It shouldn’t need saying, but let me just state for the record that when I review or recommend a book, I do it not as a favour to the writer but rather to you, the reader. Yes of course, my selections are all highly subjective, and so I know it doesn’t automatically follow that you will all feel the same way as I do, but when it comes to Samin Nosrat’s Good Things, I feel confident in my assertion that if you cook – or, indeed, eat or read – you need this book in your life. It’s hard to think that anything could match the indispensable and iconic Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat but this book truly does: it's both the perfect follow-up and a singular pillar of wisdom in its own right.
As I wrote in my review of Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat, Samin Nosrat has a rare ability to convey both the science and poetry of cooking. This is as true of Good Things but it is also, urgently, about connection: to the earth and its ingredients; to ourselves and others; to life. There’s so much more to be said in this regard, but for now I will restrict myself to how this translates to the recipes. While there are plenty of them, and they stand alone magnificently, it doesn’t do justice to the book to reduce them to a list of titles. Each recipe seems to lead to another, connected by ingredient, method or mood, and even where this isn’t explicit, that sense of connection is there, fostering confidence and bestowing comfort, creating a kitchen primer like no other.
As a cookbook, Good Things would be welcome at any age, but as a manifesto – though this is perhaps too crude a term to use – it answers particularly to the age we live in now; at the very beginning of this book Nosrat quotes Raymond Carver’s “Eating is a small, good thing in a time like this.”
And I leave you now with one very good thing: Samin Nosrat’s parsley-flecked garlic bread, aka Pane Criminale!
Good Things by Samin Nosrat (Ebury Press, £30). Out 18 September 2025.
Photography by Aya Brackett.
