Calling all home chefs and bakers! Interested in trying some new recipes this holiday season? The New Orleans Public Library has professional-grade cake pans and thousands of cookbooks available for checkout with your Library card on a three-week loan period.

Our cookbooks are available at every library location, but your library card also gives you access to the cookbooks in the culinary collection at the Southern Food and Beverage Museum, which we can bring directly to your home branch for your convenience.

Our cake pans, which can be found exclusively at the Rosa F. Keller Library, come in a variety of shapes and sizes, including multi-tier hearts, stars, circles, and hexagons. We also have Cinderella, SpongeBob SquarePants, Thomas the Tank Engine cake pans, and more. 

Some of our favorite new cookbooks of 2022 stand out not only for the recipes they contain, but also for the unique stories they tell. These are cookbooks that you can sit down and read for pleasure or make use of in your holiday meal planning, and they’re all available for free at your local library.

My America: Recipes from a Young Black Chef by Kwame Onwuachi and Joshua David Stern
This popular collection of recipes from the African Diaspora in America are interwoven with a deeply personal narrative about what it means to be American and what American cuisine really is. Enjoy reading the travel stories of a chef whose culinary research has taken him all over the Americas. 

Gullah Geechee Home Cooking: Recipes from the Matriarch of Edisto Island by Emily Meggett, et al
Try your hand at Old World, West African recipes, preserved by a highly-regarded South Carolina elder of the Gullah Geechee community. Ms. Meggett cooks for large family gatherings that include (at last count) her 50 grandchildren.

Turkey and the Wolf: Flavor Trippin’ in New Orleans by Mason Hereford and JJ Goode
Whether you’ve eaten at this beloved New Orleans restaurant or not, you will definitely want to indulge in some of their funky, family-friendly sandwich recipes, especially if you want to get the kids involved in some kitchen shenanigans.

I Am From Here: Stories and Recipes from a Southern Chef by Vishwesh Bhatt
A Mississippi man with South Asian heritage shares award-winning Southern-Indian fusion recipes from his popular eatery in Oxford, while regaling readers with food and family love stories about the women in his family who taught him to cook.

Fix Me a Plate: Traditional and New School Soul Food Recipes from Scotty Scott of Cook Drank Eat by Scotty Scott
This cookbook may not have your doctor’s seal of approval, but it is full of crowd-pleasing dishes for large family gatherings, potlucks, and any occasion where you want people to ask, “Who made dat?!” Be the person with no leftovers to pack up and take home this holiday season.

Visit nolalibrary.org to find a copy of all these and more, and to explore the library’s Cake Pan Collection.