Author Kevin West shares five readable cookbooks

We are thrilled to have Kevin West, author of Saving the Season: A Cook’s Guide to Home Canning, Pickling, and Preserving, a new (and gorgeous!) book covering the basics of preserving as well as advanced recipes.  

 What are cookbooks for? Once they were resources for cooks, like grammar books are for writers. Then came the Alice B. Toklas Cookbook, which was also a memoir, full of anecdote and adventure and gossip—recipes optional. Toklas had to disguise her memoir as a cookbook because Gertrude Stein, her more famous companion, had already written The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas. While few other writers have such problems, many cookbook authors since have stretched the form’s conventions in order to explore a wider world beyond the kitchen.

The following five readable cookbooks go beyond the mere technical instruction of recipes. These are books with voice, and they evince bedrock opinions about love, death, and politics—even if those particular subjects never explicitly break through. An enduring cookbook is, in Paula Wolfert’s phrase, “a statement about the good life,” and these five range widely enough to encompass ethics as well as aesthetics, cosmology and geography, a social vision and a culinary one. They are cookbooks with a purpose, even for readers who never plan to rattle pots and pans in the kitchen.

•  West Coast Cook Book by Helen Brown. Published in 1962, Brown’s wonderful book sings the praises of the Pacific Slope—its fruit, vegetables, seafood, game, olive oil, and wine— in the same regional-seasonal key later made famous by Alice Waters. Who was this woman? In her day, Brown was the “West Coast food establishment” to her New York friends including James Beard. She deserves a foodie revival.
• The Cook & The Gardener by Amanda Hesser. Before she founded the influential website Food52, and even before she wrote for the New York Times, Amanda Hesser spent an enchanted year cooking in a seventeenth-century chateau in Burgundy. Her book, arranged by monthly chapters, recounts the seasons of her kitchen via her dealings with the estate’s cantankerous old gardener. A page turner.
• The Gift of Southern Cooking by Edna Lewis and Scott Peacock. A collaboration of uncommon warmth between the aged granddaughter of slaves and a young white chef from Alabama. Miss Lewis was a national treasure, and the rest of us are lucky that Peacock was there to learn from her skills, listen to her wisdom, and love her great spirit.
• A Platter of Figs by David Tanis. Imagine the mysteries of Chez Panisse explained for the home cook. Imagine those recipes prepared and photographed in the author’s Paris apartment. Imagine those pictures accompanied by quirky little stories set in Umbria, Normandy, and New Mexico. Now imagine Tanis coming to tell you those stories as you sit in your reading chair. Irresistible.
• Fine Preserving by Catherine Plagemann. The loveliest of all preserving books, with refined recipes explained in elegant prose. The 1986 reprint by Aris Books also includes marginal notes from M.F.K. Fisher’s personal copy of the book. Fisher was approving and cranky in equal measure. Apple-mint jelly? “No!,” says Fisher, and you can’t wait to read the reason why not.  

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Kevin West will be at Third Place Books in Lake Forest Park on Sunday, July 21, at 5:30 p.m. and at the Book Larder in Fremont on Monday, July 22, at 6:30 p.m.