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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Photographs: Eat Me Daily

Farm-to-table is one of those irritating culinary trends that is hard to really stay irritated by. Fundamentally, it's just so darn right: we should be eating seasonally and locally, we should be supporting sustainable agriculture and the preservation of heirloom vegetables. The most delicious food is the stuff that's been harvested (butchered, cultivated, fished) as close as possible to the kitchen that's cooking it.

It's a delicious irony, then, that the proprietors of Walland, Tennessee's Blackberry Farm is the family that founded the chain Ruby Tuesday's, where the salad bar is anchored by shredded cheddar, diced ham, and macaroni salad. Blackberry Farm is a mega-luxury inn located on a remote 4,200-acre property that was farm-to-table before the hyphenate even existed, built as it is around a working farm from which the inn's extraordinary kitchen sources the vast majority of its ingredients. The Blackberry Farm Cookbook: Four Seasons of Great Food and the Good Life (Amazon), by innkeeper (and Ruby Tuesday scion) Sam Beall, is about as far from Ruby Tuesday as you can get without coming around the other side.

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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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