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.
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
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
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
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
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