100 books like Epic Tomatoes

Have you ever wished you could grow those nutritious, meaty peas and beans your granddaddy used to grow? Some had cool names, like Rattlesnake Beans, Big Red Ripper, or Blue Podded Shelling. They were probably heirloom varieties, plants that have been around for 50 years or more. While heirlooms are harder to find than they used to be, and nurseries and garden centers don’t often sell them as young plants, you can still grow these varieties from seeds (tip: look for them online or search for “seed swaps” in your area). Weaver is an organic gardener and food historian who discusses the old-timey veggies our forebears ate and where their seeds came from. You’ll want to plant your own kitchen garden with many of the varieties he covers.

As a Southern gardener, I’ve learned a lot from Passalong Plants by co-authors Steve Bender, the self-described “grumpy gardener” columnist for Southern Living magazine, and Felder Rushing, from Mississippi, who is an eleventh-generation gardener, writer, author, and broadcaster on MPB Think Radio. As the title suggests, their book is about plants that have been passed along from one gardener to another, sometimes over a neighboring fence. Many are now living heirlooms you can’t find at retail. Instead of focusing only on seeds, Bender and Rushing discuss plant swaps, dividing and sharing perennials, and growing more plants from cuttings. Their style is chatty and informal but also informative.

This is a guide to saving and growing 160 different vegetables, and you must know how to harvest, save, and store their seeds if you want to plant some of the harder-to-find varieties. Co-author Kent Whealy was one of the founders of Iowa-based Seed Savers Exchange, a nonprofit organization and seed bank that has a collection of over 20,000 varieties of heirloom flower, vegetable, fruit, berry, grain, and herb seeds. He and his former wife, Diane Ott Whealy, are credited with sparking the heirloom seed movement in the 1970s. 

Author John Forti’s book combines personal essays and gardening info on traditional/ heirloom plants. He encourages readers to slow down and reconnect with the land (he’s one of the founders of the Slow Food movement) and learn or re-learn sustainable, traditional gardening skills. He describes herbs like angelica, pre-industrial agricultural practices (I wish I had goats, so they could eat all the poison ivy around my house), and much more. I enjoyed the beautiful woodblock print images throughout the book. They help remind me that I don’t have to depend on all the modern “stuff,” like technology, chemicals, and modern hybrids, to have a successful and satisfying garden.

Tomatoes for Neela is a beautiful book and such a treat to read knowing it’s written by a prominent chef!

I have to admit that I am not one who loves vegetables (I’m a sweet tooth!). However, this story really inspired me to take full advantage of the access I have to fresh produce. I share Neela’s excitement for her favorite day of the week being the day of the green market.

My own neighborhood has the most charming farmer’s market every Thursday and I love walking around, seeing all the colors and varieties of food there. I was definitely encouraged to add more veggies, especially tomatoes, to my tote bag and enjoy having a go-to tomato sauce recipe from the Padma Lakshmi to share with friends for pasta night.

I have a small, mostly shady city yard, but I still haven’t given up hope of growing food outside my back door.

That’s where Emily Tepe’s book The Edible Landscape comes in. With lovely photographs of real gardens and step-by-step instruction, Tepe walks me through how to successfully grow fruits, vegetables, and flowers side-by-side to create a garden that is both beautiful and productive.

The best part of the book is Emily’s 10 favorite lists, featuring plants she loves and recommends.

This workbook has a wealth of helpful tips on how to deal with overwhelming anxiety. It’s written simply with great illustrations that really help littles figure out the scary world that surrounds them. I love the example of worries growing like tomato plants. If we want the worries to stop growing, we stop watering them! At the time my daughter was four and we had a huge over-producing tomato garden so this was a perfect illustration for both of us. We set up a time to talk about worries and we kept to that time limit. It helped both of us go through the anxiety instead of getting overwhelmed by it. There is no cure for anxiety and medication is not really an option for small children so dealing with it head-on was the only way that worked for us. This book really gave us both tools. It’s practical and… show more.

I think one of the most important yet hardest things to study with food in history is its sensory appeal.

Taste and smell are so important to how we experience food, but don’t leave a record. Visualizing Taste is a smart, fun look at the role of the senses in food marketing, and how businesses remade markets around visual selling.

To illustrate what an incredible revolution this was, just think about the following: when you walk into a supermarket, what do you smell? Chances are, if it’s a decent one, the answer is nothing. Which is kind of crazy since food should smell!

Hisano shows us how modern marketers changed our relationship to food, elevating color over other attributes of food, such that today we rely more on sight than taste or smell to buy our food.

I read this book as a kid, probably too young, and it haunted me, but in the best ways. It stuck with me through my entire adult life and was likely something that helped kick off the aspects of my morbid personality to the point where I thought a kid's book about presidential assassinations was okay.

It’s fun and not actually scary, but it feels like it should be scary and is just a good time.

It was impossible to not salivate while reading Fannie Flagg lovingly describe the delicious southern dishes in her iconic novel, Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Cafe. This book is the companion cookbook to the novel and it has recipes for deep-fried chicken, bourbon-chocolate pecan pie, pork chops with apples and sweet potatoes and, of course, fried green tomatoes. I realize that I hardly need to say more, but… that’s not even the best part. Fannie’s signature sense of humor shines throughout this beautiful book. (Don’t worry, the pulled pork is made with actual pork!)