The best cookbooks for gifting: Your guide for matching the right book to the right person

For the Pinterest-addicted party-planner

Elise Strachan of My Cupcake Addiction has created the new bible for fun parties, especially the kid-friendly sort. It’s loaded with Instagrammable treats even beginner bakers can handle along with entertaining tips. Pick up Sweet Celebrations! The Ultimate Dessert and Party Planning Companion for your party-planning pal. (Target, $23)

For the busy multitasker

Cook it once and spin it into five possible dishes your kids will actually eat. That’s the idea behind this cookbook. Top Chef alum Ryan Scott starts with a key ingredient, like biscuit dough, and uses that to help you get dinner on the table in under an hour in One to Five: One Shortcut Recipe Transformed into Five Easy Dishes. (Amazon, $15)

For your friend who needs a health reset

Maybe she has an autoimmune disease. Maybe she has food allergies. Maybe she’s just feeling bloated, foggy and not quite herself. Your friend is hopefully seeing a doctor, but if she’s interested in clean eating, this is an excellent introduction. Culinary nutritionist Amie Valpone walks you through everything — how to read ingredient lists, what to eat instead of your trigger foods, how to give your pantry a makeover and how to make sense of it all. Eating Clean: The 21-Day Plan to Detox, Fight Inflammation, and Reset Your Body is way more than recipes. It’s a guidebook.  (Barnes & Noble, $15)

For the Instant Pot newbie

Prediction: Whoever didn’t get an Instant Pot last year for Christmas is getting one this year. The electric pressure cooker is rising in popularity. But how do you use it, exactly? With a few exceptions, we’re pretty much the generation raised without this culinary tool. So a cookbook like The Best Pressure Cooker Recipes on the Planet, filled with foolproof recipes, is in order. (Amazon, $13)

For the aspiring off-the-grid homesteader

From the popular Discovery reality TV show Alaska: The Last Frontier comes the cookbook by Eve and Eivin Kilcher, Homestead Kitchen: Stories and Recipes from Our Hearth to Yours. If you know someone who’s always wanted to dig into foraging or wanted to know what to do with venison or who keeps threatening to go off the grid, this is the book for them.  (Target, $20)

For the modern Mexican food lover

I think we’re ready to start playing with our Mexican food now, aren’t we? Mexican Today: New and Rediscovered Recipes for Contemporary Kitchens is is a cookbook for those of us who don’t have hours to grind spices for moles — and who aren’t such strict traditionalists that they can’t appreciate the commingling of American and Mexican flavors in a dish like Dreamboat Hot Dogs. (Barnes & Noble, $20)

For the ‘I’m not a foodie’ foodie

Turkey is a hot culinary region right now, but don’t put it that way to your foodie friend because a) she was into Turkish “before everyone else was” and b) she is way too cool to care about culinary trends anyway. But between us, she’ll be delighted with Turkish Delights: Stunning regional recipes from the Bosphorus to the Black Sea. The region is a sweet spot with influences from the Mediterranean to the Middle East. Here’s hoping you get a dinner invitation out of this. (Target, $20)

For the baker who still loves bread

Bread has become the new food outlaw, and that’s just plain silly. For those who still love bread, it’s all about going natural. The New Healthy Bread in Five Minutes a Day uses age-old techniques for new applications. It digs into whole grains, novel flours like spelt and naturally fermented sourdough. Readers will even learn how to make their own mother — ahem, your bread fanatic friend will know what that means. (Amazon, $22)

For the French countryside daydreamer

Mimi Thorisson is living the life the rest of us daydream about. She and her photographer husband Oddur restored an ancient stone mansion in the French countryside, where she went on to cook and blog. Meanwhile, Oddur documents their impossibly perfect lives with their ridiculously photogenic children and their fox terriers and… I think you can imagine the rest. I’m holding out on an invitation to spend the summer with them — any day now, right guys? But the next best thing is trying out Mimi’s recipes in French Country Cooking: Meals and Moments from a Village in the Vineyards, from beignets with apricot filling to roast duck with cherries to salted butter chocolate cake.(Barnes & Noble, $29) 

For the life hacker

This is the cookbook for your friend who’s always looking for the quickest, easiest way to do everything: Mad Genius Tips: Over 90 Expert Hacks and 100 Delicious Recipes. Justin Chapple and the editors of Food & Wine threw in every last trick they could find, from organizing the utensils in your drawers to poaching eggs in a muffin tin. (Barnes & Noble, $23)

For the modern Southerner

The editors of Southern Living collected 100 vintage recipes and combined them with fresh, contemporary versions for Recipe Revival: Southern Classics Reinvented for Modern Cooks. Get ready for orange rolls from the 1970s and citrus pull-apart bread with fresh citrus glaze from today. (Target, $18)

For the Indian food fanatic

Because Indian food is about way more than chicken tikka. It’s a rich cuisine spanning a multitude of regions and flavors. The Indian Cooking Course: Techniques, Masterclasses, Ingredients, and Traditional Recipes is a practical encyclopedia. It teaches everything from how to cook perfect rice to coconut-based curries of the South to “what the heck is the deal with Ayurvedic diets?” (Amazon, $30)

For the smoothie lover

This book was the surprise of the year for me. I’m not a smoothie person. At all. And yet, Oh She Glows Every Day: Quick and Simply Satisfying Plant-Based Recipes has become the cookbook I use the most. I’m addicted to the salted chocolate smoothie, and I’m making cookie dough truffle balls and Glow Bars every weekend for snacks. I never thought a meat- and dairy-eater like me could love a plant-based cookbook this much, but I totally do. What’s even more surprising is how much my partner and my tween son love the recipes too. (Amazon, $16)

For the obsessive cook

Whenever we want to find the best, I mean the best way to cook something, we turn to Kenji López-Alt’s James Beard award-winning tome The Food Lab: Better Home Cooking Through Science. This isn’t even a new book. It came out in 2015. But we had to include it because it’s just so freakin’ useful and because, science. (Amazon, $27)

For the comic book fan

One of our favorite things about The Adventures of Fat Rice: Recipes from the Chicago Restaurant Inspired by Macau is that it includes recipes in comic form, which is kind of how we wish all recipes were written. Check out our writeup on their fried rice hack.

The best cookbooks for gifting