Yotam Ottolenghi’s ‘Plenty More’ sweeps best cookbook of the year poll

What was the best cookbook of 2014? List after list has been generated on that subject. But Eat Your Books, the website that allows you to catalog the recipes in your cookbook collection, might have the last word. And it says it’s Yotam Ottolenghi’s “Plenty More.”

Eat Your Books arrived at that by collecting and tabulating more than 300 best-of lists from a wide variety of sources -- newspapers, magazines, blogs and websites -- from all over the English-speaking world.

More than 800 books were mentioned on one list or another, but the winner, by a large margin, it says, was Ottolenghi’s fourth cookbook.

“This is the fifth year in a row that Ottolenghi has had a book in the top 10 and the third time he has had the number one book,” Eat Your Books’ website says. “No other book came close to this book’s universal popularity — it was the number one book in every country we get polls from.”

Following “Plenty More” was Gabrielle Hamilton’s innovative “Prune” cookbook, which comes with notes, scribbles and food stains already supplied. Baking maven Dorie Greenspan’s “Baking Chez Moi” was third, followed by Sean Brock’s “Heritage” and Karen Page’s “The Vegetarian Flavor Bible.”

Rounding out the Top 10 were the controversial “Thug Kitchen,” Rose Levy Beranbaum’s “The Baking Bible,” Charles Phan’s “The Slanted Door,” Margarita Carrillo Arronte’s “Mexico: The Cookbook” and David Lebovitz’s “My Paris Kitchen.”

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