The climate cookbooks gift guide
Gift one of these climate cookbooks, demand the recipient cook you a thank-you dinner
A programming note for all baking buds: Next week’s newsletter — which will be about everything you’d find on a regenerative cookie plate — will be the last of the year. This dessert demon is going on holiday break.
And speaking of the holidays, I’m discounting paid subscriptions by 30% through the end of the year so you can snag one as a gift for yourself or a baking bud. Your support is a direct investment in my research, writing, interviewing, and recipe development, which I do because I believe climate cuisine needs a damn good dessert course. If you subscribe or gift a subscription during this special, I’ll snail-mail you two original cookie recipes and a Pale Blue Tart sticker. :)
When I wrote about climate cookbooks — a new type of cookbook written to address the dietary changes necessitated by the climate crisis — for Grist recently, I had this follow-up gift guide in mind the whole time.
As I was mainlining coffee and sautéing my way through a dozen of these cookbooks, I was struck by how many flavors of climate cooking their authors have dreamt up: There’s a colorful, waste-not approach to upcycling odds-and-ends into quick meals that rule, a collection of traditional, plant-forward recipes from around the world, and even a recipe for perennial, regional eating.
So if the number of holiday gifts you have sorted is a big old goose egg, consider the climate cookbook — and the profound obligation its recipient will be under to make you a thank-you dinner, pronto.
The climate cookbooks gift guide
For the curious weeknight cook
One: Pot, Pan, Planet by Anna Jones is what happens when a vegetarian cookbook author known for recipes as brightly flavored and globally inspired as Yotam Ottolenghi’s — just less fussy — wises up to the urgency of the climate crisis. You won’t notice that Jones has tinkered with her methods and ingredients as you fry chickpeas for a carrot-tahini soup or stew greens for kimchi-fried rice, but she has. In her latest cookbook, Jones has streamlined kitchen appliance use (hence the whole one-pot, one-pan thing) to save time and energy, offered vegan swaps when dairy and eggs infrequently appear, and deemphasized plant-based ingredients like almonds and chocolate that come with social or environmental baggage. In terms of environmental benefit, Jones’ cooking style is kind of a vegetarianism-plus — and there’s an extra helping for readers who want more. Tips on how to improve issues like biodiversity and soil health dot the book like pats of butter tucked between the latticed windows of a pie crust — not mandatory, but certainly delicious.
Climate cooking ideas: More plants, less waste
Try this dessert first: Chocolate, olive oil, and rosemary cake
For just about anyone
There’s a reason I’ve already gifted this book twice this year. Restaurateur sisters Margaret & Irene Li believe cooking for the climate can be as simple as using what you already have on hand. Their cookbook Perfectly Good Food was inspired in part by their realization that reducing food waste is research nonprofit Project Drawdown’s top-ranked solution to climate change (followed closely by adopting plant-rich diets). The brightly illustrated book is full of highly riffable recipes like a cream-of-anything soup and a freewheeling sangria starring berries that The Bachelor franchise might politely call ‘golden.’ The drink’s fruity flavor is as addicting as watching 70-odd-year-old women catfight over the least interesting man to ever come out of the state of Indiana.
Climate cooking ideas: Less waste
Try this dessert first: Mix-and-match fruit galette
For the global adventurer
The For People and Planet cookbook is for the home cook whose culinary cravings could fill an entire passport booklet. A global, plant-forward collection of recipes contributed by star chefs and indigenous home cooks and compiled by Kitchen Connection and the United Nations, the cookbook invites you to sauté your way through five big ideas: the food system, biodiversity, sustainable consumption, food and climate change, and reducing food waste. Stories alongside the flavorful recipes — like a moringa pasta and a nopales-and-white-tepary-bean salad — root each dish in a different, localized interpretation of sustainable eating. Carbon footprint calculations and a mild white-paper energy make this cookbook a good gift for the unabashed climate nerd in your life.
