On My Bookshelf

Cookbooks that I often dip into, mentioned in Jam Today Too:

Allen, Darina. Simply Delicious Suppers. Macmillan, 2001.

Beard, James. American Cookery. Little, Brown and Company, 1972.

——. James Beard’s Theory and Practice of Good Cooking. Alfred A. Knopf, 1977.

Child, Julia, Louisette Bertholle and Simone Beck. Mastering the Art of French Cooking. Volume One. Alfred A. Knopf, 1961.

Child, Julia and Simone Beck. Mastering the Art of French Cooking. Volume Two. Alfred A. Knopf, 1970.

Cunningham, Marion. The Fanny Farmer Baking Book. Alfred A. Knopf, 1984.

David, Elizabeth. French Provincial Cookery. Penguin Classics, 1999.

Fisher, M.F.K. With Bold Knife and Fork. Putnam, 1969.

Gandia de Fernández, C. and Angeles de la Rosa. Flavors of Mexico. 101 Productions, 1979.

Henderson, Fergus. The Whole Beast: Nose to Tail Eating. Ecco, 2004.

Jaffrey, Madhur. A Taste of the Far East. Random House, 1997.

Madison, Deborah. Vegetarian Cooking for Everyone. Ten Speed Press, 2007.

Roberts, Michael. Parisian Home Cooking. William Morrow, 1999.

Rombauer, Irma S. Joy of Cooking. Bobbs-Merrill, 1975.

Shulman, Martha Rose. Provençal Light. Bantam, 1994.

Slater, Nigel. Appetite. Clarkson Potter, 2000.

Sunset Magazine. Sunset Seafood Cookbook. Lane Publishing Co.,1984.

Wolfert, Paula. Mediterranean Grains and Greens. HarperCollins, 1998.

Cookbook/memoirs that I love. Every one of them takes an individual and creative approach to food:

Beard, James. Delights and Prejudices. Running Press Book Publishers, 1992.The Grand Poobah of American cooking on his life and food loves. And it all starts with an eccentric childhood in Oregon.

Chamberlain, Samuel. Clementine in the Kitchen. David R. Godine, 1988.The utterly charming classic of an American family discovering the pleasures of the table in pre–World War II France.

Fisher, M.F.K. The Art of Eating. Macmillan, 1990.

A must-have for any serious reader/eater, by one of our best American authors, let alone one of our best food writers. “The Gastronomical Me” is more than the tale of an education through food, it’s one of the most poignant love stories ever written.

Gray, Patience. Honey from a Weed. Harper & Row, 1986.

An artist cooks and meditates on food and meaning. The subtitle says it all: “Fasting and Feasting in Tuscany, Catalonia, the Cyclades and Apulia.”

Lebo, Kate. A Commonplace Book of Pie. Chin Music Press, 2013.

A practical poet rhapsodizes about pie. She loves it, and she makes you love it, too.

Lewis, Edna. The Taste of Country Cooking. Alfred A. Knopf, 1976.

The classic memoir of American country cooking. What could be more American than the cooking of a Virginia farming community settled by freed slaves?

Lobrano, Alexander. Hungry for Paris. Random House, 2008.

More than just a guide to Paris restaurants, this is a love letter to the special places that have given pleasure to the author…and through him, to us, too. I can imagine rereading this long after the restaurants he describes have disappeared.

Olney, Richard. Lulu’s Provençal Table. Ten Speed Press, 2002.

Olney follows the legendary Lulu around her kitchen as she dips and dances and creates, by magic, ineradicable happiness with food.

Olney, Richard. Ten Vineyard Lunches. Interlink Books, 1988.

Such a pleasure to read menus and their recipes composed by a real artist.

Short, Kayann. A Bushel’s Worth: An Eco-Biography. Torrey House Press, 2013.

This memoir of life on a postmodern farm brought tears to my eyes. Hope-filled and moving.

Strope, Nancy. Cattle Country Cookbook. Binfords & Mort, 1971.

An Eastern Oregon ranch wife writes with beautiful plainness about real ranch food. Not just a wonderful snapshot of a place and time, but absolutely chock full of practical recipes.

Toklas, Alice B. The Alice B. Toklas Cookbook. Doubleday, 1960.

Impossible to get more individual than this. I personally think Ms. Toklas was a greater artist than her partner—though a little quieter about it.

Villas, James. Between Bites: Memoirs of a Hungry Hedonist. John Wiley & Sons, 2002.

Hilariously truthful. If you’ve enjoyed his other writings as much as I have, you’ll love finding out what REALLY happened during those fabulous meals—particularly his date with M.F.K. Fisher, where due to a bad case of food poisoning he couldn’t swallow anything except a bit of milk toast. Recipe included.

Wechsberg, Joseph. Blue Trout and Black Truffles. Alfred A. Knopf, 1954.

Another must-have for the shelf of any serious food lover. Evocative and individual. Don’t miss “The Sausage Millennium.”

Also highly recommended is the TIME-LIFE “Foods of the World” series of books. Published in the late 1960s, these are not just physically beautiful in their design and photography, but endlessly fascinating in their descriptions of both the foods of the world and of post-war Western attitudes toward that world. Many of the greatest of the food writers of the time were enlisted in this series: M.F.K. Fisher to write the volume on provincial French cooking, Craig Claiborne on the Grand Cuisine of France, Waverly Root on Italian cooking, Joseph Wechsberg on the Austrian Empire of his youth…and great writers who loved food were also involved, most notably Laurens van der Post, who wrote, in his seventies, the volume African Cooking, in which he memorably says:

“Then I wondered, often in desperation, what in the world all the warring systems, countries, tribes and races still had indisputably in common. Oversimple and childlike as it may seem, one answer that popped up unbidden from my imagination was food. If I did what has never been done before—if I wrote about the food of Africa as a whole…—perhaps I could render some service and at least pay homage to my troubled continent… In a small way, too, I could recall for my readers the fact that all men are one in their needs and searchings, that whatever sets them apart is evil and whatever brings them peaceably together is good.”

“All men are one in their needs and searchings.” What could be a better quote with which to end a cookbook than that?