Author: Jessica Plummer

I’ve been reading the Smitten Kitchen blog since blogs were, you know, a thing, so the parasocial attachment is real. She’s still the first place I go when I don’t know what to cook, so I’m excited to add a whole new batch of recipes to that well — especially that pound cake she keeps talking about.

I’ve only heard good things about this book, which explores Black and Jewish cuisine and the intersection between them — but also how food and culture shape each other, and the inventive cooking that arises out of migration and diaspora.

Another blog book! This one is by the Leung family, who are behind the popular blog of the same title. Chinese food is a go-to comfort food for me, so anything that can help me get more of it in my life is a plus.

NYC marathon champion Shalane Flanagan and nutrition coach Elise Kopecky’s previous book, Run Fast. Cook Fast. Eat Slow. is one of my favorite cookbooks to reference, so I need to add their latest collaboration to my collection. As a runner, I love their emphasis on flavor and enjoyment instead of counting calories or excising “bad” foods.

I know just enough about curry to know that it’s an extremely broad term that my occasional forays into cooking butter chicken have barely scraped the surface of. This cookbook about “the diaspora of curry” — from Asia, Africa, Australia, Europe, and the Americas — sounds enlightening and fascinating.

Speaking of cuisines I know very little about, African cuisine is too often overlooked and ignored in the Western world. Africana has over 100 recipes from all over the African continent, which obviously encompasses a massive range of cultures and flavors, and I’m excited to try as many of them as possible.

Okay, this isn’t exactly a cookbook, but it does include 25 recipes, and also I loved Kurlansky’s The Big Oyster, on the history of the oyster industry in New York City, and more importantly, I absolutely love onions. Bring on the alliums!

This is another cookbook I keep hearing good things about and another cookbook that arose out of a popular blog — Little Fat Boy — but the main reason I bumped it up on my TBR is because it has the most beautiful dumplings on the cover, and I could eat dumplings every day of my life and never get sick of them.

Okay, this one is cheating a little bit, because I already own it, but I’m including it because it’s designed to be read straight through. What’s included in this book are less recipes and more techniques for how to make lots of basic staples that you can portion out, freeze, reheat, and repurpose to get a wide array of meals on the table quickly. Also, the back and forth notes between Chang and Krishna are charming.

And of course, we have to end with dessert! In the battle between cake and pie, I am always and forever Team Cake. This book gives you a little bit of a shortcut by starting with box mixes, which, let’s face it, are sometimes the tastiest option. And it’s publishing just in time for my birthday! You know, just in case anyone feels like throwing me a party.

As a white American, I know at least the mainstream African American history that’s taught in schools, though the older I get, the more I realize how little I actually know. How much less, then, do I know about the history of Black people in England? This history dates back to Roman Britain, situating Black Britons as part of the history and culture of the nation rather than rare exceptions.

This book makes the case that Indian slavery – technically illegal but openly practiced for centuries – was one of the major causes of Native American genocide and one with which we still have not reckoned. Again, I know mainstream (white) American history pretty well. I don’t know about this.

That subtitle! How could I not want to read it? I know very little about Chinese history in general, so there are centuries to dive into here, but Empress Dowager Cixi lived from 1835-1908 (and ruled China from 1861 on), so that’s the period we’re looking at for this one.

The case this book revolves around – the sterilization of a “promiscuous” socialite by her mother in order to control millions of dollars of her inheritance – took place in 1934, and I’ll admit I’m a 1930s history buff – but I know far less about disability history and reproductive rights than I’d like to, and stories like Britney Spears’s only serve to illuminate how sadly relevant this sort of thing still remains.

You can’t mention that you like history without having a million World War II books chucked your way – but India is almost never mentioned. This book examines the period between 1940 and 1944 and the devastation Churchill’s decisions wreaked on the subcontinent.

I love urban history, especially that of my native New York, but books on the topic tend to focus on the 19th century and earlier, and rarely address disturbing aspects like the way American governments at every level codified segregation in our cities throughout most of the 20th century.

This history of the migration of almost six million Black southerners to other parts of the country over the years 1915-1970 has been on my TBR for ages, and having now read Isabel Wilkerson’s Caste has just moved it higher up on the list.

The thing about historical events that happen when you’re a child is: you’re too little to understand them, but they’re too recent for you to learn about them in school. So it was for me with the end of the Soviet Union when I was seven. All I’ve ever gotten is a vague sense that America and capitalism are just so gosh-darn superior; I have a feeling it’s a little bit more nuanced than that.