The best books about eating

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 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.

My grandfather hunted squirrels to put in the stew pot, raised turnips and mustard greens, and shared all that he had with family and neighbors. Joe Gray Taylor’s book takes us back to the beginnings of the cuisine and hospitality of the American South where folks made the most of the natural environment and its riches. This book also describes the way people “visited” in the South, sometimes staying with relatives or friends for weeks or months on end, the hosts accepting them naturally, adding places at the table. Taylor covers Southern hospitality from the days of the frontier through the antebellum and Civil War years and Reconstruction, including the richest and the most impoverished populations, reminding me that I myself am just one generation removed from living off the land.

If you strive to be a Victorian-era food snob, this is the guidebook. It’s a comprehensive overview of food and cooking customs from the second half of the 19th century, packed with illustrations and tons of fun trivia. (For example: celery was considered a high-status food by the middle class because of its connection to Homer’s Odyssey. If you were looking for a trendy centerpiece, you could put it in specially appointed silver or glass vases like a bouquet of flowers. Haha!) You’ll also find an explanation of mealtimes, and how expectations for breakfast, lunch, dinner, tea, and supper were different from today’s. There’s a whole chapter on Victorian table etiquette! By the way, Victorians advise that if you’re hosting a dinner party, make sure to wear an outfit that’s “rich in material, but subdued in tone” so you don’t show up any of your guests.

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 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.

How do we manage those unruly portions at restaurants? Why are we eating the leftovers from our kids' plates? How do we stop boredom munchies? As a certified health coach who has been on her own transformative health journey, Amber Lia exposes 31 common food-related struggles--based on hundreds of hours of research-- that women and men face in everyday moments. Food Triggers offers the "aha" understanding of why we react the way we do as well as tangible solutions to expose the key food triggers sabotaging your health, exchange broken and destructive patterns for healing and God-honoring habits, use practical strategies for immediate action rooted in Scripture and break free from the cycle of reactionary eating, shame, and feelings of defeat, and walk-in victor.

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.

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. 

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.”

Who doesn’t love this charming tiger? I’m a huge fan of Judith Kerr’s children’s books and her sweet and child-like illustrations, so I had to add this one to the list. It’s such a classic. My favourite thing is spotting Mog in the street when the family is on their way to the cafe.

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.

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.

The joy of this book is the way it lays bare the detective work of archaeology. Martin Jones shows us how archaeologists build a picture of the past using fragments of bone; food residues on the inside of cooking pots; grains of pollen; berry seeds and whipworm eggs. He takes us from a group of chimpanzees foraging in Tanzanian fruit trees and the beginnings of sociable eating to the development of cooking among Neanderthals in the Iberian Peninsula and on to a newly-permanent Mesopotamian farming settlement and the competitive dining of a Roman table in Colchester. Organized around the central question of ‘why humans share food’, the book is a history of the meal itself.