Cod
1997 · 304 pages
One fish shaped the whole Atlantic world. Kurlansky follows cod from the Basques and their secret fishing grounds through the slave-trade economies it fed to the Grand Banks collapse of 1992.
★ 4.5
The Books canon
Sourced and shelved.
Every book chosen by hand and annotated for why it matters.
Browse all 1,178 books or filter by subject, era, place, and author.
Browse all 1,178 books or filter by subject, era, place, and author.
The Book of Jewish Food
1996 · 668 pages
From Aleppo and Samarkand to Vilna and New York, Roden gathered eight hundred recipes and the histories that traveled with them. She was born into Cairo's Jewish community and expelled along with it.
★ 4.7
Essentials of Classic Italian Cooking
1992 · 736 pages
Marcella Hazan taught America what Italians actually eat, region by region, and her rule is exacting: buy well, do less, wait. Her tomato sauce is a can, an onion halved, and butter.
★ 4.7
Oranges
1967 · 149 pages
Curious why the juice from a Penn Station machine changed color through the winter, McPhee went to Florida. He came back with citrus botany, grove barons, and the entire industry of frozen concentrate.
★ 4.7
Kitchen Confidential
2000 · 312 pages
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.
★ 4.7
Like Water for Chocolate
1989 · 246 pages
Tradition forbids the youngest daughter to marry, so Tita cooks, and everything she feels enters the food. Her quail in rose petal sauce sends a sister off naked with a Mexican revolutionary.
★ 4.7
Green Eggs and Ham
1960 · 62 pages
Sam-I-Am will not stop offering: not in a box, not with a fox, not on a train, not in the rain. Fifty words is all Seuss used, and the badgering turns into song.
★ 5.2
Honey from a Weed
1986 · 374 pages
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.
★ 5.3
A Book of Middle Eastern Food
1968 · 513 pages
Egypt expelled its Jews after Suez, and Roden, exiled in London, collected recipes from displaced Sephardi and Arab families and the histories behind them. English-speaking kitchens learned hummus, tabbouleh, and mezze from her.
★ 5.3
Between Meals
An Appetite for Paris
1962 · 185 pages
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.
★ 5.3
The Physiology of Taste
1825 · 464 pages
Brillat-Savarin, a French magistrate, made the table a subject for philosophy: tell me what you eat, he wrote, and I will tell you what you are. No food writer has bettered him.
★ 5.4
The Omnivore's Dilemma
2006 · 450 pages
Pollan traces four meals backward: a drive-through, Whole Foods, Joel Salatin's farm, and a pig he shoots himself. Carbon isotopes reveal Americans are built of corn. He made provenance a mass preoccupation.
★ 6.3
The Art of Eating
1954 · 784 pages
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.
★ 7.0