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2014 was a year for faraway cuisines to take up residence in U.S. kitchens — cookbook authors cast their nets for flavors from Paris, the Middle East, Southeast Asia and points in between.

Jennifer Lin-Liu's On the Noodle Road takes readers on a journey along the former Silk Road, looking for the origins of the noodle. But reviewer T. Susan Chang says that the book gets tied into knots when the quest turns cold.

The rebels, rule breakers and renegades who rule this year's Top 10 list aren't looking for a Ph.D. in Traditional Cooking. They're pleasure seekers whose books are filled with quirky facts, gorgeous pictures and ingredients deployed in unexpected places.

Snapping turtles look to suburban New England gardens to lay eggs as their habitats are increasingly threatened. So the next time you're checking the progress of the peas and lettuce this spring, beware.

This season's standouts praise America's culinary traditions from coast to coast — and everywhere in between. Authors of these plainspoken and charming cookbooks craft memorable recipes around just a few well-chosen flavors: meals for every day that are anything but.

This year, cooks poured their hearts into these carefully crafted, kitchen how-tos. T. Susan Chang says these cookbooks are like a properly seasoned skillet — heavy-duty, battle-tested and much to be prized.

This year has yielded a bumper crop of cookbooks for the farmers market regular. Food writer T. Susan Chang has sorted through this bounty to come up with an armload of recommendations — as well as a score of great summer recipes — for the locavore in your life.

If you're the kind of person who's always believed that a book can teach you to do anything, this year's crop of cookbooks will prove you right. Cooks lacking confidence will find comfort in detailed instructions and comprehensive how-tos.

This year's crop of spring and summer cookbooks is a sprawling, eclectic collection, hard to summarize and harder to sort. In these books we find a world of thrilling arcana, seemingly custom tailored for a summer in which eating in looks to be the greatest adventure of all.

There's no reason not to eat well, even in tough economic times. Three cookbooks conjure deliciously simple dinners from the most ordinary of ingredients.