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
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.
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
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
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
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
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
The Taste of Country Cooking
1976 · 310 pages
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.
★ 4.7
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
Adventures on the Wine Route
A Wine Buyer's Tour of France
1988 · 288 pages
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.
★ 4.5