2009 has really been the year of the home cook. While last year's crop of cookbooks was dominated by technical, aspirational, fantastical documents like Alinea, A Day at El Bulli, and Under Pressure, the front runners this year are all about doability — take Ad Hoc home, take Momofuku home, make your own bacon, can your own jam. Amidst the piles of books we've read in the past twelve months, there are dozens we're sure we'll turn to time and again. But a few stand out as the strongest, the smartest, the most beautiful, the most engaging — basically, the best of 2009. Our books editor Helen Rosner and associate editor Paula Forbes share their picks:

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Photograph: Helen Rosner / Eat Me Daily

I held my breath when I heard there was going to be a Momofuku cookbook. Restaurant cookbooks are always a tricky proposition, a tenuous juggling act of self-praises. Inevitably, the chef, the restaurant's philosophy, the restaurant itself, and (often an afterthought) the food, are all forced on us as individually iconic elements of culinary history — whether or not they actually are. It's a rare restaurant that deserves the temporary immortality of a cookbook, and rarer still that a cookbook really does capture that restaurant's essence. When it does all come together, it's glorious — French Laundry, Alinea, The Zuni Cafe Cookbook. And when it doesn't — well, I'll spare the dignity of those restaurants that put out books without bringing anything to the table. They know who they are.

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Photographs: Eat Me Daily

Be warned: Phaidon Press's new book Coco: 10 World-Leading Masters Choose 100 Contemporary Chefs (Amazon) will suck you in. As its neatly descriptive subtitle so concisely notes, this is a book filled with profiles of 100 up-and-coming chefs, as selected by ten "Masters": Ferran Adria, Mario Batali, Rene Redzepi, Alice Waters, Jacky Yu, Gordon Ramsay, Fergus Henderson, Shannon Bennett, Alain Ducasse, and Yoshihiro Murata. Each of the young chefs gets a few hundred words of praise from a Master, a handful of beautiful photographs of them and their work, and a representative menu complete with recipes. And thanks to that massive quantity of information — narrative, visual, and technical — this is a book that you can dip into, flop open to a random page, or read backwards. It's a riot of glorious information.

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Autumn brings more than just falling leaves and the return of legitimate root vegetables: it's also when publishing houses drop their most ambitious cookbook offerings, hoping to tap into the spirit of cooking (and book-buying) that pervades the pre-holiday season.

And is this ever a good year for cookbooks: the next three months will see enough glossy shots of figs, doorstop culinary bibles, and sweet, quirky one-offs to shut down any concern over the future of culinary publishing. The season brings big names: Keller, Adria, and Bastianich all add more to their oeuvres, not to mention hotly anticipated game-changers from the likes of David Chang, Michael Psilakis, and Michael Symon. Our books editor Helen Rosner sifted through the hundreds of titles landing on shelves in the next few months and picked out the ones most worth paying attention to.

The Big Guns

The books everyone will be bragging about owning come 2009 year-in-review time

Coco by Ferran Adria, Mario Batali, Rene Redzepi, Alice Waters, Jacky Yu, Gordon Ramsay, Fergus Henderson, Shannon Bennett, Alain Ducasse, and Yoshihiro Murata

(Phaidon, October 2; preorder on Amazon)
Ten internationally renowned chefs pick 100 rising stars, each of whom is profiled, along with a recipe or three. Expect who makes it in and who doesn't to fuel plenty of interminable dinner-party conversation.

Momofuku by David Chang and Peter Meehan

(Clarkson Potter, October 27; preorder on Amazon)
David Chang has already shared the recipe for his pork buns online — now learn how to make everything else. Not for the vegetarians.

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Grub Street tipped us off to the newly-released cover of the upcoming Momofuku cookbook, out October 27, 2009, which you can preorder on Amazon.

Update: The cookbook is out! Read our review: Cookbook Review: Momofuku by David Chang and Peter Meehan: The Hype, Justified

When we heard that No Reservations was doing a food porn episode, and we were like, eh, it's probably just a compilation clip show episode. BUT NO, were we so very wrong. Featuring segments with Jose Andres, Eric Ripert, Terrance Brennan, John Down (of Christopher Norman Chocolates), Martin Picard, and David Chang, this episode had tons and tons of excessive, over the top food — or, put simply, food porn, but Bourdain-style. The whole show, brilliantly wrapped around the music and design of 70s porno films, was phenomenal to watch.

We're not out to be Momofuku fanboys, but wow, Anthony Bourdain sat down with David Chang at Ssam Bar, and they consumed nearly the entirety of the menu, and then some. In Bourdain's words:

When you have the opportunity to sit down at one of the hardest to get reservation restaurants in the city, with its brilliant, mercurial and highly-sought after chef to walk you through a full-on assault of the whole damn menu of delightfully pantagruelian, wildly creative combinations, you do it baby. You train for that motherf*cker. Because if you're lucky enough to get a crack at it, you go all the way, to the other side, consequences be damned.

The videos »

The video »

Photograph by John Joh

In an interview with The Huffington Post, David Chang talks about the culture of celebrity chefdom, about supporting small, independent farmers against "big tobacco" agri-business, and calls Wylie Dufresne's wd-50 "probably the most important restaurant in New York":

I think that Wylie Dufresne at wd-50 is America's most under-appreciated chef. I learn from him. New Yorkers don't know how lucky we are to have someone like Wylie because he was the first person to bring a lot of what was happening in Europe to America and he doesn't make concessions. His restaurant is probably the most important restaurant in New York -- and allowed so many restaurants to do whatever they wanted to do -- because he created a whole new genre of cooking. If you look very closely at his food, it's very, very unique, and even his techniques are not similar to anyone else. His food is influenced by Ferran Adrià and Heston Blumenthal, but while a lot of people are first generation acolytes, Wylie is six generations removed. He's internalized it so it's his. It's New York.

Our spies are everywhere. A tipster reports:

Went to the cow in west london last week--spotted mssrs. Chang et friedman, momofuku/spotted pig respectively. They seemed to be eyeing the menu furtively.

Hmm. Furtive eyeing is always intriguing. The Cow, by the way, has possibly one of the best restaurant homepages we've ever seen.

My strategy for getting in to Ko is to check out the reservation website at random, non-10AM times, with the idea that I'll catch a canceled resy before anyone else. It's not the best strategy (it's never, technically, worked), except yesterday I completely randomly lucked into a 2-person lunch at noon on Friday. But then I saw the cancellation policy, and WHAT THE FUCK. $150 per head fee if you cancel less than 24 hours out? The lunch itself costs $150/person! And it's not like they won't fill those stupid counter stools! I'm completely over Chang. He's lost his mind.

He thoughtfully included a screencap, and kids — it's true. If you don't go to your Ko lunch, you're gonna pay for it anyway.

The big red $150 fee »

The French Culinary Institute has been airing this commercial for a while on the Food Network. In it, David Chang, himself an alumnus, has some nice things to say about FCI:

Momofuku sounds absurd, but it means "lucky peach." I graduated from college, and I was like, I'm never going to sit behind a desk, ever. Life is way too short. Do things that you want to do. The FCI has implemented a really aggressive and modern cooking program. If you're serious about it, then check out the FCI.

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