Frontlist | The Ten Best Books About Food Of 2020 | Arts & Culture

The Man Who Ate Too Much: The Life of James Beard

This riveting biography chronicles the life a towering figure in American cookery, tracing James Beard’s rise to culinary fame from his boyhood in the Pacific Northwest to catering gay cocktail parties in Manhattan to the publication of an American culinary Bible, James Beard’s American Cookery. While Beard was gay, his closeted public persona became that of a “sexless bachelor,” two-time James Beard Award-winning author John Birdsall writes. His book pulls back this veneer to show a more complete portrait of Beard’s life, examining the cook’s use of coded language in early cookbooks and his place in New York City’s LGBTQ community. Birdsall’s multi-layered account also doesn’t shy away from darker parts of Beard’s life. The language itself is as rich as Beard’s fried quail. Birdsall describes his subject’s love for butter-saturated oysters, for instance, “hissing and foaming, edging into brownness, with a scent so rich it would seem capable of tinting the air gold.”

Falastin: A Cookbook

Sami Tamimi, a co-founder of London’s famous Mediterranean Ottolenghi restaurants, and Tara Wigley, a food writer and Ottolenghi alumna, delve into the food of Tamimi’s homeland, Palestine. (There is no letter “P” in Arabic, they explain of the book’s title.) The recipes in the cookbooks—like chicken shawarma pie, labneh cheesecake and tamarind-slathered eggplant—are intended to be doable for home cooks, with friendly notes about what can be prepared ahead of time, and paired with enticing photography of herb-studded food. Falastin also seeks to capture the political reality of life in an embattled land through vignettes about the people who live and cook there, from Islam Abu Aouda, a woman who offers cooking lessons in a Bethlehem refugee camp, to a family of farmers enmeshed in lawsuits to keep their land on the West Bank.

This digestible book is meant as a one-stop guide for people who have wondered about how to eat responsibly and ended up in the “dark, dank rabbithole of twenty-seven different browser windows” with no good answers. Sophie Egan, a journalist and director of health and sustainability for the Culinary Institute of America, isn’t interested in strict moralizing—she offers guidance for the “conscious carnivore,” for instance—but rather helping readers decipher ingredient lists and nutritional claims. She explores the phenomenon of “food fraud” (like cutting Parmesan cheese with wood pulp), points out that a bar of chocolate takes a whopping 450 gallons of water to produce and offers a list of numbered tips for reducing your reliance on single-use plastics. As evidence of the 270-page book’s practicality, each chapter concludes with a bulleted “Top 5 Takeaways” list and an appendix of other trusted resources readers can turn to for more information.

In Bibi’s Kitchen: The Recipes and Stories of Grandmothers from the Eight African Countries that Touch the Indian Ocean

Somali-American cook and food entrepreneur Hawa Hassan’s debut cookbook welcomes readers into the kitchens of dozens of bibis—the Swahili term for “grandmother”—from East Africa. In Bibi’s Kitchen, write Hassan and her co-author Julia Turshen, “is not about what is new and next. It’s about sustaining a cultural legacy and seeing how food and recipes keep cultures intact.” Each section opens with a brief history of each country and features interviews with each matriarch, asking the women about their culture, cooking and what home and community mean to them. Ma Penny, originally from Kenya but now residing in Massachusetts, shares a recipe for mukimo (mashed green split peas, corn and potatoes) while Ma Zakia fixes up a fudgy wedding sweet in Comoros. I tried out Ma Shara’s recipe for Tanzanian stewed eggplant, and it’s just as homey and celebratory as the cookbook itself feels.

The Best American Food Writing 2020

Some may say it’s cheating to include an anthology of standout food writing on a best books list, but to that I say: Think of it as a sampler platter. This mélange of food journalism includes historian Cynthia Greenlee’s account of “How Grits Got Weaponized Against Cheating Men,” New York Times writer Kim Severson’s profile of celebrity chef Jamie Oliver, and Washington City Paper food editor Laura Hayes’ exploration of how restaurants often fail to address the accessibility needs of disabled customers. The collection also tackles thorny questions of “authenticity,” with Texas Monthly taco editor (that’s right, taco editor) José Ralat recounting how a debate over authenticity threatens the homegrown tacos of Kansas City while food educator Sara Kay takes on how “authenticity” and racist stereotypes often go hand-in-hand in Yelp reviews.