Thackeray (of whom I've read, well, not much, but I have seen movies based on
Becky Sharp and
The Luck of Barry Lyndon, and I have a subscription to
Vanity Fair!) once said "Next to eating good dinners, a healthy man with a benevolent turn of mind, must like, I think, to read about them."
To which I say "Amen!," though I am not a man, nor do I vouch for any benevolent turn of mind. I love to read about food. Though I possess, well, lots of cookbooks, and know many people who read cookbooks as though they were novels, I'm not quite one of them. (Reading cookbooks makes me hungry and envious, as watching the Food Network and other food-porn TV does. I do it, but not without some pain.)
I'm fonder of what many call, generically, gastronomy: books about food, whether they're histories, sociological texts, or (possibly my favorites) personal -- memoirs about the food that has shaped the writer (in more ways than one!).
I have a special fondness for celebrity cookbooks (I think I have five based on Elvis Presley's appetites alone). Recently I picked up a copy of
Writers' Favorite Recipes, compiled by Gillian Vincent and the National Book League of Great Britain (St. Martin's Press, 1979). I have a sneaking suspicion that I have another copy of this book in a box somewhere, but this one was only $1 at
Community Thrift (which has the best book section of any thrift store in town, by the way), so who cares.
