I know the audacity of saying something like this since I edit a food blog, but here’s the truth of it–food books often leave me a little cold. There are just so many pitfalls that a volume of food writing can fall into, including:

• The tortured chef memoir. Boy, chefs do a lot of coke, or at least it seems that way from the explosion of depressing tell-all autobiographies. And, man, I really do not care to read about it.
• The restaurant cookbook. This can be nice, I guess, if you really love the restaurant. But then again, if you could really cook that stuff at home, why would you ever bother to go out to eat?
• The ultra-specific sourcebook. Truly, I sort of admire the geeked-out nature of this sub-genre, but I also find it hard to imagine staying interested in foraging or home brewing or pickling things for upwards of three hundred pages

But enough of the negatives. When I stopped by the Food Book Festival in Williamsburg last weekend, there were plenty of books to intrigue those who love both good food and good writing. Here are a few that I intend to read cover-to-cover:

Cooked by Michael Pollan
If ever there were a food writing superstar, it is Michael Pollan. He can research, he can write, and his books use lovely patterns that release some kind of pressure in my brain. In this new book, he goes back to the structure that he popularized in The Botany of Desire, with each of the four sections of the book devoted to one of the four classical elements (fire, water, air, earth) and how it has changed cooking. Continue reading →