Also of interest…in books for cooks

At Home on the Range

by Margaret Yardley Potter (McSweeney’s, $24)

Before Eat, Pray, Love, there was At Home on the Range, said Michael Hainey in GQ. When memoirist Elizabeth Gilbert rediscovered this 1947 cookbook written by her great-grandmother, we were all lucky she pushed to get it reprinted. “This is a cookbook that puts to shame” all recent efforts in food adventurism. Margaret Yardley Potter championed eating everything from calf’s brains to cockscombs, and her voice was “one part Dorothy Parker and one part M.F.K. Fisher.”

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The Cookbook Library

by Anne Willan and Mark Cherniavsky (Univ. of Calif., $50)Anne Willan, the founder of an esteemed French cooking school, “has a cookbook library any food historian—and any serious self-styled foodie—would lust after,” said Noelle Carter in the Los Angeles Times. In this fascinating book, she and her husband survey the collection’s greatest hits, including titles dating to the 1400s. In addition to providing antique recipes, each tested for the modern cook, they write knowledgeably about the evolution of cookbooks.

Yes, Chef

by Marcus Samuelsson (Random House, $27)

You might think this author was a coddled wunderkind, said Erica Marcus in Newsday. By 24, he was already running Manhattan restaurant Aquavit and the youngest chef ever to receive a three-star review from The New York Times. In his new memoir, he reveals the surprisingly arduous path he took to culinary celebrity, beginning with his Ethiopian childhood, his mother’s death, and his adoption by a Swedish couple. “The story of Samuelsson’s development as a chef is beautifully told.”

A Feast of Ice & Fire

by Chelsea Monroe-Cassel and Sariann Lehrer (Bantam, $35)To be fully immersed in the fantasy world of TV’s Game of Thrones, you need recipes, said Nick Owchar in the Los Angeles Times. In the series’s inspiration, George R.R. Martin’s Song of Ice and Fire saga, Martin provides enough details about the characters’ meals that two food bloggers have been able to build a cookbook around them. Not surprisingly, there are enough meat dishes included that Martin comes across as “the medieval Dr. Atkins.”