Lately, Germany has been earning kudos for its high-end cuisine, counting 11 restaurants with three Michelin stars (the only European country with more is France). But Teutonic home cooking still has something of a reputation for being heavy on fatty meats and light on complexity. That's a shame, because there's a lot to like about regional German recipes, such as the dishes shown here from Biergarten Cookbook, by Julia Skowronek (DK, March 2015), and Jeremy and Jessica Nolen's New German Cooking (Chronicle Books, January 2015). And with the 50th anniversary edition of Mimi Sheraton's seminal and still-relevant classic The German Cookbook (Random House, 2014), there's no better time to get (back) into German food.