THIS year’s best cookbooks did not explore the twisted minds of culinary geniuses, reveal obscure hill towns of Tuscany or take us back in time. (Although readers with some appetite left for Mark Twain will enjoy Andrew Beahrs’s deep dive into 19th-century American food, “Twain’s Feast,” Penguin Press, $25.95).

Instead, they brought brilliant recipes and ideas for right now: at this time of year, even enthusiasts may grow weary of the kitchen. In the span of just two years, David Tanis has published two modern classics. “Heart of the Artichoke” is the follow-up to “A Platter of Figs” (both Artisan, $35). Despite his triply enviable lifestyle (Paris resident, part-time chef at Chez Panisse, frequent traveler to Morocco and Mexico), Mr. Tanis is also a highly practical adviser to American home cooks. His tricks for improving supermarket steak (rub it with garlic and salt) and making pasta for one person (cook it like risotto) will inscribe themselves on your brain. Mr. Tanis’s gifts for composing menus and conveying kitchen wisdom are on every page, along with some perfect sentences like “Sheep, it turns out, adore bread.” (This is followed by the unimprovable opening: “When I worked as a cook in a chateau in the Dordogne. ...”)

Home cooks will find less romance, but more recipes in “Around My French Table” by Dorie Greenspan (Houghton Mifflin, $40). This is Ms. Greenspan’s first book on savory cooking (she is the author of “Paris Sweets” and “Baking: From My Home to Yours”) and she clearly has been bursting to share. Some of the text is windy — do we need to be told what Dijon mustard is? — but her recipes for stylish, updated French food like marinated salmon with potatoes are welcome, and they really work. Her mustard batons — a zippy rework of the cheese stick — are a new go-to hors d’oeuvre.