The most recommended books about eating

Athena Calderone welcomes you into her casual, cool, and elegant world in Cook Beautiful.

Recipes are listed by season, using simple and healthy ingredients at their peak of freshness. The recipes are simple and straightforward and include gorgeous and “swoon-worthy” photos and tips explaining how to style and plate your meal for maximum impact and little effort.

The recipes in Cook Beautiful are equally impressive for an intimate dinner party, yet simple enough to serve on a Tuesday night. Many of the seasonal dishes have made it into my own dinner rotation.

Everything this reality TV personality Lisa Vanderpump does looks beautiful, elegant, and expensive on TV. Of course, I wanted to see how she does that, that’s why I purchased this book.

I was pleasantly surprised by how honestly she described so many things she does as “smoke and mirrors” in her words. From owning many restaurants in different countries, she has a wide variety of knowledge on hosting people. She shared many tips on how to make beautiful presentations of food and table settings effortlessly such as decorating store-bought plain cake to make it look like a custom-ordered cake from a high-end cake shop.

Her dry sense of British humor really adds fun to reading this book as well. The recipes in this book are mainly from chefs who worked for her restaurants, I was really impressed when I tested them out but easy enough for home cooks like me… show more.

This was a gift from a friend, and I absolutely love it. From the jacket copy: “It is the riveting portrait of a gay man struggling to overcome the reverberating shame and guilt of a long-buried childhood secret.” On the very first page he includes his ode to a sandwich, written when he was a child. It starts: "The BLT is the most perfect sandwich. The bacon brings it salt and the rich taste of pork. The tomato is sweet and juicy…”  Labrano eventually became a famous food critic, and his memoir is peppered with fabulous descriptions of food and wine. His description of a dinner in Val-les-Bains in the Ardèche region of France is downright inspiring. A great read!

This wonderful, engaging book will change the way you think about food. Margaret Visser unpicks an “ordinary meal” in North America, digging beneath the surface of everyday ingredients such as butter, lettuce and chicken to reveal fascinating stories. Visser – who writes with a shrewd and perceptive intelligence - weaves together history, science and social observation to great effect. The ‘ordinary’ meal proves to be no such thing.

Angela Shanté and Seth Rogers have constructed a beautiful story around the infamous pastime in Black families sitting down for Sunday dinner.

While Sunday dinner's origins are rooted in chattel slavery, when enslaved Africans only day of rest was Sunday. Black families looked forward to a larger feast on those days. But while the options provided to the enslaved weren’t the best, Black Americans have always been able to transform the little they had into revolutionary additions to American cuisine.

The story of the Black Sunday dinner is one of resilience and community in the face of adversity. Sunday dinners with the main character expand in community as their family welcomes guests to join their weekly family ritual. When his teacher asks the class to share a family tradition, Sunday dinner becomes the obvious choice. 

Adam Gopnik’s book, The Table Comes First: Family, France and the Meaning of Food has it all: essays on the history of restaurants, followed by second on taste, then come the recipes (a stellar one on leg of lamb prepared with bacon and anchovies, saffron and cinnamon), and finally, in Chapter Ten, an essay on wine that is a far cry from the plethora of books on “how to taste.” It calls wine what it is, alcohol, and talks about why it makes us happy. I downloaded this book onto my Kindle a long time ago, and writing about it reminds me to purchase a hard copy of the book in order to place It on my shelf next to Gopnik’s book, Paris to the Moon, written way back in 1995, which is about the year he and his wife and infant son spent in Paris, with great stories… show more.

This is the only entertaining book I’ll ever recommend that doesn’t actually have pictures! It would be blasphemous other than Mark is an expert recipe developer who churns out 40 menus for successful meals and offers a plethora of tips and helpful success secrets throughout. I miss the pictures but love how he organizes the meals by season. It’s easy to narrow down the chapter you want to cook from, and the descriptive titles let you choose a menu based on the delightful sound of the recipe! You’ll be thrilled to have these seasonal menus laid out for you, but they lend themselves well to inserting some of your own updated favorite recipes in place of canapes. Try his Pasta with Walnuts, or Chili-Fried Shrimp with Scallions and Orange, yes please!

This book is a poem about people gathering around food, whether at tables or on picnic blankets, breakfasts in bed, or at a sidewalk café. The illustrations are beautiful—homes around the world, and spreads of all kinds of foods. The theme is gratitude—for food, for family and friends, for the diversity of the world’s tables that together make the greatest table. This is a quiet book—one that could be read as a prayer before a meal. It is invitational: “…so if you’re hungry, join us here, pull up another chair. We’ll all scoot over, make more room, there’s always some to spare.”

This first book in the Supper Club trilogy is a personal favorite of mine. Nothing pairs better than a good book and good food.

Carla Laureano inspired me to try some new foods with her descriptions of what Chef Rachel Bishop cooks for her friends. The friendships are spot on, the romance is simmering, and the takeaways (as in lessons learned, not as in a curry from your corner shop) are meaningful.

Stories from the Kitchen is a celebration of food in fiction, an anthology of short stories combined with tidbits from novels. The authors are well known, ranging from Charles Dickens’ “Love and Oysters,” about oysters upending the life of a man and his dependable routines, to Isaak Dineson’s “Babette’s Feast,” in which a lavish dinner served by a French cook transforms the hearts and souls of the most austere members of an isolated Danish community. Another story of particular interest: M.F.K. Fisher’s heartbreaking “A Kitchen Allegory.” As in Fisher’s gastronomical non-fiction writing, in which food is her greatest metaphor, this slice of fiction uses food as a source of empathy for a woman who has to reckon with no longer being needed. Reading this entire collection underscores how my own book—though unprecedented in its number of recipes tucked within a novel— stands on a long tradition of food as… show more.