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Cookbooks

Review: Practical Magic for the Modern Cook

Swiss chard slab pie from Kristin Donnelly.Credit...Meredith Heuer for The New York Times

Here’s one way to spot the modern cook: Look in her refrigerator. Chances are, there’s a little kimchi fizzing in the back and a jar of preserved lemons in the door. Regardless of the food she grew up with, she is acquainted with a wide array of global flavors, from fish sauce and tahini to pomegranate molasses and miso.

These ingredients aren’t advertisements for sophistication or adventurousness. They’re just part of today’s pantry, along with crème fraîche and smoked paprika. At least, that’s what I thought after spending a few weeks with a stack of cookbooks that come out this fall.

I had brought them all home because they were books that made me want to cook, but there was something else, too. Each had its own clear, complete vision for what modern home cooking should look like: comforting, practical, often vegetable-focused and with a global point of view.

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“A New Way to Dinner”
by Amanda Hesser and Merrill Stubbs
(Ten Speed, $35)
Credit...Sonny Figueroa/The New York Times

Efficiency was a major theme. I’m impressed by good planners: They map their time to make sure they’re spending it on what really matters to them. And as someone who tends to throw meals together at the very last minute, I hoped that cooking from the new book by the Food52 founders, Amanda Hesser and Merrill Stubbs, would make a difference for me.

The book, “A New Way to Dinner: A Playbook of Recipes and Strategies for the Week Ahead,” offers complete grocery lists and menus for one-week blocks. Each plan outlines how a week may look with a couple of hours of weekend prep to set up five home-cooked dinners that share and borrow elements from one another and then repurpose leftovers into lunches.

My week’s prep, which I saved for late Sunday night, was meant to take an hour and a half, but took me three. Not because the directions were off, but because I kept going outside to drink wine with a friend.

Was I already failing? No. By the end of the night, following Ms. Hesser’s guidelines, my fridge was packed with quart containers full of secret weapons I would use throughout the week: pickled onions, roasted cherry tomatoes, blueberry syrup, sliced steak and onions.

Those roasted cherry tomatoes ended up as a side with Thai-style steak, and the leftover steak from that meal became part of a crispy rice salad with avocado. Extra tomatoes were stirred into rice with jarred tuna and olives for a rice salad. Another night, I mixed them with corn and penne for a summery pasta dish.

“Our plan may take the spontaneity out of your cooking,” the authors write, and that’s true. There is something a little grim about knowing on Monday exactly what you’ll be eating all week long. (Beef again?)

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“A Modern Way to Cook”
by Anna Jones
(Ten Speed, $35)
Credit...Sonny Figueroa/The New York Times

On the other hand, spontaneity in cooking is deeply overrated: Thanks to the Plan, just 20 minutes after arriving home from the office on a Thursday night, I was able to carry a home-cooked dinner over to some friends and their new baby. It occurred to me that the book had a certain Marie Kondo quality to it: the life-changing magic of planning your week.

Anna Jones, a British cookbook author and food stylist, has a whole section in “A Modern Way to Cook: 150+ Vegetarian Recipes for Quick, Flavor-Packed Meals” for 15-minute dishes, including one for the spaghetti technique that the internet went heart-eyed for a few years ago.

In it, you boil the raw pasta not just with water, but also with halved cherry tomatoes, lemon zest and greens. By the time the pasta has cooked, the liquids have reduced to form a thick, starchy sauce. It’s a one-pot meal, ideal for nights when you need to get dinner to the table quickly and don’t have a lot of ingredients to mess around with.

Many of Ms. Jones’s recipes are also vegan and gluten free, leaning a bit toward wellness trends like turmeric milk and spiralized vegetables. I was excited to try her recipe for spelt pizza from the 35-minute section, which involved making cashew ricotta from scratch. Most people who are in the habit of making ricotta substitutes from cashews probably know to start with raw nuts, but I had never made one before. The recipe didn’t specify the type of cashews, so I used the roasted ones in my pantry.

I ended up with a rather delicious but not remotely ricotta-like paste, which I crumbled over the spelt flatbread, tomato sauce and sautéed mushrooms. I didn’t know I had made a mistake until a vegan friend pointed out how fudgelike it was and inquired about the technique.

