The Best Mediterranean Cookbooks

Best for beginners: The Mediterranean Dish

Suzy Karadsheh grew up in Port Said, on Egypt's Mediterranean coast, and founded The Mediterranean Dish website before writing the book. It adapts Mediterranean and Middle Eastern dishes for American kitchens, with ingredients from an ordinary supermarket, clear instructions and plenty of photographs. Sample recipes include spanakopita egg muffins, chicken shawarma bowls and homemade pita bread. If you want to cook one new thing a week and have it work, this is the place to start.

Best all-in-one: The Complete Mediterranean Cookbook

America's Test Kitchen does what it always does: 500 recipes, each worked out until it is reliable, each with a short note on why it works and how to vary it. It covers the whole region, from a Moroccan-style chicken and lentil soup and tagliatelle with artichokes to garlicky roasted shrimp, and closes with fruit and sweets such as baklava and Greek lemon rice pudding. It reads like a reference rather than a travel diary, and it opens with a section on the Mediterranean diet – skip it if, like us, you are here for the cooking.

Best for vegetables: Ottolenghi Simple

Not strictly Mediterranean – Yotam Ottolenghi's cooking runs from Jerusalem to London – but few books do more for a bag of vegetables, a can of chickpeas and a lemon. Every recipe carries the letters of SIMPLE: short on time, ten ingredients or less, make ahead, pantry, lazy, easier than you think. Pick the letters that match your evening and cook.

Best for Spain: The Food of Spain

Claudia Roden, best known for her books on Middle Eastern food, turned to Spain here. Long introductions to the regions and their food history come before the recipes, so each dish arrives with the story of where it belongs. It is a book to read before a trip south as much as one to cook from, and good company for the oils in our Spanish olive oil guide.

Best for bold flavors: Moro

Sam and Sam Clark opened Moro on Exmouth Market in London to cook the food of Spain and North Africa – the two sides of the old Moorish kitchen – and this was their first book. Expect spice, smoke and plenty of olive oil. It suits a confident cook who likes to grill, and pairs naturally with our guide to grilled whole fish.

Why there are no diet books here

Many bestsellers with “Mediterranean” on the cover are meal plans built around nutrition goals. Those belong with your doctor or a registered dietitian, not with us. The books above are about cooking: how to make a pot of chickpeas taste like something, when to add the lemon, how much oil a tomato salad really wants. If you would like more structure, a good cookbook plus a weekly rhythm – one fish night, one bean night, one pasta night – does the job; our easy meals page sketches such a week.

Getting the most from a new cookbook

• Read the introduction and the pantry notes first; they tell you how the author thinks.
• Cook three recipes in the first two weeks, and mark the ones you would make again.
• Stock the five or six staples the book uses most – often canned chickpeas, lemons, feta, cumin and good olive oil.
• Repeat a favorite until you no longer need the page. That is when a recipe becomes yours.

Which one to buy first

• New to Mediterranean cooking: The Mediterranean Dish.
• One book for everything, with carefully worked-out recipes: The Complete Mediterranean Cookbook.
• Mostly vegetables, little time: Ottolenghi Simple.
• In love with Spain: The Food of Spain first, then Moro.

Whichever you choose, the two things that make the biggest difference are a good bottle of oil – our olive oil guide explains which – and a handful of dishes you cook often enough to stop reading the recipe. Our easy Mediterranean meals are a good place to begin.

How we chose

We looked for books that teach a way of cooking rather than a diet, are in print in English and are sold on Amazon in the US, the UK or Germany. Details come from the publishers' and booksellers' descriptions and from trade reviews such as Publishers Weekly. We do not claim to have cooked through these books; we describe what each one is built to do and who it suits. More for the Mediterranean kitchen is on our category page.