The new Bookforum has a great review by Melanie Rehak of Gillian Riley’s Oxford Companion to Italian Food, which makes me simultaneously drool and reach for my wallet in a pure Pavlovian response.
Cooking is my favourite hobby and for years I’ve bought good cookbooks and read them almost like novels. My early favourites were books by Madhur Jaffrey–particularly books like Madhur Jaffrey’s Flavors of India, which introduced me to the concept of Indian cuisine as a vast amalgamation of very different regional styles. She has a great line in the book that goes (I’m paraphrasing): “Indian cooking” is like saying “European cooking”. Through the book she takes the reader on tours of Indian regional cooking through series of very personal and subjective anecdotes.
I was also completely absorbed by Elizabeth David’s Italian Food the first time I encountered it. It remains surprisingly fresh and accessible despite time and the proliferation (commercialization) of “foody” culture.
The store is still thin on books on food, but I’ve managed to find a few interesting items like this odd little book on galley cooking. But this book by Ali-Bab is really my kind of thing. “Ali-Bab” was the pseudonym of Henri Babinski, a mining engineer and adventurer. His Encyclopedia of Practical Gastronomy was written in the early part of the 20th Century and is a wonderfully idiosyncratic collection of historical and cultural analyses of gastronomy in addition to being a collection of great recipes. I love these kinds of digressive and personal books on food.
In recent years I’ve become a fan of the controversial Anthony Bourdain and all of his written and televised works.
What unites all of these wildly different authors and cooks is their differences. They all approach food passionately and personally. A good cookbook reads like a good novel–or absorbs us like any good piece of art–because it reveals some truth about the human condition; through either form or content.
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