Food writing is a broad term that includes cook books, restaurant reviews, memoirs about growing up in a particular culture with food taking a central place in the narrative, essays musing about the various aspects of food, cooking, eating, and just being in the kitchen. We have several collections of essays about food, here at Luna, and they all make for excellent reading. Here's a look at a few of them.
Chewing the Fat: Tasting Notes from a Greedy Life by Jay Rayner
Jay Rayner is a restaurant critic and food writer and this book is a collection of newspaper columns that he’s written over the years for The Guardian. Raynor writes about a variety of topics - the joys of cooking with what he likes to call piggy products, his inability to ever get up from the table without wearing his meal (at least some of it) on his shirt, his intense dislike of picnics and picnic food, the pleasures of sometimes eating alone, and the joy of cooking alongside a friend.
He writes about Christmas cooking - the smells, the food, and the joys of sequestering himself in the kitchen for the first half of the day, doing what he thoroughly enjoys, while avoiding at least some of the stress which comes with gathering the whole family under one roof. Rayner is passionate, engaging, charming and funny. At six hundred words each, these essays are concise and yet somehow packed with detail. A delightful read.
Home Cooking: A Writer in the Kitchen by Laurie Colwin
Laurie Colwin is a novelist who liked to cook. She wrote five popular novels, three collections of short stories, and two collections of essays about food and life in the kitchen, called Home cooking and More Home Cooking. As she says in the introduction, "One of the delights of life is eating with friends; second to that is talking about eating. And for an unsurpassed double whammy, there is talking about food while eating with friends. People who like to cook, like to talk about food". That, in effect, is what this book is about. A collection of food stories, memories, a celebration of ingredients and dishes, meals planned and accomplished, all written by someone who was obviously passionate about life, and able to express that passion with an elegance and intimacy that make this book special.
Colwin writes about the perfect scrambled eggs, the best way to make fried chicken, the simple, and often cheap but hearty, dishes that she used to make with eggplants as a young writer living in a tiny apartment in New York, the many variations of potato salad, making bread, cooking for a dinner party where every guest has a food no-no of some kind, and so on. To quote Nigella Lawson, this book is "everything food writing should be: funny, profound, inspiring and unaffected."
Kitchen Person: Notes on Cooking and Eating by Rachel Cooke
Rachel Cooke has been writing a monthly food column for The Observer since 2009. This book brings together fifty of her best pieces. She says in the introduction that food has always been unusually important to her, and that she aspires to a state of enlightened greediness, a notion that I can get behind.
Cooke is unfussy, intolerant of fads, and happy to air her opinion on everything ranging from asparagus to mayonnaise, to salt, vinegar, lasagna, biscuits, macaroons, and many other things besides. She writes about restaurants, cook books, celebrity chefs, food markets, eating alone, and learning to cook. She's funny, engaging, and refreshingly honest about all the changes that have happened around food ever since chefs began to cook on TV, since home delivery became an everyday thing, and food fads took over the world.
Comfort Eating: What we Eat when Nobody’s Looking by Grace Dent
Grace Dent is a restaurant critic for The Guardian, and a judge on BBC's MasterChef UK. This book, as the title suggests, is about the foods that we turn to at the end of a long day, meals that we eat by ourselves when we're in need of a bit of lifting up, foods that we loved eating as children, the first meals that we made for ourselves as adults-on-a-budget, meals that we can have again and again.
Such meals often tend to involve bread, potatoes, pasta, cheese, butter, bacon, chocolate, ice-cream...things that we've been told are bad for us, and so qualify as “guilty” pleasures. And sometimes, that is exactly what we need. At the end of a stressful day, a salad of greens and lean chicken simply will not satisfy.
Comfort Eating began as a podcast in 2021, and is still on air. In each episode, Grace Dent invites a celebrity to her home. They sit down in her kitchen and discuss their lives in the context of food, cooking and cuisine. They talk about their favourite comfort foods and the sometimes strange but satisfying meals that they throw together when they’re eating alone. The podcast is a collection of warm, chatty, cheerful, heart-warming, funny, uplifting, and often deeply personal conversations.
Comfort Eating, the book, features the best of these conversations.