More Proof That We Are What We Eat

(And Drink)

Not too long ago, memorable meals rarely had a place in gripping life stories. Sure, some food-focused memoirists became literary darlings -- M.F.K. Fisher, Alice B. Toklas, the masterful Laurie Colwin. But their personalities and writing were idiosyncratic, special.

Then in 1983, in her wildly popular Heartburn, Nora Ephron peppered the fictionalized collapse of her second marriage with recipes and tales of meals gone by. Publishers didn't look back. Fifteen years later, Ruth Reichl's runaway success with Tender at the Bone, in which she described just about every meal she'd ever cooked or eaten, confirmed that there was a big audience for the books where the tell-all details were about food and the food world.

But it takes either a very good idea (such as Julie Powell's 2002 project in which a rudderless young secretary in a tiny Queens kitchen blogged her way through all the recipes in Julia Child's Mastering the Art of French Cooking, which became the book Julie and Julia) or deft prose to make these books work. This season's literary menu supplies ample portions of both.

Foodie Country

David Kamp's The United States of Arugula: How We Became a Gourmet Nation (Broadway, $26) provides a kind of lively Cliffs Notes to the last few decades in food history. The title -- surely some editor's ghastly idea -- belies the heavily researched, stylishly written body of knowledge that supports Kamp's premise: In little less than half a century, food in the United States has been revolutionized by an increasing array of products, cookware, magazines, restaurants, chefs and TV shows, changing the way we shop, cook and eat, and creating a much more sophisticated audience.

Starting with the three early tastemakers of the food establishment -- James Beard, Julia Child and Craig Claiborne -- Kamp moves the story along with portraits of the pivotal figures in this culinary upheaval. Alice Waters is there, as well as the trail of chefs who passed through her influential Berkeley restaurant, Chez Panisse, and those who followed her lead. So too are the early producers and purveyors of natural and artisanal foods, the prominent restaurateurs, ground-breaking shopkeepers, celebrity chefs and even influential food writers as they showed Americans just how good food could be.

Everything He Ate

One of the most intriguing of the current crop of food books comes from Nigel Slater, a popular British food writer and TV journalist. His The Kitchen Diaries: A Year in the Kitchen with Nigel Slater (Gotham, $40) is a chronicle of what he shopped for, cooked and ate in his London kitchen. Slater clearly thinks of cooking as one of life's most pleasurable activities. His attitudes and recipes celebrate each season's bounty as he turns them into wonderful feasts -- sometimes grand but just as often small and simple.

Of November, he writes, "I have never enjoyed shopping for my supper more than in the last few weeks. The air is crisp. The market stalls are groaning with fat roots, purple cabbage and wacky mushrooms. The new apples spurt with juice and the Conference pears are still hard enough to hurt your gums." From this abundance, and more -- the squashes, game chestnuts, pumpkins -- he recounts seemingly effortless meals and explains how they fit in his life. There's roast squash with thyme and raspberry ricotta pancakes. A crisp salad for a cold day. Slow cooked duck with star anise and ginger. Stilton, onion and potato pie. Coffee and walnut cake.

In December, as he readies for holiday cooking there's leftover rice made "Spanish" with chorizo, garlic and scallions; sautéed chicken thighs with spices, fennel and cream; a simple baked red mullet with pine nut stuffing; and his Christmas cake (his most often requested recipe, he reports). That's all before December 11.

Who wouldn't want to break bread with this man? That said, if you're not a farmers' market shopper, be warned: Some of the ingredients in his recipes are not in American supermarkets. But most of his recipes are easy to follow -- and inspiring.

Dining Out

Danny Meyer is one of the most admired restaurateurs in the United States. The success rate of his Manhattan establishments -- from Union Square Cafe, which he opened in 1985 when he was 27, to the quartet of eateries his company brought to life in the remodeled Museum of Modern Art in 2004 -- is legendary in a business where many more new restaurants fail than succeed. As he demonstrates in Setting the Table: The Transforming Power of Hospitality in Business (HarperCollins, $25.95), his personal history -- his family's successes and misadventures in business, his relationships with his father and grandfathers, and his early passion for food and cooking -- is essential to the way he runs his restaurants. So, too, is his commitment to the communities his restaurants serve. Great restaurants, he maintains in this thought-provoking book, can't exist without great service and what he calls "enlightened hospitality." He lays the basic principles out simply: champion and serve the people who work for and with you, then your guests, followed by your "community," your suppliers and your investors. If the first four groups are happy, he says, the investors will be, too.

The book's marketing as a personal step-by-step account of building his company, full of inspirational lessons from which any business person can profit, portends heavy going. And Meyer's writing style isn't a natural draw. But his book gets more and more engrossing as it progresses, describing his developing approach to restaurant management as well as his attempts to analyze missteps along the way.

Culinary Living

Wrestling With Gravy: A Life, With Food, by Jonathan Reynolds (Random House, $25.95), is replete with ruminations on how food can play a role in relationships between men and women, but his pronouncements on that subject are questionable (he suggests cayenne pepper and cardoons as ingredients in a meal designed for seduction). But cooking has clearly been a continuing source of pride and achievement for Reynolds, though his life and careers as a playwright, actor, screenwriter, author and food columnist for the New York Times Magazine are the real subject of this book. Big-name kitchens and celebrities from those worlds make appearances, and their recipes do, too, including his cousin Lee Remick's barbecued Chinese duck. Would readers be as interested in his story without that focus? Perhaps. But it's much more fun -- and intimate -- with it.

Maybe that's the appeal of these books. We may not all cook, but we all eat. Seeing how food fits in other people's lives is just about as personal as it gets. ·

Judith Weinraub is a 10-year veteran of the Washington Post Food section and a recent winner of a 2007-08 Food and Society Policy Fellowship from the W.K. Kellogg Foundation.