Smitten Kitchen Keepers

The long-awaited new book from the bestselling and beloved author of The Smitten Kitchen Cookbook-a collection of essential recipes for meals you'll want to prepare again and again.

Deb Perelman is the author of two bestselling cookbooks, the OG of the culinary blogosphere, the homegrown brand with more than a million Instagram followers, the self-taught cook who obsessively tests her recipes until they're perfect.

Here, in her third book, Perelman presents 100 new recipes (plus a few old favorites from her site) that aim to make shopping easier, preparation more practical and enjoyable and food more reliably delicious for the home cook.

What's a keeper? It's a brilliantly fuss-free lemon poppy seed cake. It's Perelman's favorite roasted winter squash. It's an epic quiche. It's a slow-roasted chicken on a bed of unapologetically schmaltzy croutons. It's the only apple crisp she will personally ever make. It's perfect spaghetti and meatballs. These are the fail-safe, satisfying recipes you'll rely on for years to come - from Perelman's forever files to yours.

I don't mean to be melodramatic, but I think this is the book I was always meant to write. As it's my third cookbook, this is a bit awkward. It would be like declaring a new child the one you got right, while your first two glare at you from across the room. To be clear, the first two weren't practice rounds. I'm very proud of them, and I'm overjoyed that so many of you have welcomed them into your kitchens. (I hope you know I'm back to talking about the cookbooks, not my kids, but if my children do wander into your kitchen, please send them home soon.). As I thought about what I wanted to do next, I rewound to the year 2006 and I remembered the central energy that drove me to create Smitten Kitchen in the first place. It was never to flex my cooking skills, which were just burgeoning at the time. It was never just to show you things you'd never seen before, I always bristled at innovation for the sake of newness when, as far as I'd tasted, the perfect pound cake didn't yet exist. It was to create a place where I could collect all of the recipes worth repeating. I wanted my own Forever Files.

I was relatively new to cooking but I kept running into duds. Even 16 years ago, there were already too many recipes on the internet, and it made it hard to choose. When I tweaked a yellow cake so that it was perfectly crumbed, or found a method that ensured my chicken would never come out dry, I wanted to shout it from the rooftops. I settled for a url.

It's unclear why I couldn't just be a person who was satisfied with a great lemon cake recipe for my own repertoire and enjoyment. No, I also needed to make sure that nobody else ever made another one, as the thought of a friend making a mediocre lemon cake bothers me more than anything should. It's definitely something wired deeply into my personality. My father, who passed away in 2018, also couldn't keep an opinion to himself. He wrote many op-eds and letters-to-the-editor, he was one of those. His strongest wish near the end was that I write a third cookbook. "Why, Dad? I wrote two. Can't I quit while I'm relatively ahead?" I asked more than once, but he loved the words "three-book deal" (even when I told him each book was individually pitched and negotiated, due to my fear of commitment). But something shifted around me when he passed, and when my son, who is now 13 and reminds me so much of him (truly just brimming with strongly worded letters) wanted to know which of my recipes he could pull off. I realized how much I wanted to be able to hand my kids a collection of recipes specifically written with making them forever in mind.