The New Cooking School Cookbook (2021)

America's Test Kitchen arranges this one as a school: 80 themed courses, from pizza and fried rice to fish on the grill, with 400 recipes and more than 200 kitchen skills and hacks. Each course explains the technique, its key takeaways and the food science behind it. That structure is the selling point for a beginner. Pick the course that matches tonight's dinner, cook it, and come away with a skill that carries over to the next one. It is a big, heavy book, so treat it as a set of lessons to dip into rather than something to read cover to cover.