duplicate copy I had here to my sister in law over the weekend, and she sat with it, absorbed, while the rest of the room chattered. It’s beautiful and strange and renegade and that overused–and unavoidable–adjective, important.”
Tamar Adler

The Winner of the 2015 Art of Eating Prize

The 2015 Art of Eating Prize for best food book of the year goes to David Sterling for Yucatán: Recipes from a Culinary Expedition (University of Texas Press). He receives $10,000 and a specially crafted hand-wrought ladle, an emblem of the prize.

David Sterling by Eduardo Cervantes

David Sterling is the founder and chef de cuisine of Los Dos Cooking School in Mérida, Yucatán, Mexico. He first learned French techniques, until a trip to Mexico in 1972 changed his focus to Mexican cooking. He pursued a primary career in graphic design until 2003, when he moved to Yucatán full-time and began his research into traditional cocina yucateca.

 

Yucatán: This was a sleeper for me and I was not prepared to be blown away by the richness of the book — a text full of information and interest, conveyed with passion and intelligence, about a region that has heretofore been a mystery to me. An eye opener of a book, and with handsome and interesting photographs.”
Nancy Harmon Jenkins

“David Sterling’s Yucatán would be a remarkable book in any year and sets a high bar for future aspirants to The Art of Eating Prize. It’s an impressively synoptic portrait of a little-known region and its rich food culture, the product of years of immersive experience and study, whose genial prose, copious photographs, and approachable recipes work together beautifully to communicate the vitality of Yucatecan cooking.”
Harold McGee

“Sterling has written an extraordinary, spirited, deeply researched book that should be read and relished like a novel, page by page, as every recipe, photograph, and story work together to tell the complex, beautiful story of Mexico’s Yucatán peninsula.”
Tejal Rao

Yucatán is a truly towering achievement. It portrays a rich culture with passion, excitement and scholarly rigor, and it’s hard to see how this book will be surpassed any time soon. Though there are many great books on Mexican regional cuisine, one hopes that Sterling is already hard at work on a book about another region of Mexico. We need as many books like this as we can get.”
Garrett Oliver

Yucatán is a loving look at an ancient culture with rich culinary traditions. Well-written and beautifully photographed, it’s a compelling journey through an underdiscovered region.”
Daniel Patterson

“This year, amidst a bevy of interesting and delicious titles, Yucatán was a clear victor for its intelligent, revelatory, and genuinely new look at a region that had been entirely overlooked. Few books in any year can claim to change the way we think about an entire culture, but thanks to David Sterling, Mexican food and the Yucatán can never be tasted the same way again.”
Lucas Wittman

Yucatán is truly extraordinary in its depth and breadth, and the passion and dedication underpinning this work are clear on every page. Sterling’s contribution has not only illuminated an underappreciated subject, but has expanded the horizon of inquiry.”
Winnie Yang