Most cookbooks are built to inspire you, to entertain you, to make you think more creatively about the choices you make in the kitchen. But Salt Fat Acid Heat: Mastering the Elements of Good Cooking (Simon & Schuster, $35) is a culinary game-changer: it single-handedly transformed the way I think about food and the equations of the meals I create and eat. Samin Nosrat, an accomplished cooking teacher and now a columnist for The New York Times Magazine, breaks down the essential elements of flavor into these four necessary components, and the entire book is an examination of the ways they complement and compound each other. The recipes included are included are thoughtful and seemingly simple, but yield rich, complex results. The Kuku Sabzi, the Persian Herb and Greens Frittata, has already become a weeknight favorite in our house.