The 14 Best Cookbooks of Fall 2020

Credit…Louise Hagger Credit…Louise Hagger In “Coconut & Sambal” (Bloomsbury, $35), Lara Lee, a chef living in London, explores her Indonesian roots, using her grandmother’s cooking as a jumping-off point. (Ms. Lee’s mother is Australian, and her father Chinese-Indonesian.) There are classic dishes: a chicken satay with a spicy peanut sauce, a beef rendang bubbling away…

Mandelbrot by Way of Florida

Mandelbrot, typically a hard, crusty biscuit, is a close relative of biscotti. Zwieback (twice-baked) rusks from Germany and elsewhere in Europe are also part of the family, with the double-baking a way to extend its shelf life. Michael Reiss, a general contractor in Miami, preferred his family’s recipe for mandelbrot, which is baked only once,…

A Throwback Beer Returns to New York

The Dodgers are long gone from Brooklyn. And so is Schaefer Beer, once a top-selling brand and a team sponsor that was brewed there. (It also sponsored the Mets.) The brand hung around longer than the Brooklyn Dodgers, with different owners in different locations. In the 1970s, the F.&M. Schaefer Brewing Company opened a new…

Sunday Suppers and So Much More

A big Italian family supper — a Sunday spread with pasta, red sauce “gravy” studded with meats, and more — defines the chef Joey Campanaro’s welcoming new book, “Big Love Cooking.” The meal comes in a late chapter, after you’ve explored biscuits dappled with sausage and cheese, spaghetti with clams (and anchovies), chicken cacciatore, halibut…

An Heirloom for the Kitchen

Vermont Rolling Pins and Company, which makes and sells more than a dozen kinds of rolling pins, has added hand-turned wooden cake stands to its inventory. They’re ample, 10 or more inches in diameter, and are available in cherry, maple or walnut. The company’s line of rolling pins has just been expanded as well, with…

A Spread Worthy of Royalty

In Min Jin Lee’s 2017 novel “Pachinko,” a restaurant owner approaches the protagonist, Sunja, after hearing of her famous kimchi. Sunja’s reputation preceding her, the owner hires her on the spot to supply his restaurant’s banchan — the small side dishes that often accompany a Korean meal. “Any fool can make a marinade and grill…

How to Read a Wine Label, in 12 Easy Lessons

Buying wine can be a paralyzing challenge. Facing a wall of unfamiliar bottles can frustrate even the most worldly consumer. Those bottles have labels, of course, often with loads of information about the character and nature of the wine within. But the more detail they offer to knowledgeable wine consumers, the more baffling they seem…

Your Best Sandwiches

I ate ham and cheese sandwiches for two months of lunches, it felt like, until one day I lost the taste for them and had to make a switch. I had a little fist of duck breast left over from when I’d made a couple of them for dinner, cooked slowly on the stovetop under…

A Potential Downside of Intermittent Fasting

Intermittent fasting is a trendy weight loss strategy. But a new study found that a popular form of intermittent fasting called time-restricted eating produced minimal weight loss and one potential downside: muscle loss. The new research, published in JAMA Internal Medicine, is one of the most rigorous studies to examine time-restricted eating, which involves fasting…