Recent Cookbooks on My Shelf - April-June 2024

A Mixed Bag with Lots of Food Writing! - Extra Food Chat with Kath

Welcome to another edition of Extra Food Chat with Kath!

It’s been a while since I’ve shared the recent cookbooks I’ve added to my shelves, and since this week on Friday Food Chat with Kath had a decidedly strong cookbook theme, I thought let’s keep the cookbook chat going over here too!

Unlike the books I shared on Friday, this selection are new to my collection, not necessarily new release books. There is also a strong food writing theme, so I hope you will enjoy that slight change of pace from the previous books I have reviewed.

The Dinner Table selected by Ella Risbridger and Kate Young (Head of Zeus) - This isn’t actually a cookbook, but I feel it deserves a place on this list as it’s a great one if you enjoy food writing. Ella and Kate (of Midnight Chicken and The Little Library cookbook series fame respectively), selected their favourite pieces of food writing from food writers and writers generally, and arranged them based on who would get on with whom at a dinner party. In their own words, “This book is the dinner party we’d throw, if we could invite everyone whose words about food we’ve ever loved…We’ve planned this book as if we were putting together the seating plan for the worlds most extravagant dinner party.”

The variety of writing and writers is vast in this book, and is by no means only from contemporary writers or just writers based in the UK (where both Ella and Kate reside). Excerpts include something from Japanese poet Sei Shōnago who wrote around the year 1000, Mrs Beeton known as the ‘Grandmother of English cooking’ from the 1800s, a comic excerpt from Iranian comic book author Marjane Satrapi, to contemporary cooks and food writers such as Diana Henry, Nigella Lawson and Olia Hercules.

At first the selection can feel random (especially to those of us who are less familiar with many of the writers and don’t have the clearly vast reading experience Ella and Kate do), but once you get reading it really isn’t. It’s a thick book so it’s something you could spend some time reading cover to cover, or dipping in and out at random. This book is really a celebration of how food intertwines all our lives and how even when the writer isn’t deliberately writing about food, it’s so often appears on the page and in the stories regardless. If you are the kind of person who likes reading cookbooks, and enjoys the podcast Something to Eat and Something to Read, I think you’ll really enjoy this anthology.

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