For those used to Thomas Keller in the context of award-winning restaurants The French Laundry and Per Se comes the happy surprise of this beautiful guide to excellence in home cooking. The consummate professional Keller lets his hair down, so to speak, trading in high-tech equipment for wooden spoons and family-style serving platters. With the simple equation that “great product plus great recipes equals great cooking,” Keller exalts the seemingly humble forum of the home kitchen into a place where extraordinary food is possible. Keller begins with a brief primer on the tools and techniques essential to great home cooking, even delineating “the big four” countertop appliances on which any capable kitchen is built. At the end of the book is an index on indispensable culinary staples like clarified butter, mornay sauce, pork brine, and a basic herb sachet. And in between are the recipes that make up Keller’s home cooking repertoire, from classics to creative reinterpretations—dishes that bring the standard of home cooking that much closer to the professional kitchen.

For a book that combines the culinary variety of a Finnish, Greek, and Cypriot heritage, an English and South African childhood, and a culinary career spanning Sydney, Tuscany, and Mexico, Tessa Kiros’ Falling Cloudberries is quite neatly assembled and prettily adorned. Part homage to her family’s rich culinary traditions and part testament to the heterogeneity of modern cuisine, Kiros’ book serves the dual purposes of validating the home cooking experience and claiming the flavors of divergent traditions as the rightful experience of a single palette. For the wanderlust gourmet, Falling Cloudberries is a testament to the romance, history, and universality of culinary tradition.

Lisa Schroeder changed careers at 35, enrolling in the Culinary Institute of America, working long hours in multiple restaurants, and finally starting upscale comfort-food mecca Mother’s Bistro & Bar in Portland ten years ago. From this outpost, Chef Schroeder combines her culinary training at one of the country’s most respected programs with a deep respect for the homey satisfaction of mothers’ recipes from all over. Just as her restaurant bridges the gap between the casual, traditional style of home cooking practiced by mothers and the savvy of a working chef, Schroeder’s book offers tips – called “Love Notes” – to explain the winning techniques behind her mom-inspired, chef-executed recipes. With 150 dishes from the restaurant, Mother’s Best promises to bring rustic, simple, home style cuisine to a mother’s kitchen near you.