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The 10 Best Summer Cookbooks Of 2009

NPR | By T. Susan Chang

Published May 26, 2009 at 12:00 AM EDT

This year's crop of spring and summer cookbooks is a sprawling, eclectic collection, hard to summarize and harder to sort.

The best of the lot seem to betray a fascination with the arcane: Here we find cooks who didn't know how to stop when it was good enough. Trapped by the ferocity of their own passions, they plunge into the pickles and brines, the secrets of the spice cabinet, the sausage casings and pantry condiments we're usually content to leave to their mysterious, silent shelf lives.

In these books we find a world of thrilling arcana, seemingly custom tailored for a summer in which eating in looks to be the greatest adventure of all.

T. Susan Chang

T. Susan Chang regularly writes about food and reviews cookbooks for The Boston Globe, NPR.org and the Washington Post. She's the author of A Spoonful of Promises: Recipes and Stories From a Well-Tempered Table (2011). She lives in western Massachusetts, where she also teaches food writing at Bay Path College and Smith College. She blogs at Cookbooks for Dinner.

See stories by T. Susan Chang