Dallas and Fort Worth have produced a shelf full of cookbooks worth owning. Not novelty books, not coffee-table objects, not celebrity tie-ins. Real cookbooks, written by real working chefs and food writers who spent decades in the kitchens and markets of this region and had something worth saying about what they found. Here is the list.
Dean Fearing belongs at the beginning of any conversation about Dallas cooking. His The Mansion on Turtle Creek Cookbook, published in 1987, was the first serious document of what he and Stephan Pyles were building at the time — a Southwestern cuisine that pulled from Mexican, Tex-Mex, Southern, and classical French traditions and fused them into something that felt entirely Texan. The tortilla soup recipe alone is worth the price of the book.
Rizzoli published a completely updated and redesigned edition in 2012, The Mansion on Turtle Creek Cookbook: Haute Cuisine, Texas Style, which is the one easiest to find now. His most recent book, The Texas Food Bible (2014), is the most accessible for home cooks — broader, less restaurant-centric, and a solid introduction to Fearing’s philosophy for anybody who never ate at the Mansion during his long run there.
Stephan Pyles is the other founding father, and his bibliography runs four books deep. The New Texas Cuisine (1993) is the one that mattered most, the one that made the national food press pay attention to Dallas cooking. Bon Appétit credited him with “almost single-handedly changing the cooking scene in Texas.” The recipes are ambitious — this is a chef’s book, not a weeknight-dinner book — but they are the record of a moment in American regional cooking that will not come around again.
His Tamales (1997), co-authored with fellow Southwestern pioneers Mark Miller and John Sedlar, is a different animal: singular in focus, beautifully photographed, and the most useful book if you want to understand the full range of what the tamale can be. More than a hundred recipes, from the traditional to the genuinely surprising. New Tastes from Texas (1999) was the companion to his Emmy-winning PBS series, organized by region rather than course, and Southwestern Vegetarian (2004) rounds out the set.
Anne Lindsay Greer McCann is the name most Dallas food people know but cannot quite place, and that is a shame, because she wrote the book that started the whole Southwestern cuisine conversation. Cuisine of the American Southwest (1983) won the Tastemaker Award and was the first cookbook of its kind — the one that codified what Fearing and Pyles and their contemporaries were building before they had the restaurants to prove it. She followed it with Foods of the Sun (1988), which expanded the framework and brought in recipes from the young chefs she was collaborating with, and later Contemporary Mexican Cooking.
Greer McCann has been called the den mother of Southwestern cuisine and she still lives in Dallas. Her books are out of print but findable, and worth tracking down.
Paula Lambert has been making cheese in Dallas since 1982, when she opened The Mozzarella Company after a trip to Italy convinced her that Americans deserved better cheese than what they were getting. The Cheese Lover’s Cookbook and Guide (2000) is the book that came out of forty years of making, aging, pairing, and thinking about cheese. It is organized by cheese type, moves through cooking techniques and pairing suggestions, and is the most practical book on cheese written by an American.
Paula’s second book, Cheese, Glorious Cheese (2007), is more focused on pairing — specific cheeses, specific wines, specific dishes — and the one to pull out when you are planning a cheese course or a party spread. Both are available and both are worth having.
Jon Bonnell is Fort Worth’s answer to the question of what Texas fine dining looks like when it does not apologize for being Texan. He opened Bonnell’s Fine Texas Cuisine in 2001 and has been cooking elk, quail, venison, Gulf seafood, and heritage beef at the highest level ever since. Jon Bonnell’s Fine Texas Cuisine (2009), his first book, is the serious one — restaurant-level recipes, ambitious preparations, the kind of book you buy because you want to understand how a Fort Worth kitchen thinks about local ingredients.
Jon Bonnell’s Texas Favorites (2011) is the more accessible follow-up, the book he described as the stuff he cooks at home when nobody is looking, with a standout chapter on tailgate food. Jon Bonnell’s Waters: Fine Coastal Cuisine (2014), his third, pulls from the menu of his seafood restaurant and is the best single-volume Texas seafood cookbook available. All three are in print.
Goldee’s Bar-B-Q — Jalen Heard, Lane Milne, and Jonny White — opened their fire-engine-red building outside Kennedale weeks before the pandemic closed every restaurant in Texas, survived on curbside and catering, and were named the best barbecue joint in the state by Texas Monthly in 2021 anyway. Goldee’s Bar-B-Q: A Cookbook (University of Texas Press, 2025), written with James Beard Award-winning author Lisa Fain, is the most important barbecue book to come out of North Texas in a long time. It is not a simple recipe collection. It is a methodology — how to manage fire, how to trim and season meat, how to think about the entire smoke process from wood selection to temperature monitoring. The brisket section alone runs longer than most cookbooks’ entire barbecue chapters. The writing has the same voice as the restaurant: young, unhurried, generous with information, and completely without ego.
Lisa Fain is Dallas-born, the granddaughter of a Texas farm family, and the writer behind the Homesick Texan blog, which began in 2006 as a way to cook the food she missed while living in New York. The Homesick Texan Cookbook (2011) is the book that came out of that project, and it remains the single best introduction to Texas home cooking in print — chicken-fried steak, tamales, chili, King Ranch casserole, kolaches, and a hundred other dishes covered with the detail of someone who actually grew up eating them.
The Homesick Texan’s Family Table (2014) expanded the scope with more regional recipes and deep background on Texas food history that puts each dish in context. Queso (2017) is exactly what it sounds like — the definitive book on the chile-cheese dip — and it is better and more substantive than that description implies. Her most recent work is the Goldee’s collaboration, which she spent a year writing while doing midnight rib shifts in Kennedale.
Seven names, eleven books. Half a shelf, at minimum. All of them available, most of them in print, every one of them the real thing. Half Price Books on Northwest Highway usually has several of the older Fearing and Pyles titles for under ten dollars. The Goldee’s book is at every major retailer and on the restaurant’s own website. Start with whatever is on the shelf on a Saturday and build from there.
