š± My Top 8 Nonfiction Reads for Foodies
Hello, and welcome to Pleasure Reading. I'm your host, Amelia Ruby. And this is a podcast about the pleasure of reading, where I share curated reading lists, author rankings, chats with my bookish friends, and more. If you too take pleasure in reading, I hope that you will subscribe and share the show with a friend. Cheers to your next best book.
Amelia Hruby:Hello, and welcome to Pleasure Reading. I'm Amelia Freebee and I am the host of this show where I share curated lists of book recommendations on all sorts of topics. So far, I have done a lot of fiction lists. So today, we are going to have our 1st nonfiction episode, and I will be sharing my top 8 nonfiction reads for foodies. Now, when I titled this episode, I had to ask myself, like, does anyone call themselves a foodie anymore?
Amelia Hruby:Like, did that phrase go the way of, like, being a hipster? Like, am am I gonna sound so out of date or old? But what I'm trying to get at when I say foodie here is anyone who loves food and enjoys not just cooking or eating, but also all of the cultural aspects of food. Perhaps you or someone you love really loves restaurant culture, hospitality culture, or has worked in restaurants, or maybe you work on a farm, or you grow food in your garden, or you have beloved family members who spend a lot of time thinking about how fruits and vegetables and grains are grown in the United States, or who have deep relationships with animals that are then slaughtered to provide food for human beings. So there are so many ways to be involved with food, to love food, to be close to food.
Amelia Hruby:And this episode is for anyone who can identify with that, anyone who loves food in any of its forms, and any of the ways that it finds itself onto a plate or into our bodies. And I love all of those things, so I'm really excited to share this episode. In this list of 8 nonfiction reads for foodies, I have a variety of types of nonfiction as well. So I've got an essay collection, 2 memoirs, 2 nonfiction, I guess, argument books, like books that have a thesis that they're unpacking over a series of chapters, 2 cookbooks, and then one almost like a business book at the very end. So there's going to be a nice range of types of nonfiction across the episode, and I really hope that you will stay tuned to hear about all of these amazing reads.
Amelia Hruby:And if you enjoy them, of course, I hope that you'll check out the show notes and head to my bookshop links where you can purchase a copy and I will receive a small affiliate payment that just helps me stay resourced to keep making these episodes for you. So that's what's coming up in this episode and let's go ahead and dive right in. The first book on my list of my top 8 nonfiction reads for foodies is an essay collection entitled An Everlasting Meal, Cooking with Economy and Grace by Tamar Adler. This book of essays came out back in 2011 and just last year, I believe in 2023, Tamar Adler put out a cookbook around these same themes. So there are kind of 2 books, I guess, within this one book recommendation, but I'm specifically recommending the essay collection, an everlasting meal.
Amelia Hruby:Although I have to say, like, the cookbook was a James Beard award winner or nominee, so, like, it's gotta be great as well. I just haven't read it myself yet. So in an everlasting meal, Tamar Adler issues what she calls a rallying cry to home cooks. And the essays in this collection really cover, like, the basics of cooking from home, and they're really about how to, I would say, like, craft a kitchen that makes cooking feel easy. So there are chapters about boiling water, chapters about cooking eggs, how to sort of summon a meal from your empty cupboards.
Amelia Hruby:There's really, like, a philosophy undergirding this book that has a lot to do with making the most of everything that you buy and to really use every piece of the ingredients that you're purchasing to make your meals, and to do so in a way that's delicious and full of pleasure. So I love the subtitle of this book, cooking with economy and grace, because it really gets at the dual aspect of this author's philosophy, which is that we can cook with such simplicity. There can be a real economy to our cooking, but it can also be graceful. It can be pleasurable. It can be delicious.
Amelia Hruby:And that really comes out in how there are these very simple, delicious recipes kind of woven through the essays in this book. This book is the one and only reason that I ever have or know how to boil a chicken, which was not something I'd ever done before I read this book, and it's become a sort of staple, simple meal in our household and, like, a foundation of many of our weekly menus. So highly recommend an everlasting meal, cooking with economy and grace by Tamar Adler. The essay collection's amazing. You can pick it up in my bookshop link or, honestly, on, like, thriftbooks or something very affordably, and then I'm excited to check out this new cookbook that I just learned about.
