Without baking, there are no holidays. Here are the new cookbooks that have us softening butter and feeding our starters (yes, still). They make wonderful gifts, and you’ll get bonus points for including a digital scale.
Delectable: Sweet & Savory Baking, by Claudia Fleming with Catherine Young (Random House, $40). The casually elegant seasonal desserts that Claudia Fleming served at peak Gramercy Tavern (circa 1994 to 2002) inspired a generation of pastry chefs. (You can thank her for the salted-caramel-chocolate tart.) Home bakers spent up to $200 for out-of-print copies of her 2001 bible, The Last Course, reissued in 2019. Two decades later, Delectable delivers a new suite of classics for the confident baker. Fleming isn’t trying to re-invent herself for TikTok. Rather, her fruity palate and well-balanced love of American and European favorites are back in style. In Fleming’s world, peach-and-blackberry cobbler is topped with ricotta biscuits, devil’s-food cake is layered with Earl Grey–infused cream, a wintry Tatin is brightened with kumquats, and sticky buns are filled with shiitakes. By combining a career’s worth of wisdom with her truly delectable recipes, Fleming has created yet another ambitious collection that will inspire for decades to come.
