skopia
A Berkeley merchant drives France cellar by cellar, buying from small growers and arguing that filtering a wine bright strips out what you want to drink. Lynch taught Americans to taste for place.
Freetown, Virginia was founded by freed slaves, including Edna Lewis's grandfather, and her cookbook is that community's year: what the farm gave in each season and the meal it made.
Bourdain cooked for two decades, then told everything: the drugs, the immigrant crews who hold restaurants up, why you never order fish on Monday. He made the line cook a figure Americans envied.
On Corfu in the 1930s a boy hunts scorpions and owls while his mother and three grown siblings supply the chaos. Durrell describes every creature exactly and every relative without mercy.
Gray gave up an editor's job for stone quarries in Tuscany, Catalonia, Naxos, and Apulia, cooking wild greens, snails, and game over wood fires and setting down a Mediterranean already disappearing.
Sent to the Sorbonne in 1926, Liebling studied restaurants instead. Proust, he argues, simply lacked the appetite to eat properly. What follows is a young man's gluttonous education in Paris.
Fisher wrote about oysters, wartime rationing, and eating alone, and made food a way of writing about hunger of every kind. The poet W.H. Auden said nobody in America wrote better prose.
Fifty years on, writing in Guatemala, one of Cortés's foot soldiers set down the conquest of Mexico as the ranks saw it. He never got over his first sight of Tenochtitlan.