22 books like The Unofficial Harry Potter Cookbook

I love this cookbook because it is a collectible and a treasure. Kasey Rogers was Louise Tate, the boss's wife from the television show, Bewitched. I was fortunate to have coordinated a book signing at Barnes and Noble in 2005 with Kasey. I got to hear firsthand knowledge of her memories of being on the set of Bewitched. She actually was able to participate in a lot of cast parties and be invited to the star of the show’s home, so the recipes are authentic. Everyone knows that "Samantha Stephens" didn't have to lift a finger in the kitchen... Now, "Bewitched" fans everywhere can share the kitchen with "Louise Tate" (the boss's wife) as she conjures up the magic that turned "Samantha Stephens" into a household name. In The Bewitched Cookbook, you'll discover "Cousin Serena's" "I-don't-cook" quick-fixes, "Dr. Bombay's" exotic banquets, "Maurice's" special drinks and delicacies, "Endora's" wickedly tasty tricks… show more.

I met well-known author Liz Gilbert at a book signing in San Francisco. She was friends with a fellow cookbook author from Estonia and New York who recommended we meet Elizabeth Gilbert. While Liz was unpacking boxes of old family books, she rediscovered a book called At Home on the Range, written by her great-grandmother, Margaret Yardley Potter. Having only been peripherally aware of the volume, Gilbert dug in with some curiosity, and soon found that she had stumbled upon a book far ahead of its time. Part scholar and part crusader for a more open food conversation, Potter espoused the importance of farmer’s markets and ethnic food (Italian, Jewish, and German), culinary shortcuts, and generally celebrated a devotion to epicurean adventures.

I met Marika Blossfeldt in Paris, France at the Gourmand Cookbook Fair. She wrote a beautiful and nourishing cookbook from her farm in Estonia. Essential Nourishment is a cookbook and nutrition guide fusing an appreciation for the sensual pleasures of natural foods with a sensible approach to nourishment. There is a yummy carrot ginger soup and lots of immunity booster recipes.

An original and one of the most helpful cookbooks I have come across. There is no wrong answer when it comes to cooking, everything in the Betty Crocker cookbook is step-by-step. Learn to make chicken pot pie, how to make great pie crusts and more.

Food might not be the first thing you think of when you think about the Harry Potter series, and it really doesn’t star that much in the films. But if you read the books, every school year starts out with a detailed description of the start of term feast, and throughout the year, every holiday and celebration is marked by another feast chock-full of pumpkin juice, treacle tart, puddings, bouillabaisse, and more.

This cookbook shows you how to make all of the wizarding world’s favorite dishes, and it is perfect if you love the books or films. It is a great way to relive and celebrate your favorite moments of these incredible stories.

First published in 1747, this cookbook was a bestseller of its day. One of the things I love about it is the way that Hannah Glasse’s forthright voice leaps off the page across the centuries. Aimed at servants, she begins by explaining that she has not written ‘in the high, polite stile’, but instead written it clearly in terms that can be easily understood by her audience. She is scathing about the extravagant tricks that fashionable French cooks resort to: ‘I have heard of a cook that used six pounds of butter to fry twelve eggs, when everybody knows, that understands cooking, that half a pound is full enough, or more than need be used. But then it would not be French.’ In its approach to ingredients, its language, its recipes, this is a wonderful glimpse into the past.

A first-person account of the culinary habit of rural Britain gathered in the aftermath of WW1, Ms. Hartley set out to collect rural recipes at time when the countryside had been emptied of their young men, leaving young women without hope of a husband. 

Resourceful and independent, Dorothy travelled the length and breadth of her native land, sleeping under hedgerows, huddling round peat-fires, always with pen-and-ink and paper in hand, notebook at the ready. The finished manuscript complete with evocative illustrations didn't see the light of day until ten years after the end of WW2.

I well remember post-war rationing and terrible school catering in the 1950s, source of the nation's reputation for inedible food. Ms. Harley's recipes prove the reverse (particularly the baking). 

Nigel Slater was already one of the U.K.’s most celebrated chefs when he released his memoir Toast in 2003.

When I read it more than a decade later, it was like diving into a prequel to his many cookbooks, columns, and TV shows that I’d followed for years. The book is hilarious and heartbreaking. It beautifully illustrates how interests and passions can save people from unhappy childhoods and toxic people, like his coarse stepmother and distant father, both of whom are vividly drawn.

As a memoirist, I took inspiration from his narrative arch and how he persevered. The darkness and isolation of my own childhood is what prepared me to embrace the glitz and glamour of Eurovision. 

In among the diaries and photographs, medal collections, old-fashioned games and mother of pearl counters that Hilary Spurling helped her husband clear from a great-aunt’s London house in the 1970s, she found the seventeenth-century, leather-bound manuscript cookbook of Lady Elinor Fettiplace. Lady Elinor lived with her husband in Appleton manor a few miles south-west of Oxford from 1589 until her death in 1647. The book is one of very few manuscript cookbooks to have survived from this time and from the marginal annotations noting timings and quantities, as well as extra ingredients, it is clear that Lady Elinor used it as a working cookbook. Spurling decided to do the same and followed Lady Elinor ‘round the calendar’ making her ‘Oringe Marmalad’ in January, pickling ‘cowcumbers’ in July, and preparing mutton and rosewater mince pies in December. Through Spurling’s cooking adventures we are transported into the familiar yet strange, rose-water flavoured… show more.

Martha Lloyd was a close friend of Jane Austen and a relative by marriage. She lived with the Austen family at Chawton in Hampshire when Jane was there with her mother and sister, and much later Martha married Jane’s widowed brother, Francis. Her household book shows us the recipes and homemade medical remedies that they used at that time. This book has a facsimile of the original manuscript, along with various notes, as well as a section on Martha Lloyd that is the best available summary of her life.