Are Food Books Changing?

Complaint: I’m having difficulty finding recent food books that I want to read. Objectively, it’s hard to judge, but I have a feeling that the publishing industry has moved on from the type of book that I enjoyed very much 10 or 15 years ago or more. I’m not finding authors who write like M.F.K. Fisher, Elizabeth David, Mark Kurlansky (in his early books), Michael Pollan, Laura Shapiro, Édouard de Pomiane, Edda Servi Machlin, A.J. Leibling, Waverly Root, and  Calvin Trillin: to mention just a few. 

I’ve been searching New-Years lists of the 2024 best food books, and other lists of people’s favorites — but I’m just not finding what I’d like to read. Most of the books on these lists are cookbooks, which are not what I’m seeking — I want history books, food memoirs, and books about food and travel. (Note that what I really DON'T want is news of the world today, especially the world in Washington. Complaining about food books is a good diversion.)

I Found an Old Classic

As I searched, I did find a reference to an old classic from 1988, A Tuscan in the Kitchen by Pino Luongo. I read it this weekend, and it was pretty good, Although the book was mainly made up of recipes, the surprising thing was that it was fun to read them. That’s lucky because actually cooking from this book would be impossible: like most nostalgia books about living in small towns during an earlier and more innocent era, all the ingredients were procured from the cook’s own garden or from local hunters, small-scale farmers, fishermen, and so on. Everything was fresh except maybe home-canned tomatoes, which predictably were better than hothouse tomatoes out-of-season (I’ve heard this before). In other words, these recipes don’t exactly work in my world. I might be skeptical that the ideal world depicted in books like this ever did exist, but never mind that.

During 2024, I read a few older books, such as Vanilla: Travels in Search of the Ice Cream Orchid (from 2005) which I read last summer. A newly-published book that I read in September was Frostbite by Nicola Twilley; this book describes two centuries of development of refrigeration (review here). But there weren't many good finds.

In my search this week, I heard about a recent book called Slow Noodles: A Cambodian Memoir of Love, Loss and Family Recipes by Chantha Nguon, which I’ll be reading soon. I’m also aware of recently-published memoirs by Joan Nathan and Marion Nestle which I may read in the coming months. But in general, I’m not finding what I want — I guess maybe I need to go back and look for classics that I’ve missed. 

In the News

The obituary of food writer and editor Gillian Riley, who died in November, reminded me even more of how I can’t seem to find new food books that I would like to read. I reviewed her major work, The Oxford Companion to Italian Food, in 2009 (link). 

From the Guardian:

“In his review of The Oxford Companion to Italian Food for the Guardian in 2007, John Dickie advised that the author needed to be ‘brave, brilliant, learned and almost certainly a little unhinged.’ The food historian and typographer Gillian Riley, who has died aged 90, fulfilled all these requirements when composing that very book. That a single person was able to master the labyrinthine complexities of Italian food culture, embracing history, literature, the visual arts, politics and an infinite quantity of processes, ingredients and recipes is remarkable. That it was done with humour, humanity and lashings of erudition was the needful icing to make it digestible.” (Guardian Obituary)

A book by Gillian Riley that I really enjoyed: Impressionist Picnics.
(Review Here)

The New Yorker still publishes a few food-themed cartoons.

Books I Love

A curiosity: the following list illustrates some of the books that I mentioned on my blog in 2008. These food books were on my shelves then, and they still are there.

• Jennifer 8 Lee, The Fortune Cookie Chronicles
• Tom Standage, A History of the World in Six Glasses
• Gary Paul Nabhan, Why Some Like it Hot
• Michael Pollan, In Defense of Food
• Pollan, The Botany of Desire
• Pollan, The Omnivore’s Dilemma
• Jordan & Brady, eds, The World is a Kitchen
• Julian Barnes, The Pedant in the Kitchen
• Mary Taylor Simeti & Grammatico, Bitter Almonds
• Elizabeth L. Ortiz, The Book of Latin American Cooking
• Claudia Roden, A Book of Middle Eastern Food
• Michelle Stacey, Consumed: Why Americans Love, Hate, and Fear Food
• Henry Hobhouse, Seeds of Change
• Julia Sahni, Moghul Microwave
• Madhur Jaffrey, World Vegetarian
• Harold McGee, On Food and Cooking
• Ayla Algar, Classical Turkish Cooking
• Gillian Riley, Painters & Food: Renaissance Recipes