Put simply, 2010 was a monster year for cookbooks. It's the last thing you'd expect in the heyday of the food blog, the TV tie-in, the crowd-sourced recipe.  But what we have here is an overwhelming display of carefully crafted books produced after years of research, recipe-testing and tireless detective work.  These labors of love — for the most part written or edited by women — are the work of cooks who not only have a remarkable, monklike ability to delve into their subject precisely and thoroughly, but also have a passion for sharing it.

We have cookbooks that take on whole lives at one go — the memoirs of one food columnist, the life stories of a veteran cook and religious culture taken root in France; 70 years of one publication, 150 of another — and in one mindblowing, fantastically ambitious case, the life of an entire country as it cooks and eats today. These books haven't just captured the cultural memory of their subjects; they're creating it as well.