Amelia Hruby:So that is available as well, and I'll link both of those in the show notes. The second book on my top eight nonfiction reads for foodies is our first memoir of the episode, and that is Burn the Place by Elena Regan. So Burn the Place chronicles Elena Regan's journey from foraging on her family farm to running her Michelin Star restaurant, which is called Elizabeth in Chicago. And the book really takes its time to show what her upbringing was like and how plants were really embedded in her day to day life from a very young age. It paints the picture of this, like, intense connection that she had with food and with the earth.
Amelia Hruby:And even though she really struggled throughout her life to understand her identity and she struggled with addiction and she encountered a lot of sexism when she entered the restaurant industry, Like, even though she dealt with all of that, grounding herself in relationship with food and learning to cook and become a chef really shaped how she navigates the world. And there was definitely a piece of me that, like, wanted more of the, like, tell me about your fancy restaurant. Tell me about all of the industry gossip that you encountered in Chicago. Like, there was a part of me that kind of wanted that salaciousness to it. I really appreciated that this book stays so centered in Elena's experience and in conversations around identity and recovery and just the, like, deep emotional instinctual connections that she has with ingredients and how she shapes them into the delicious menus that she creates.
Amelia Hruby:So, again, this book is called Burn the Place. It's Elena's first memoir. She wrote a second memoir called Fieldwork, which is about foraging that is more recent. Burn the Place came out in 2020, and Fieldwork came out in 2023. But I think that just, personally, I'm partial to Burn the Place.
Amelia Hruby:I highly recommend it. I enjoyed it on audiobook, one of, like, the rare, honestly, audiobooks that I listened to the whole thing, and it was, like, a great accompaniment for a day that I was doing some work around my home. And this is another one that is available, like, very inexpensively in a lot of resale shops or thrift books, etcetera. So highly recommend burn the place by Elena Regan. The 3rd book in my top 8 nonfiction reads for foodies is the second memoir on this list and maybe the second most popular book on this list, and that is crying in H Mart by Michelle Zauner.
Amelia Hruby:So if you entered a independent bookstore or, honestly, even like a straight up Barnes and Noble in the past 3 years, you probably saw the cover of this book somewhere. Even if you didn't notice it or pick it up, you probably saw this red book that had 2 pairs of chopsticks holding noodles between them, and it says, crying in H Mart by Michelle Zauner on the cover. Like, it has been everywhere. And this is definitely a memoir that, in my opinion, lives up to the hype. So before writing this book, Michelle Zauner was best known as the Grammy nominated musician who performed as Japanese breakfast.
Amelia Hruby:And this memoir is not so much about her music. In fact, it's not really about the music at all. It's about her relationship with her Korean mother and her grief over the loss of her mother when her mother passed away. And the way that Michelle Zauner tells this story is largely through her relationship with food and the foods that her mother would make or feed her or encourage her to eat and their trips to H Mart, which is a Korean or Asian grocery store. So after her mother died, when Michelle was 25, visits to H Mart became these, like, portals to and through her grief over the loss of her mother, and the book is really about the reckoning that she went through in this grief and kind of tracing her identity as a mixed race Asian American kid becoming an adult and trying to find herself in her music and in food and in life.
Amelia Hruby:And so, again, this is a very popular memoir, but I really would totally say it lives up to the hype and I highly recommend Crying in H Mart by Michelle Zauner. Okay. Now we're moving on from memoirs and heading to the 4th book on my top 8 nonfiction reads for foodies, and that is no meat required, the cultural history and culinary future of plant based eating by Alicia Kennedy. So as you might have guessed from my mention of boiling a chicken at the very beginning of this episode, I eat meat and plants and all of the things, and I'm grateful to not have food allergies or even very many foods I dislike. So I really do eat kind of everything.
Amelia Hruby:But that said, I really appreciated this book and the way that Alicia Kennedy traces the culinary and cultural history of plant based eating in the US. And I think that this book really makes the argument that the food we eat is a political choice and that becoming a vegetarian or a vegan can be a political action. And she traces sort of these different cultural histories that are political histories, and I really enjoyed the clear punk feminist ethos of this book and the way that Alicia Kennedy, like, traces that through plant based eating in and of itself. There is also a very strong critique of capitalist food systems in this book and a critique of lab grown meats. So there's a lot here that I found really compelling and was really grateful to read just such a, like, succinct and potent argument for plant based eating.
