16 Appetizing Cookbook Cover Ideas

Whether you want to create a cover for your family recipe book, or are a thriving chef about to make every home better with your own cookbook, look no further than these beautiful cookbook cover designs.

As a foodie and self-proclaimed chef, I find my family recipe cookbook to be a dear keepsake and a gospel of sorts. I can’t guess how many times I asked my mother to send me a photo of some of her recipes. And they always awaken nostalgia, happiness and childhood in me.

That is the value that cookbooks bring to the table (pun intended): to offer knowledge so you can make people who are dear to you happy. Or just step up your cooking game!

But before a reader experiments around the kitchen with your recipes, you need to win them over with a good cookbook design. We do eat with our eyes first after all.

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The Dish is King

If your recipe book is centered around a certain type of food, or you simply want the reader to start craving for what’s inside, you can put a photo of amazing and delicious dishes on the cover. It never fails!

1. Ottolenghi Simple: A Cookbook

The English-Israeli chef Yotam Ottolenghi is a star in his own right, with a notable career in cooking, hosting cooking shows and writing cookbooks.

Spending his early childhood in Jerusalem and studying Israeli cuisine, he implemented his heritage in his recipes and this colorful and appetizing front cover seems to prove that his family recipes are something you would want on your table.

2. Ama: A Modern Tex-Mex Kitchen

Tex-Mex cuisine is a burst of vibrant flavors and colors. It’s a mixture of two different nations and cultures tied together perfectly into something great. This cookbook cover proves that by using typography that reinforces the Mexican culture and by combining contrasting colors. And those tacos look mouthwatering, don’t they?

3. See You on Sunday: A Cookbook for Family and Friends

It might seem just like a memory now because of social distancing, but a family meal is noisy, colorful, and dishes are spread all over the table. Sam Sifton’s new cookbook See You on Sunday has recipes for family and friend gatherings, and the graphic design perfectly encapsulates that. The position of the dishes well shot from a birds-eye perspective, combined with elegant typography and many colors makes this a great design solution.

4. Huxtabook: Recipes from Sea, Land & Earth

The best cookbooks often look fancy and classy, and this one’s cover with a darkly colored background with beautiful and light dishes plated tastefully definitely exudes style and sophistication. The kitchen decor used in the photo helps complement the overall aesthetic of this recipe book cover.

5. Pasta Grannies

This book is “saving traditions and sharing skills, one granny at a time!”. It is an amazing and cute concept, almost like a family cookbook of a whole nation and culture. The photo of a grandma holding a rustic, old-school plate of home-made pasta is all it takes to sell the idea to any pasta lover!

6. Season: Big Flavors, Beautiful Food

A beautiful photo that shows the cook in the act of seasoning stands on the front cover of this recipe book for Indian cuisine. The beautiful gold letters, elegant font and the focus on seasoning make it a captivating visual.

Illustrated Cookbook Covers

Illustrations always make things playful, colorful and approachable. For all of those afraid of entering the kitchen, a beautifully illustrated front cover will make a cookbook look like it’s easier and not as complicated too.

7. Whole Food Cooking Every Day

This book for vegetarian, vegan, gluten-free and sugar-free recipes has a light and colorful illustration of vegetables and herbs, which seems like a collage. The muted colors and textures of the plants give it a unique and retro vibe.

8. My Abuela's Table: An Illustrated Journey into Mexican Cooking

Cute, colorful, even childlike: this front cover is unlike any other. The author celebrates her grandma’s cooking and her heritage, and the sweet illustrations with Mexican motifs and common cooking ingredients seem like the perfect recipe for that.

9. Plenty More

This is the second book by Yotam Ottolenghi on this list, so it seems that he knows publishing and design as well as cooking. This minimal illustration of dishes piled up with a basic color scheme is definitely a different approach to cookbook cover design, but it works!

10. Salad Party

Just like a good and balanced salad, this cookbook cover is exploding with freshness and taste. It has a retro flair to it, but it’s a very unique and brave decision for using that many colors. And the collage feel that it possesses makes me think of a homemade recipe binder.

Cookbook covers with the chef’s portrait

Celebrity chefs often write cookbooks. And their photo on the cover is what makes that book sell. Here are some great examples.

11. Gordon Ramsay's Home Cooking

This cookbook by the Masterchef has a photo of him in his natural habitat: the kitchen. The only thing that seems strange is that Ramsey is so peaceful in that photo, right?

12. Antoni in the Kitchen

The food expert of Queer Eye’s Fab Five knows much, much more than making guacamole, guys. His first cookbook came out last year, and it has a beautiful pastel-colored cover, depicting Antoni Porowski in the kitchen, combined with a playful marker font for the title.

13. From Crook to Cook

Snoop Dogg is a unique person with an even more unique career: from a platinum-selling rapper to a platinum-recipe writer. The front cover of his recipe book perfectly shows the quirk and fun cooking with Snoop Dogg is, by combining a cure old-school pattern cover with a photo of Snoop in his regular outfit holding mac & cheese.

Quirky and Creative Cookbook Covers

Sometimes an unusual design attracts a lot of attention and impresses. Especially with thematic or entertainment cookbooks, a creative and quirky front cover works perfectly.

14. Binging with Babish

If you’ve seen the Binging with Babish YouTube channel, you know that the cook (his actual name is Andrew Rea) always films his cooking videos from an angle that only shows his hands and the countertop on which he works. You won’t see Babish’s face anywhere, and this cover stays true to that style.

15. Heroes' Feast: The Official Dungeons & Dragons Cookbook

The beloved storytelling game Dungeons & Dragons is a vast and magical universe that deserves its own cookbook. True to the design and tradition of this game, the official cookbook is designed as an old book of runes or maps, with hardbound black leather covers with vintage and mythical font.

16. The Unofficial Harry Potter Cookbook

Finally, we have a magical cookbook, one inspired by the Harry Potter universe. With a dark violet background and a matching mystical font (not the trademarked Harry P font), it depicts a witch’s cauldron in which something magical is cooking.