For the pure pleasure of reading about food—even aside from the recipes—try these charmers:

In her many influential books, the British food writer Elizabeth David not only shares her love of food and cooking but writes so evocatively that you can smell and taste the ingredients and dishes as she describes them. She was one of the early popularizers of regional cooking and had enormous influence on the generation of chefs that came of age in the 1960s and 1970s. Two posthumous collections (she died in 1992) serve as appetizers: South Wind Through the Kitchen: The Best of Elizabeth David and Is There a Nutmeg in the House?: Essays on Practical Cooking with More than 150 Recipes can be fine appetizers, but don’t miss An Omelette and a Glass of Wine; French Provincial Cooking; Italian Food; and A Book of Mediterranean Food, as well as English Bread and Yeast Cookery (which will make you hungry, since the delicious smell of bread rising emanates from every page).

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M(ary) F(rances) K(ennedy) Fisher expressed her love of good food and its importance in the lives of families and communities in books like How to Cook a Wolf; With Bold Knife and Fork; and The Gastronomical Me.

Calvin Trillin approaches food with humor and much gusto in the three books that make up The Tummy Trilogy: American Fried; Alice, Let’s Eat; and Third Helpings. These essays, which appeared originally in The New Yorker, are treasures.

Jeffrey Steingarten began as the food critic of Vogue in 1989. His wide-ranging and entertaining columns are collected in The Man Who Ate Everything: And Other Gastronomic Feats, Disputes, and Pleasurable Pursuits and It Must Have Been Something I Ate: The Return of the Man Who Ate Everything.


Food played a major role in the lives of both Ruth Reichl (longtime New York Times restaurant critic and editor-in-chief of Gourmet, who wrote about her lifelong interest in food in two memoirs, the best of which is the first, Tender at the Bone: Growing Up at the Table) and Patricia Volk (who wrote about her life in Stuffed: Adventures of a Restaurant Family).



Laurie Colwin, a wonderful novelist and columnist for Gourmet, died much too early (and unexpectedly) at age forty-eight, leaving behind two collections of writing on food, Home Cooking and More Home Cooking. (But don’t miss her fiction, either: The Lone Pilgrim and Shine On, Bright and Dangerous Object, especially.)