We cannot tell a lie: Over the years, we’ve been members of various recipe cults: Martha Stewart, Real Simple, hell, even this guy for a little while. But as the years have worn on, one book and one book alone has proven itself over and again to be pretty much the only cookbook you’d ever need in your home, if indeed you ever had to narrow it down to one. We speak, of course, of The New Best Recipe. Pardon us if you know about this already; we bring it up because, as the colder months draw nearer, this is the book you need for holidays, dinner parties or even just nights like tonight, when it’s miserable outside, and you’d like nothing more than to curl up with a fantastic soup you’ve never made before. (For us, it’s Potato Leek, and no, you cannot come over.) Released in 2004 as an updated edition of the earlier tome The Best Recipe, The New Best Recipe is a whopping 1,000 pages of knowledge gleaned over the years from the folks at Cook’s Illustrated magazine who, as you may know from their magazine or TV program, are obsessive recipe and gear testers the likes of which this world has perhaps never known. Think of a classic dish from any number of Western cuisines, and chances are, The New Best Recipe has it on lockdown. For the newbie cook, it is a godsend — few cookbooks put dishes in context the way this one does — and for the aspiring chef, these recipes are so sturdy as to be a great jumping-off point when you want to get creative. And at $24.95, it just could be the cheapest textbook in the world. Suffice it to say, unless you’re ordering takeout, do not invite anyone over until there’s a copy of The New Best Recipe in your kitchen; otherwise, God only knows what could happen.