October 24th is National Food Day! If you’d like to read — rather than eat — your way through it, dive into one of these fantastic cookbooks. Each is good enough not to cook from!
- The Paris Cookbook by Patricia Wells. As Francophile
foodies have long understood, this seminal work is as much a love letter to the
City of Lights as it is a how-to-cook manual.
- Bread and Chocolate: My Food Life in & around San Francisco by Fran Gage. This book’s 60 recipes aren’t nearly as
entertaining as the author’s tales of growing up seafood-free in Pittsburgh;
her discovery of (and initial confusion about) quinces; and her adventuresome
eating along the Left Coast.
- Lidia’s Italy by Lidia Matticchio Bastianich.
Fans of Bastianich’s PBS show already know she’s an accessible, down-to-earth
matriarch of Italian cooking. This eponymous companion guide to the show is
filled with engaging anecdotes, cultural tidbits, and colorful characters.
- The American Woman’s Cook Book, edited by Ruth Berolzheimer. Published decades before Don Draper conquered Madison Avenue, this book’s addictively readable recipes offer a glimpse of what the Greatest Generation ate at home. Liver loaf with pan gravy, anyone?
Do you like to read cookbooks? Tell us about your favorites in the comments section below!