I struggled with directions in some of the other recipes, too. It seemed like a lot of work to fry thinly sliced lemon and chop it for a zucchini salad when you were already making a sauce from pistachios, herbs and lemon juice. Why not just grate in zest along with the juice? I have pretty decent knife skills, but it wasn’t so easy to julienne six zucchini into fine noodles without a mandoline or a spiralizer, though Ms. Jones assured me it would be fast work.

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One-pot spaghetti from Diana Henry.Credit...Meredith Heuer for The New York Times

Maybe I was getting lazy. It was time for a potluck.

Like cross-stitching and tarot-card reading, potlucks never went away. I like them in theory (everyone sharing the work and the food), but the truth is, I haven’t been to very many successful ones.

Kristin Donnelly’s “Modern Potluck: Beautiful Food to Share” is inspired by the family gatherings she went to as a child in the Philadelphia area, and the community potlucks she attended at Quaker meetinghouses. She paid attention to what worked and what didn’t, and has simple guidelines for getting the potluck right.

She believes in cooking generously, family style, and making food that is easy to transport and share. The 9-by-13-inch pan is to Ms. Donnelly what the sestina is to a poet, an old-fashioned form to play with. She uses it for poblanos filled with the cumin-scented potato mash that usually goes into samosas, as well as for a pasta-free lasagna layered with mushroom Bolognese. It’s the kind of unfussy, nourishing food that a dream roommate might have waiting for you when get home.

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“Modern Potluck”
by Kristin Donnelly
(Clarkson Potter, $27.50)
Credit...Sonny Figueroa/The New York Times

Ms. Donnelly is — appropriately, given her communal subject — very good at attribution. The recipe for a vegetarian slab pie, with a peppery crust and a creamy Swiss chard filling (one of my favorites in the book), came from a former intern of hers.

The British cookbook author Diana Henry is also great at crediting the people who inspire her and at drawing the lines that connect what you’re cooking to other people and places all over the world. Some recipes from “Simple: Effortless Food, Big Flavors” came via Twitter, reading a magazine column or meeting a friend. This is truly modern cooking, the recipes rolling in constantly from many different sources, all of which Ms. Henry seems to value equally.

She manages to guide you through recipes with very little instruction, because she’s so precise with her wording. For the delicious roast chicken, marinated overnight in yogurt, Ms. Henry explains how to marinade and cook the meat, and dress a salad, in just three tidy paragraphs.

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“Small Victories”
by Julia Turshen
(Chronicle, $35)

Her recipe for baked Greek-style beans in tomato sauce may be one of the longest to make, at about an hour, but it involves very little work and a huge payoff: an hour of beans simmering in the oven in a deeply flavored tomato sauce turns them almost meaty, under a confetti of feta and preserved lemon.

Julia Turshen’s “Small Victories: Recipes, Advice & Hundreds of Ideas for Home Cooking Triumphs” is electric with positive energy: Each recipe ends with “spin-offs” that you could try depending on your mood and the ingredients at hand. For a dish of roasted kale with cherry tomatoes, you could add minced ginger and soy sauce, and a little drizzle sesame oil, or replace the kale altogether with mushrooms and asparagus. It’s part of Ms. Turshen’s ethos that if you can cook one thing, you can cook a thousand — you just don’t know it yet.

Each recipe also involves one, or a few, “small victories” for the home cook to feel good about. In the chicken skillet pie recipe, one of these is replacing béchamel, the flour-thickened milk sauce often used in a chicken potpie, with a little tub of crème fraîche. It cuts out the work of making a sauce, and it binds the roasted chicken, raw shallots and peas beautifully.

I did make a mistake following this recipe, absent-mindedly mixing more than double the correct amount of apple cider vinegar into the dough. When my friends arrived and I opened my fridge to get the skillet, draped in pastry, the vinegar smell was powerful. I worried that I had ruined the dish, but put it in the oven and hoped for the best.

Turns out it was fine, better than fine, or as a food writer might put it, the dough was very forgiving, with a wonderful texture and a slight untraceable tang. The pie was meant to serve eight, but four of us wiped the skillet clean.

Recipes: One-Pot Spaghetti | Swiss Chard Slab Pie

A version of this article appears in print on  , Section D, Page 7 of the New York edition with the headline: Practical Magic for the Modern Kitchen. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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