Padma Lakshmi. 2025. Padma’s All American: A Cookbook. Knopf.
We watched Padma’s amazing show Taste the Nation last year, and truly enjoyed the trip she took us on around the country, meeting various communities and hearing their stories, talking about food, and cooking their traditional recipes with them. This cookbook draws from the show, sharing about 100 recipes from across America’s wildly varied communities.
This is my kind of cookbook: it skips from region to region, foodway to foodway, and introduces the reader to an amazing array of traditions and food cultures. And as Padma says, all of these are American: if someone in America is cooking it, it’s American food.
My absolute favorite thing about living here is that we have access to more varieties of food than anywhere else on the planet — and we don’t even know how much we can get, so we take it for granted. This book celebrates that fact and lets the reader wander around the giant food hall we live in. And it’s all delicious!
My favorite so far is Desert Chicken, cooked with an Apache elder, who cooked chicken thighs in sage, sumac, and agave syrup. It is a rich, deeply flavored treat — I have made it with a mix of jasmine and wild rice and sauteed mushrooms, and with stone-ground grits as sides. So good. You may be familiar with sumac if you cook Indigenous food, or if you like Middle Eastern cooking. Here it shines and makes the chicken sing.
The book is lovely, and if you have not already seen it, the series is well worth watching.