There are some cookbooks you reach for when you need to get dinner on the table, and others you sit down with when you’re hungry for a good read. Here are two recent releases, starting with the one that’s less practical but utterly fascinating: a cookbook that focuses on flavours to which we’re naturally averse.

You’d think that Jennifer McLagan would have nothing left to write about after her last three quirky cookbooks: Bones: Recipes, History, and Lore followed by Fat: An Appreciation of a Misunderstood Ingredient and Odd Bits: How to Cook the Rest of the Animal. But trust her to keep thinking outside the recipe box. Her latest offering is Bitter: A Taste of the World’s Most Dangerous Flavor, With Recipes (HarperCollins).

The cover of Bitter is a foreboding matte black, embellished only with blue-grey-green cardoon leaves. The cardoon, McLagan writes, is a thistle and a member of the artichoke family; the stalks have a subtle bitterness beloved by Italians but not widely known among North Americans. Indeed, she notes on the book’s inside cover, while some cultures have long appreciated bitter flavours—think of Campari in Italy or bitter melon in Asia—people on this continent tend to focus on the pleasures of salty and sweet.

McLagan is out to change that. “Cooking is about balancing tastes,” she writes, “and bitter often plays a vital role in a dish’s harmony; it is crucial to the composition of a meal or menu. Without a touch of bitterness, your cooking will be lacking a dimension. Furthermore, bitter is both an appetite stimulant and a digestive—that is, it has the power to make you hungry as well as helping you digest your meal.”

Where does the danger come in? “We all have an innate aversion to bitter tastes,” she explains. “Our tongues are covered in taste buds that are very adept in detecting even the smallest traces of bitterness. This is a natural defense system to protect us: many poisons are bitter, so our response when tasting something very bitter is to grimace and often to spit it out.”

But that doesn’t mean we can’t learn to appreciate bitter foods. “Bitter is the gatekeeper of adult taste,” declares Naomi Duguid, a fellow cookbook writer whose quote McLagan highlights on the book’s opening page. Indeed, bitter foods and beverages such as grapefruit, Brussels sprouts, turnips, coffee, and hoppy IPA beers are acquired tastes, not something your average five-year-old would embrace.

McLagan admits that the whole concept of bitterness is a tough one to pin down, since the perception of taste is highly individual. Is a grapefruit, for example, bitter or simply sour? Our experience of bitterness, she says, varies more widely than any of the other basic tastes.

The book explores bitterness through culinary and physiological science, literature, and history. It’s pretty much guaranteed that you’ll learn something reading it and gain insight into your own preferences as well. It never occurred to me that I dislike both Seville orange marmalade and black coffee for the same reason.

A wealth of interesting recipes may inspire you to give that dreaded vegetable you’ve been avoiding since childhood another try. (Brussels sprouts, as many people are realizing due to their trendy resurgence, taste unpleasantly bitter when you boil them to a mush but are delicious when pan-fried with a little lemon and salt.) Other recipes, such as rutabaga and apple soup, methi and spinach with baked eggs, and tea-poached pears, will have you contemplating sophisticated flavours anew. Even making toast, for example, is an exercise in controlling bitterness; a little browning adds a nice flavour, but too much makes it unpleasant.

If you’re looking for a more straightforward recipe collection—with less emphasis on contemplation and more on completion—pick up The Dirty Apron Cookbook (Figure 1). It’s written by David Robertson, who co-owns Vancouver’s Dirty Apron Cooking School & Delicatessen, and includes both recipes taught in class and ones used to stock the shop.

Dishes range from basic for beginner cooks to more involved for those comfortable at the stove. There’s a page on how to poach an egg, and a recipe for smoked-salmon bagels with lemon and dill cream cheese. Other easy recipes include porcini mushroom and chestnut soup, roasted root vegetable salad, and kale caesar salad with hard-boiled eggs.

Other projects are more advanced, such as making fresh pasta dough. Many of these are geared to impress dinner-party guests, like the miso-sake roasted sablefish and a lovely ginger-soy tuna poke that’s arranged atop a block of pretty green pressed avocado.

And then there’s a whole chapter called “Deli Lunches”, in which Robertson reveals the “art of a great sandwich” in the balance of fresh, sweet, salty, tart, crisp, and fatty ingredients. The Dirty Apron’s specialties include a bánh mì–style pulled-pork baguette and a roast chicken sandwich with chipotle mayo, shaved Parmesan, sun-dried tomatoes, and watercress. Then there’s the arugula and goat cheese ravioli, served with a walnut and sage butter sauce. “This ravioli is a classroom favourite at the Dirty Apron—even the hardcore carnivores love it,” Robertson writes.

Part of what makes the dish so tasty, McLagan might add, is the arugula and walnuts—bitter foods that make the end product oh so sweet.