Cravings — Recipes for All the Food You Want to Eat

The Celebrity Cookbook That’s Actually Good

The celebrity cookbook is a genre with a deservedly mixed reputation — too often a ghost-written cash-in stuffed with untested recipes and glossy photos of someone who clearly does not cook. Cravings is the great exception, and it became a bestseller precisely because word got around that it was the real thing. Chrissy Teigen — model, television personality, and one of the funniest people on the internet at the height of her social-media fame — turned out to be a genuine, obsessive home cook, and her debut cookbook delivers food people actually make, love, and return to.

That authenticity is the whole story of the book. Cravings works not despite Teigen’s celebrity but alongside it: the personality is real, the appetite is real, and most importantly, the recipes are real.

Food You Genuinely Want to Eat

The title is a promise the book keeps. Cravings is unapologetically about indulgence — the food you actually want rather than the food you feel you should eat. Rich pastas, crispy fried things, generous comfort dishes, and gloriously over-the-top crowd-pleasers fill its pages, all built around big, satisfying flavour. There is no pretension and no penance here; the book embraces pleasure as the entire point of cooking, and that joyful lack of guilt is a large part of its charm.

Running through the indulgence is a thread of family Thai cooking, inherited from Teigen’s mother Pepper, whose dishes add a personal, flavour-packed dimension that lifts the book above standard American comfort fare. These recipes are among the book’s most beloved, and they give Cravings a distinctive heart.

A Voice Like No Other Cookbook

What truly sets Cravings apart is its writing. Teigen brings the same funny, candid, slightly chaotic voice that made her a social-media phenomenon to the page, and the headnotes are a genuine pleasure to read — irreverent, self-deprecating, full of personality and honest enthusiasm. Most cookbooks are consulted; this one is read. The voice makes cooking from it feel like hanging out with a hilarious friend who happens to make incredible food, and it transforms the book from a reference into an experience.

Reliable in the Kitchen

Personality would mean little if the food failed, but Cravings delivers where it counts. The recipes are well tested and dependable, producing exactly the results they promise without the disappointments that plague lesser celebrity efforts. Teigen clearly cooked these dishes obsessively before publishing them, and that diligence shows in instructions that work and flavours that land. The book earns the trust of its readers the only way a cookbook can — by performing in real kitchens, again and again.

Unpretentious by Design

Cravings is not a culinary education or a technical manual, and it never pretends to be. It is a collection of fun, indulgent, approachable recipes from someone who loves to eat, and its casual, low-stakes tone is central to its appeal. Readers seeking serious instruction in technique, or health-conscious and diet-specific cooking, are in the wrong place. Readers who want delicious, satisfying food and a genuinely entertaining book to cook it from will find few more enjoyable options. The lack of pretension is a deliberate, winning choice.

A Phenomenon and a Franchise

The book’s success was substantial enough to spawn sequels and a whole Cravings brand, and that staying power reflects how thoroughly it connected with home cooks. In an era sceptical of celebrity products, Cravings won people over the hard way — by being good — and it helped redefine what a famous person’s cookbook could be. Its influence is visible in the wave of personality-driven, indulgence-celebrating cookbooks that followed, but the original remains the most charming of the bunch.

The Verdict

Cravings is a delight: a celebrity cookbook that turned out to be one of the most fun and genuinely useful comfort-food collections of its era. It offers indulgent, reliable, crave-worthy recipes wrapped in a voice you actually want to spend time with, and it never takes itself too seriously. For home cooks who want delicious food and a good laugh in equal measure, it is an easy recommendation and a perennially popular gift.

Redefining the Celebrity Cookbook

Cravings arrived at a moment when the celebrity cookbook was an object of justified suspicion, and it quietly helped change the category’s reputation. By being genuinely good — tested, personal, and cooked from real love of food rather than assembled as merchandise — it set a higher bar for what a famous person’s cookbook could be. Its influence is visible in the wave of personality-driven, indulgence-celebrating cookbooks that followed, many of which borrowed its formula of authentic voice plus reliable comfort food. Teigen also built Cravings into a genuine franchise, following it with sequels and a whole brand of cookware and pantry products, but the original remains the most charming and the most surprising. What it proved is simple but important: readers can tell the difference between a cash-in and the real thing, and they reward authenticity. Cravings succeeded because Teigen actually cooks, actually cares, and actually wrote it in her own unmistakable voice — and that sincerity, more than her fame, is why it endures.

Our rating: 4.5/5 — A genuinely great celebrity cookbook: fun, indulgent, reliably delicious comfort food delivered in Chrissy Teigen’s irresistible, unfiltered voice.

Explore More

• Browse our full guide to the best cooking & food books.