The best gastronomy books

Join me and my four grandsons as we cook the boys’ favorite summer dishes and prepare a birthday dinner for their grandfather. With this book I welcome you once again to the Simeti farm in western Sicily, first described in my earlier book, On Persephone’s Island, and to the dinner table where three generations of my family gather each summer to celebrate our multicultural heritage with good food and great affection. Part memoir, part family recipe collection, part delightful photographic record of an extraordinary experience, it is also a meditation on the role that food can play within the family in bonding, creating memories, and consolidating tradition and identity.

Straight out of the sewers and right into the kitchen, the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles' favorite pizzas are finally yours to create and enjoy! Join Leonardo, Raphael, Donatello, and Michelangelo on a seriously ooey, gooey, cheesy adventure inspired by the beloved original cartoon series.

This cookbook contains sixty-five righteous recipes, from old-school classics such as the New York Style Pepperoni to newfangled feasts such as the Lean, Mean, and Green and Shredder's Revenge. There's a pizza for every occasion — breakfast pizzas, mini-pizzas, party pizzas, and even dessert pizzas.

Have you ever wanted to leave the rat race, move abroad and live the good life somewhere green and bountiful? Lisa and her partner, the enigmatic S, did just that. In 2007 they left their jobs as newt catchers and their native English shores for beautiful green Galicia in the remote northwest of Spain – a land of mystery and mists, Celtic music and Celtic legends, and a language of its very own. 

Follow one couple’s love affair with this unspoiled region as Lisa and S set to work to self-renovate a derelict farmhouse, whilst trying to become self-sufficient and learn more about this untamed part of the Iberian peninsula. Their story unfolds through Lisa’s letters to her mum, making this truly a series to write home about.

From Ancient Rome through 21st-century America, bestselling author Denise Kiernan brings us a biography of an idea: gratitude, as a compelling human instinct and a global concept, more than just a mere holiday. Spanning centuries, We Gather Together is anchored amid the strife of the Civil War, and driven by the fascinating story of Sarah Josepha Hale, a widowed mother with no formal schooling who became one of the 19th century’s most influential tastemakers and who campaigned for decades to make real an annual day of thanks.

Populated by an enthralling supporting cast of characters including Frederick Douglass, Abraham Lincoln, Sojourner Truth, Walt Whitman, Norman Rockwell, and others, We Gather Together is ultimately a story of tenacity and dedication, an inspiring tale of how imperfect people in challenging times can create powerful legacies.

Matt O’Brien, an assistant curator and art restorer at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, has always been passionate about the Italian Renaissance. But when he discovers a long-neglected portrait of a beautiful woman among the museum’s miles of storage bins, he becomes obsessed--and not only because he suspects that the painting is by Leonardo da Vinci. Something about the mysterious woman’s exquisite face stirs his memory, and when Matt finds himself spun across the centuries into Quattrocento, Italy, where he arrives perfectly attired in 15th-century clothing, he appears to be free to pursue her.

A magically woven, richly detailed debut, Quattrocento tells an unforgettable tale of art, and love, and the unexpected places where they meet.

Joseph Soderini di Avenzano is America's most celebrated chef...Some believe he cut a deal with the Devil to achieve fame and fortune. Whether he is actually Bocuse or Beelzebub, Avenzano is approaching the twenty-fifth anniversary of his glittering Palm Beach restaurant, Chateau de la Mer, patterned after the Michelin-starred palaces of Europe. Journalist David Fox arrives in Palm Beach to interview the chef for a story on the restaurant’s silver jubilee and quickly becomes involved with Chateau de la Mer’s hostess, Alessandra, unwittingly transforming himself into Avenzano’s rival.

When the chef invites David to winter in Florida and write his authorized biography, he gradually becomes sucked into the restaurant’s vortex—shipments of cocaine coming up from the Caribbean; the Mafia connections and unexplained murder of the chef’s original partner; and the chef’s ravenous ex-wives, swirling in the background like a hidden coven. As Alessandra plots the demise of the chef, David tries to sort out hallucination and reality, while Avenzano plays with him like a feline’s catnip-stuffed toy.

A groundbreaking culinary work of extraordinary depth and scope that spans more than one thousand years of history, A Mediterranean Feast tells the sweeping story of the birth of the venerated and diverse cuisines of the Mediterranean. Author Clifford A. Wright weaves together historical and culinary strands from Moorish Spain to North Africa, from coastal France to the Balearic Islands, from Sicily and the kingdoms of Italy to Greece, the Balkan coast, Turkey, and the Near East.

Red Sauce tells the story of how Italian immigrants invented a whole new cuisine in the United States, from creating veal parmigiana to penne alla vodka. Today, Italian American favorites like pizza or spaghetti and meatballs are synonymous with Americans and American food, available anywhere and everywhere. That wasn’t always the case. When Italian immigrants arrived in cities like New York, people of northern European ancestry viewed their foods as too foreign, too ethnic, garlic too strong a flavor, and lasagna unpronounceable. In Red Sauce, Ian MacAllen explains not only the origins of our favorite ethnic foods, but how they became beloved by Americans everywhere. 

The Missing Ingredient is about what makes good food, and the first book to consider the intrinsic yet often forgotten role of time in creating the flavours and textures we love.

Written through a series of encounters with ingredients, producers, cooks, shopkeepers, and chefs, exploring everything from the brief period in which sugar caramelises, or the days required in the crucial process of fermentation, to the months of slow ripening and close attention that make a great cheddar, or the years needed for certain wines to reach their peak, Jenny Linford shows how, time and again, time itself is the invisible ingredient. From the patience and dedication of many food producers in fields and storehouses around the world to the rapid reactions required of any home cook at the hob, this book allows us to better understand our culinary lives.