Side dishes make the meal, and almost nobody plans them. A burger without fries, turkey without stuffing, barbecue without slaw and beans and macaroni cheese: the main course gets all the attention and the rest of the plate decides whether dinner was any good.

Rick Rodgers is an award winning cooking teacher and he wrote the reference that closes the gap. More than four hundred and fifty recipes across vegetables, grains, potatoes, salads, breads, stuffings and sauces, in 480 pages, indexed so you can find something to go with what you already have in the oven.

This is the book that stops the Thanksgiving panic and quietly fixes every ordinary weeknight in between. If a household cooks at all, it should own one book like this, and this is the one.