As a recipe editor I shouldn’t like Samin Nosrat, who admits to having a complicated relationship with recipes and whose first book Salt Fat Acid Heat is a call to cooks to free themselves from their tyranny. But I was drawn into her podcast Home Cooking by her infectious curiosity about food, her knack of applying her encyclopaedic knowledge to what’s actually in your pantry, and her boisterous, room-filling laugh. (Podcast fans, note there is a brand new series that started in September 2025.) Working backwards, I pounced on a decommissioned library copy of Salt Fat Acid Heat. It wasn’t quite what I expected. Almost textbook-like, with hand-drawn illustrations, flavour wheels, charts and diagrams, but no photos, in it Samin teaches you how to cook; to learn and explore techniques, what to do with fundamental ingredients, when, and most importantly, why. But, while I read it frequently and have learnt a lot, I rarely cook a whole recipe from it. On face value Good Things presents as a more conventional cookbook with recipes and full page photos, but it’s imbued with that beguiling mix of authority and down-to-earthness all wrapped in a Californian vibe: I’m trying a 2,300 year old recipe for slow-cooked salmon wrapped in banana leaves (thank you Archestratus), a genius suggestion of blitzing preserved lemons into a paste and there’s a chapter on bread that has me yearning to make fluffy pittas and chewy sesame flatbreads (though I should know by now that anything that involves me and yeast leads to a hellhole of trampled expectations). TRACY WHITMEY