Category: Food Books

The books in Penguin’s Great Food series might be small but they’re perfectly formed. For these slim little pocket – or handbag – volumes, the publishing house chose twenty writers from a variety of...

I am a big fan of Michael Pollan’s writing. I was first grabbed by 2008’s In Defence of Food, which led me to The Omnivore’s Dilemma from 2006. These books – absorbing, fascinating, infuriating and entertaining – are great reading. Pollan may be writing about weighty things but he wears his learning and research lightly.

Great research is the key to Mark Kurlansky’s The Food of a Younger Land. The subtitle – A Portrait of American Food–Before the National Highway System, Before Chain Restaurants, and Before Frozen Food, When the Nation’s Food Was Seasonal – explains the what of the latest book on food from the author of Salt, Cod and The Big Oyster.

Despite its title, this is not the kind of book that you’ll pick up if you’re really wanting to learn how to cook. Cooking Lessons could as easily be titled Life Lessons, the kind of things that you learn as you experience – in journalist Daisy Garnett’s case – a few years spent working in New York, a series of disastrous boyfriends and thinking time sailing across the Atlantic en route to resuming life back in England.