The cover for the cookbook “Chop Chop” shows a plate with cooked fish, cassava salad and a variety of raw vegetables.

The New York Times has released its highly anticipated list of the 14 Best Cookbooks of 2025, and Nigerian food writer Ozoz Sokoh’s debut cookbook, Chop Chop: Cooking the Food of Nigeria, has secured a well-deserved spot among the year’s most exceptional culinary publications.

The prestigious list, curated by The New York Times Cooking and Food desk, features an impressive array of titles spanning diverse cuisines and cooking styles. While the complete roster includes cookbooks exploring everything from easy baking to Thai cooking in America and seasonal pasta, “Chop Chop” stands out as a groundbreaking contribution to the documentation of West African foodways on the global stage.

Yewande Komolafe, writing for the Times, praised Sokoh’s approach, noting that the author has organized a broad survey of Nigerian cuisine, robust, piquant, and balanced, into a guide that genuinely supports and empowers the home cook. The review highlighted Sokoh’s practical strategy of offering shortlists of ingredients like red palm oil, dried shrimp, and fermented locust beans (írù) at the start of each chapter, allowing readers to assess their pantry before diving in. With chapters titled “More Than Just Fufu” and “All-Time Favorites,” the book manages to be comprehensive while still allowing Sokoh to lend her personality to the story of Nigerian cuisine.

“Chop Chop” represents nearly two decades of work by Sokoh, a culinary anthropologist who began documenting Nigerian food on her blog Kitchen Butterfly in 2009. The book features 100 recipes spanning all six of Nigeria’s culinary regions. It was also recently featured in the National Post’s “The 10 best cookbooks of 2025…”

Now a professor of Food and Tourism Studies at Centennial College in Ontario, Canada, Sokoh’s work has been featured in Smithsonian Magazine, CNN African Voices, and Anthony Bourdain’s Parts Unknown. Her selection for the Times’ best cookbooks list joins a growing recognition of African culinary traditions in mainstream food media. The book, gorgeously photographed with images of Nigeria’s landscapes, markets, and people, is already receiving acclaim from culinary historians including Jessica B. Harris, who called it a book that “gives a rich and loving culinary picture of the food of Africa’s most peopled country.” With “Chop Chop,” Sokoh invites readers everywhere to experience Nigeria’s food-loving spirit, one plate at a time.

Order a copy here.