The Times’ cookbook selection

If your idea of fun is baking pastries and cakes, whipping up batches of frosting and loading your freezer with seasonal ice creams, you likely spend a lot of time foraging through your cookbook library or plumbing the internet for favorite or new recipes.

These days, Snoop Dogg is known in food circles as much for his collaboration with Martha Stewart as he is for his music.

You could say that Matt Jennings has been following the chef’s playbook.

Most chefs with Michelin-starred restaurants, plus a classical training and the résumé to go with it, would pour all that fancy stuff into their debut cookbook.

When barbecue expert Steven Raichlen began writing about live-fire cooking, most weekend warriors limited their repertoire to simple items such as burgers, hot dogs and steaks.

As we gear up for summer, with its backyard holidays and barbecues, kid-friendly vacations and baseball games, it’s helpful to have a cookbook on hand that showcases classic American desserts — a book that gathers recipes for all those homey pies and frosted cakes and cookies like one big, sugar-dusted recipe box.

The act of cooking a meal can bring so much more to the table than just, well, dinner.

When it comes to addressing social injustice, food is both the message and the medium.

First let us point out that in Los Angeles, October can often feel like the hottest month of the year (blame the Santa Anas), so unlike in some areas of this country, it is actually peak ice cream season here.

You can tell the approach of fall when football floods the airways, the kids go back to school — and the cookbooks start hitting the shelves, thick volumes penned by high-profile chefs and filled with prettily photographed, highly cravable dishes.

By year’s end, there will be quite a few terrific cookbooks celebrating Los Angeles food and restaurants on the shelves at your local bookstore.

Hindsight is a funny thing, loaded with irony and regret and a kind of impossible nostalgia, a quality that should, by definition, require more than a few months to accumulate meaning.

You can tell a lot about a cookbook by its first and its last recipe.

Vegetable cooking has come an awfully long way since Deborah Madison started cooking vegetarian food, which the celebrated cookbook author circumspectly notes in the introduction to her 14th cookbook, out next month from Ten Speed Press.

As he throws flour across the counter in a sudden sideways dust storm, Marcus Samuelsson talks about his new cookbook, about the Harlem restaurant it chronicles and about the wider project that they both articulate.

A good recipe most often comes with a back story, and in one new cookbook the storytelling is so essential to the cookery that the title would be equally at home displayed on a kitchen counter or atop a stack of novels on a nightstand.

What do you think of when you hear the words “Aunt Jemima”?

Editor’s note: Anthony Bourdain died Friday, June 8, 2018, at age 61, according to CNN.

Fall is a season that many of us look forward to, not only for the weather and the sports and the holidays, but because that’s when publishers tend to drop their best and often heftiest cookbooks.

What must it have been like to be Dorie Greenspan’s neighbor in Paris’ leafy 6th arrondissement while she worked on her latest cookbook, “Dorie’s Cookies”?

Back around 2010, a dark mood began to press down on the hardback cookbook industry, something that Ten Speed’s vice president and imprint publisher, Lorena Jones, called “a prevailing sense of doom.”

Because I am a very lucky person (and the host of a long-running food-focused radio interview show, “Good Food” on KCRW), cookbooks get dropped off at my doorstep every day; the fall publishing season always results in a deluge.

Conveniently in time for Halloween, the Hoxton Street Monster Supplies shop — this is an actual shop in London — has come out with “The Monster’s Cookbook,” with 70 “everyday recipes for the living, dead and undead.”

If you’re the sort of person who gravitates toward diners, whose favorite restaurants serve breakfast all day (we are not talking about McDonald’s), who makes breakfast for dinner at home and whose idea of a good time is making frosted flakes from scratch, then here’s a cookbook for you.

With all the cookbooks that come out each year, repeating volumes filled with market-driven dishes prettily photographed in vintage cookwear on hardwood tabletops, it’s easy to overlook some of the best examples of the genre.

Tokyo is one of the world’s greatest food cities, a massive and glorious place to eat that spans the culinary spectrum, from Michelin-starred restaurants to izakayas and ramen alleys.

Cookbooks tend to divide into spatial categories: those that are close to home, essentially explorations of the author’s kitchen or family cuisine; and those that roam further afield to examine the food and culinary traditions of other cultures.

Is your idea of fun trolling the stalls of your favorite farmers market for the more interesting stuff: the loaded baskets that appear like sudden gifts and that then happily require an entire conversation with your farmer?

If you, like many food-minded people, spend an inordinate amount of time reading the quarterly food journal Lucky Peach, the devoutly on-trend publication launched in 2011 by Momofuku’s David Chang, Peter Meehan and Chris Ying, then you probably know about the cookbooks that the editors of that journal began giving us last year.

When Marcella Hazan died in 2013, the legendary cookbook author left us with a short stack of books, most notably her “Essentials of Classic Italian Cooking” (also legendary), and a legacy.

Some words are more fraught with meaning than others, especially in the food world.

The papacy is one of those institutions that is endlessly fascinating — blame Rex Harrison and Charlton Heston, for those of a certain age, or maybe Dan Brown.

Before Da-Hae and Gareth West, the husband-and-wife authors of the new book, “K-Food: Korean Home Cooking and Street Food,” decided to write a cookbook, they first opened Busan BBQ, a street food business selling Korean bulgogi hamburgers in London.

Sometimes, not often, a cookbook shows up that you grab immediately, no questions asked, and start to read.

Cookbook of the week: “An: To Eat: Recipes and Stories From a Vietnamese Family Kitchen” by Helene An and Jacqueline An (Running Press, $35) There are certain places in Beverly Hills that are dining destinations in the same way that Barney’s or Jimmy Choo are shopping destinations: Spago, of course, and since 1997, Crustacean, Helene An’s seriously upscale Vietnamese restaurant.

For years, the sea salt caramels made by Christine Moore’s Little Flower Candy Co. have operated like currency in this town, beribboned bags of them found in many shops around L.A. and at Moore’s two Pasadena restaurants, Little Flower Candy Co. and Lincoln, circulated as housewarming gifts and holiday presents, and as family sugar trove.

If you’ve spent a lot of time at Belcampo, Fernald’s butcher shop and counter at Grand Central Market in downtown Los Angeles, or her larger restaurant of the same name in Santa Monica, you’ll be forgiven for assuming that her first book would be, say, a butcher’s manual, or an ode to sustainable meat.

“Nothing Fancy” by Diana Kennedy (University of Texas Press, $29.95).

Cookbook of the week: “Eat Your Drink,” by Matthew Biancaniello (Dey Street Books, $22.99.)

“Cooking, Blokes + Artichokes” by Brendan Collins (Kyle Books, $29.95).

Book of the week: “The New Bread Basket,” by Amy Halloran (Chelsea Green, $17.95).