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.
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