Climate cooking ideas: More plants, less waste, biodiversity, eating regionally
For the home cook who wants to be a chef
Ambitious home cooks will appreciate the emulsion of ideas and action in British chef Tom Hunt’s cookbook Eating for Pleasure, People, and Planet. The self-described “eco chef” half-joked when I interviewed him for Grist that the cookbook took 10 years to write, because he was honing the root-to-fruit manifesto that opens the book. In it, he argues that climate cooking boils down to three ideas: plant-based, low-waste, and climate cuisine — which he brings to life with recipes like a (beet) pulp fiction burger, use-what-you-have salads, homemade plant milks, and a chocolate truffle biodiversity tasting experiment. The photos in the cookbook lean cheffy — a raspberry, tomato, and foraged-herb salad looks more like a pointillist painting than I feel capable of recreating — but many of the recipes are deceptively simple, like used-espresso brownies that get extra depth of flavor from rye flour.
Climate cooking ideas: More plants, less waste, biodiversity
Try this dessert first: Aquafaba meringues with blood orange and chocolate sauce
For the dinner-party girlies
’s cookbook To the Last Bite is full of the sort of recipes and photographs that make me want to immediately depart for her Catskills farm, where I will drape myself in linen and eat with the seasons… or at least give my apartment dinner parties that kind of vibe. Alexis’s approach to climate cooking is reducing food waste; and she tackles it in a subtle way with recipe footnotes that recycle leftover and half-used ingredients from one dish to another. You could use any leftover thyme from her marinated ricotta salata to make her hearty root vegetable pot pie, and then use the leftover heavy cream from the pot pie in a banana tarte tatin. She’s training us to think about ingredient overlaps as we cook, shop, or build a menu — an approach that New York Times food writer Tanya Sichynsky has also taken in her Venn-diagram meal plans. I hope we see more of it in future climate cookbooks.Climate cooking ideas: Less waste
Try this dessert first: Any-fruit granita, which Alexis shared with Pale Blue Tart this summer
For the DIY-er
The Zero Waste Chef is for the home cooks who want to divest from the food waste and single-use plastics that are nearly inevitable conditions of shopping and cooking within our modern food system. Written by Anne-Marie Bonneau, it’s as much a guide as it is a cookbook. You’ll find bracing tips on how to say no to plastic bags and takeout containers alongside her low-waste recipes for mains, breads, desserts, and more. Anne-Marie told me that readers love the chapter on DIY staples the most: An apple scrap vinegar turns peels into a zingy condiment, and a “worth-it tomato paste” gets you out of buying that plastic-metal tube ever again.
Climate cooking ideas: Less waste
Try this dessert first: “Grown-up” sourdough brownies
For the northern heartland homies
Northern heartland homies and fans of regional eating will love The Perennial Kitchen. Beth Dooley has been writing about local, Minnesotan food for decades; but in her latest cookbook she leaned into perennial and cover crop ingredients that can restore the soil and prevent erosion, reducing farm runoff into the Mississippi and Gulf. Her recipes take you through every meal of the day — and some baking and preserving projects — and introduce you to distinctive flavors of the region. Her no-meatballs with tzatziki star hazelnuts, which grow as hardy, perennial shrubs in the upper midwest; and her toffee bars get a butterscotchy kick from perennial wunderkind Kernza. Wild rice grown by the White Earth Nation binds together a smokey-sweet turkey sausage hotdish, reassuring us that the hotdish will persist, dontcha know, in sustainable cuisine. (Phew.)
Climate cooking ideas: Eating regionally, biodiversity
Try this dessert first: Kernza toffee bars
For the nerds: An open-source list of climate cookbooks
I wrote this story for Grist because I could see this cookbook genre emerging — and I think it needs to grow. Want to see all the climate cookbooks I’ve been able to track down so far? Or do you know of another, and want to add it to the list? Leave a comment on this spreadsheet or drop me a line.