With eye-popping colors and shapes, intense flavors, and curious textures, sweets and candy are beloved by people of all ages worldwide. They provide minor treats, lessons in economics for children, and colorful giveaways to mark festivities. They can be admired for beauty and novelty, make ideal gifts, and can even be used to woo. But these seemingly inconsequential indulgences are freighted with centuries of changing cultural attitudes, social and economic history, emotional attachments, and divergent views on the salubriousness of sugar. How did confectionary become so popular? Why do we value concentrated sweetness in such varied, gooey forms? And in the face of ongoing health debates, why persist in eating sweets? From marzipan pigs and nutty nougat to bubblegum and bonbons, Sweets and Candy looks beneath the glamour and sparkle to explore the sticky history of confectionary. Methods for making sweets can be traced back to the importance of sugar in Arabic medicine and the probable origin of this practice in ancient India—a place where sweetness is still important for both humans and gods. Gorging on gobstoppers from these early candy antecedents to modern-day delectables, Laura Mason describes the bewildering and fascinating ways in which different cultures have made, consumed, valued, and adored sweets throughout history. Featuring a selection of mouthwatering illustrations and scrumptious recipes to try at home, this global candy trail will delight sweet-toothed foodies and history buffs everywhere.

Winner of the 2018 James Beard Foundation Book Award (Baking and Desserts) A New York Times bestseller and named a Best Baking Book of the Year by the Atlantic, the Wall Street Journal, the Chicago Tribune, Bon Appétit, the New York Times, the Washington Post, Mother Jones, the Boston Globe, USA Today, Amazon, and more. "The most groundbreaking book on baking in years. Full stop." —Saveur From One-Bowl Devil’s Food Layer Cake to a flawless Cherry Pie that’s crisp even on the very bottom, BraveTart is a celebration of classic American desserts. Whether down-home delights like Blueberry Muffins and Glossy Fudge Brownies or supermarket mainstays such as Vanilla Wafers and Chocolate Chip Cookie Dough Ice Cream, your favorites are all here. These meticulously tested recipes bring an award-winning pastry chef’s expertise into your kitchen, along with advice on how to “mix it up” with over 200 customizable variations—in short, exactly what you’d expect from a cookbook penned by a senior editor at Serious Eats. Yet BraveTart is much more than a cookbook, as Stella Parks delves into the surprising stories of how our favorite desserts came to be, from chocolate chip cookies that predate the Tollhouse Inn to the prohibition-era origins of ice cream sodas and floats. With a foreword by The Food Lab’s J. Kenji López-Alt, vintage advertisements for these historical desserts, and breathtaking photography from Penny De Los Santos, BraveTart is sure to become an American classic.

“Packed with joyful food writing, each recipe complemented by its history and stunning photography.” —Appetite Magazine With over one hundred iconic recipes, The British Baking Book tells the wonderfully evocative story of baking in Britain—and how this internationally cherished tradition has evolved from its rich heritage to today’s immense popularity of The Great British Bake Off. With lavish imagery and evocative narrative, the expert-baker author details the landscape, history, ingenuity, and legends—and show-stopping recipes—that have made British baking a worldwide phenomenon. From cakes, biscuits, and buns to custards, tarts, and pies, authentic recipes for Britain’s spectacular sweet and savory baked goods are included here—like pink-frosted Tottenham cake, jam-layered Victoria sandwich cake, quintessential tea loaf, sweet lamb pie, Yorkshire curd tart, and more. Illustrating the story of how British baking evolved throughout the country, many of the recipes have a sense-of-place heritage like Dorset apple cake, Whitby lemon buns, Cornish cake, Grasmere gingerbread, and Scottish oatcakes. Evocative and fascinating, this cookbook offers a guided tour of Britain’s best baking. “From the iconic Chelsea bun to the substantial Staffordshire oatcake, the bakes she highlights in the book epitomize comfort and reassurance.” —National Post

Great British Sweets is a gloriously indulgent celebration of our Great British love affair with sweet-making and good old-fashioned confectionery. From pear drops to humbugs, honeycomb confections to liquorice, coconut ice to sugar mice, Nozedar gives us the rich history of these classic sweets along with over 50 easy-to-follow recipes for how to make them at home. Make your own Macaroon Bars. Have a go at homemade Humbugs. Create a giant Curly Wurly bar. Or rustle up some lovely Liquorice.