Holiday Gift Guide 2012: Modernist Cuisine at Home, a cookbook for ambitious home chefs

Modernist Cuisine at Home is a spin-off of Nathan Myhrvold’s Modernist Cuisine, a $625 five-volume epic geared toward serious students of food. This more approachable version is just as beautiful as the original, and offers home cooks a fighting chance at replicating some of the fancy techniques made famous by Heston Blumenthal et al. Giving it as a gift also sets you up for the next few Christmases, since whoever receives it will soon be clamouring for a sous-vide machine, a pressure cooker and a digital scale. $147. See 20 other gifts for cooks »

Available at Indigo, multiple locations.