Michael Smith and David Rocco celebrity chefs receive cookbook awards from Taste Canada

On November 5, Taste Canada's annual Food Writing Awards celebrated the best in Canadian culinary publishing.

Food Network Canada favourites Michael Smith and David Rocco were among this year's winners, with Smith's Chef Michael Smith's Kitchen receiving the General Cookbook award, and Rocco's Made in Italy awarded as a top Regional/Cultural Cookbook.

Both men accepted their awards via video message, as Rocco was in India and Smith was in Jasper, B.C., on Monday night.

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Watch Michael Smith introduce his winning cookbook, containing 100 of his all-time favourite recipes, below:

Each category had both an English and French winner. Josee Di Stasio's A la di Stasio 3 took top spot alongside Smith for her recipes and tips stemming from the Tele-Quebec cooking show. In Rocco's Regional/Cultural category, Vincent Beck and Diem Ngoc Phan's Asie: Un voyage culinaire took home the French prize.

Also at the ceremony, prolific cookbook author Anita Stewart was inducted into the Taste Canada Hall of Fame, as were posthumous recipients Catharine Parr Traill, Jeanne Anctil, and Margo Oliver, Quill and Quire reports.

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Judges evaluated 73 submissions before awarding the year's best cookbooks.

"The selection and diversity of the publishing and the cuisine in this country are breathtaking. Our judges were in the unique position of spending time with each of these books — testing recipes, reading the narratives and studying the presentation — to finally decide the winners in this year's Taste Canada Awards," says Karen Gelbart, National Chair of Taste Canada.

"Kudos to the publishers for their forward thinking in continuing to publish works that showcase our Canadian cuisine, and many congratulations to our winners for their innovative interpretation of Canada's food world."

See the entire list of winners here. Culinary narratives and single-subject cookbooks were also given awards.

All shortlisted titles were donated to the University of Guelph library's Canadian cookbook collection.

What's your favourite Canadian cookbook? Tell us in the comments.