Prashad Cookbook (2012)

Gujarati vegetarian cooking from the Patel family, whose small restaurant was the surprise runner-up on Ramsay's Best Restaurant in 2010. Kaushy Patel learned to cook as a child on her grandmother's farm, and the 100-plus recipes run from simple snacks to full family dinners. It is the clearest test on this list of whether a region's food holds up without meat, and Gujarati cooking passes easily. The family scale of the recipes suits a weeknight table, and the snacks alone justify the shelf space.