Where to Start with Hetty McKinnon
Hetty McKinnon is a Chinese-Australian cookbook author, food writer, and one of the most compelling voices in modern vegetarian cooking. Born in Sydney to Chinese immigrant parents, she grew up surrounded by the flavors and traditions of Cantonese home cooking. In 2012, she founded Arthur Street Kitchen, a community-based salad delivery service in her Sydney neighborhood that became the seed for her first cookbook. She has since published five cookbooks, relocated to Brooklyn, and built a devoted following through her Substack newsletter, “To Vegetables, with Love.” Her writing weaves personal memoir with practical recipes, always rooted in the idea that vegetables deserve to be the center of the plate. In 2024, her book Tenderheart won the James Beard Foundation Award for Vegetable-Focused Cooking and the IACP Award, cementing her place among the most important vegetarian cookbook authors working today. She has been vegetarian for over twenty-five years, but her food is never defined by what it leaves out.
Start here
To Asia, With Love
Hetty McKinnon · 256 pages · 2021 · Easy
Themes: Asian vegetarian cooking, Chinese-Australian identity, noodles and dumplings, family and memory
McKinnon’s fourth cookbook and the one that brought her to international attention. To Asia, With Love is a joyous celebration of the foods and flavors she grew up with as a Chinese girl born in Australia, now filtered through decades of cooking and a life built in Brooklyn.
Why Start Here
To Asia, With Love is the book where McKinnon’s voice comes through most clearly. It is personal, warm, and unapologetically rooted in the specific experience of being a child of immigrants learning to claim a culinary identity. The recipes are entirely vegetarian but never feel like they are missing anything. You will learn to make knife-cut noodles, dumplings, chili oil, and kimchi from scratch, alongside quicker preparations like miso-glazed eggplant and turmeric coconut rice.
What makes this a better starting point than her award-winning Tenderheart is scope and accessibility. At 256 pages, it is focused and inviting rather than encyclopedic. The recipes work with supermarket ingredients, the techniques are approachable, and the headnotes give you just enough context to understand why each dish matters to her. For anyone curious about vegetarian Asian cooking, this is the most welcoming door into McKinnon’s world.
What to Expect
A 256-page hardcover with warm photography and personal essays woven between the recipes. Organized around the building blocks of Asian home cooking: noodles, dumplings, rice, salads, and sweets. Named one of the New York Times Best Cookbooks of Summer 2021 and recommended by Nigella Lawson. The difficulty level is genuinely accessible, with most recipes achievable on a weeknight.
Alternatives
Hetty McKinnon · 528 pages · 2023 · Moderate
McKinnon’s most ambitious and acclaimed work. Tenderheart is a 528-page tribute to her late father, a Chinese immigrant who worked as a fresh produce supplier in Sydney. Each of the twenty-two chapters focuses on a single vegetable or fruit, and the book contains over 180 recipes that range from simple weeknight preparations to more involved weekend projects.
Why Read This
If To Asia, With Love is McKinnon’s homecoming, Tenderheart is her masterwork. The book won the 2024 James Beard Foundation Award for Vegetable-Focused Cooking and the IACP Award, placing it among the most celebrated vegetarian cookbooks of recent years. The writing is deeply moving, blending memoir, grief, and cooking in a way that few cookbooks attempt and even fewer achieve.
The botanical organization, with chapters on everything from Asian greens and eggplant to celery, turnip, and seaweed, shares a structural kinship with Deborah Madison’s Vegetable Literacy. But where Madison approaches from the perspective of a gardener and scientist, McKinnon brings the lens of a daughter trying to preserve her father’s legacy through food.
What to Expect
A substantial, beautifully produced hardcover that functions as both cookbook and memoir. Over 180 recipes organized by ingredient. The difficulty level is slightly higher than To Asia, With Love, with some recipes requiring more time and technique. Winner of the James Beard Foundation Award and IACP Award. Named one of Bon Appetit’s Best Cookbooks of the Year.