Amelia Hruby:And it really had me asking myself, like, is eating meat in alignment with my values, and is plant based eating, like, sort of the way I want to go in the future? Is that more of an orientation or a value system or a practice that I want to take on and live by? So this one definitely has a political point of view, so may not be for everybody. But for me, definitely one of my top 8 nonfiction reads for foodies. Whether you eat meat or not, I think it's just really informative, and you'll learn a lot reading this book.
Amelia Hruby:Onto my 5th book in my top 8 nonfiction reads for foodies, and that is eat and flourish, how food supports emotional well-being by Mary Beth Albright. So I wanna say outright that this is the closest thing that we're gonna get to, like, a book about how to eat. It's also the closest we will get to any sort of, like, I hate to even say this word, like, diet book that we will get on this list. But especially if you're new to me, you need to know that I am adamantly anti diet culture, adamantly anti diet. And I almost put an anti diet book on this list.
Amelia Hruby:I was like, my top 8 nonfiction reads for foodies, probably anti diet by Christy Harrison. But but that felt a little bit, like, off topic for this. I am gonna do an episode in the new year about books that help you break up with diet culture, so we will get there. We will talk about that. But I think that as someone who has gone through this process of divesting from diet culture, at least in my relationship with myself and my personal habits, I have often felt like, okay.
Amelia Hruby:I don't diet anymore, but, like, how do I make decisions about what to eat? Like, how can I be in touch with this? And I think intuitive eating is a great practice, but just, like, hasn't written a great book. Like, not a book that I'm gonna put on my list of my top 8 nonfiction reads for foodies. So if there's anybody in your life that you're like they're really interested in different ways of eating and how to understand how what we eat impacts our well-being, this is my go to pick for that type of person.
Amelia Hruby:Maybe that person is you. You are that person. This is my go to pick for you. So, again, this book is called eat and flourish, how food supports emotional well-being by Mary Beth Albright. And this is an evidence based argument that a whole food that a whole food diet is good for your mental health.
Amelia Hruby:And so Mary Beth Albright kind of walks through how food supports our mind, our emotions, and our bodies, and how all of this is interwoven. There's a lot of research in this book. There are a ton of citations in this book, and there is a really clear and cogent redefinition of emotional eating, like, quote, unquote emotional eating, that talks about how, like, yeah, food triggers different emotional responses in our body, and that's a good thing. Like, emotional eating has been labeled a bad thing by diet culture, but, actually, this is really good for us, and we can partner with food and appreciate food for all the different ways that it has and can nourish us. So I am not here to tell anybody how to eat.
Amelia Hruby:I don't think that's interesting or helpful, and and I certainly don't have credentials to do that. But for me, this was just a helpful sort of invitation to think about the science of food from a perspective that is not pushing a diet. And so if that's something you're looking for, I do recommend Eat and Flourish, How Food Supports Emotional Well-being by Mary Beth Albright. And I recommend reading it with your own critical thinking cap on, you know, be in conversation with the book. It's not giving you a how to manual.
Amelia Hruby:It's giving you an invitation to think about some things. That's how I like to engage nonfiction writ large, if I'm being honest. Okay. Now let's move on to the 2 cookbooks that I have put on this list. So I think I could do a whole episode on cookbooks and, like, cookbooks that I think are great.
Amelia Hruby:But for this list of my top 8 nonfiction reads for foodies, I have picked cookbooks that I think are really more about the practice of cooking than they are about any particular recipes. So the first cookbook that I'm gonna shout out is definitely the most popular book in this whole list, and that is salt, fat, acid, heat, mastering the elements in good cooking by Sama Nasrat. So, obviously, this book became a Netflix show. Like, it is incredibly popular. But just in case you are a person who has not read it yet or has not picked it up or has not looked at it, I think that this is my favorite book to learn how to cook, like, to read and be taught an approach to cooking where you can really start from the beginning.
Amelia Hruby:You can learn the foundational elements, and then you can practice it through the recipes that are presented in the book. Of course, there are also these really lovely illustrations. There are now, like, special edition copies of this book. It's such a wonderful gift for yourself if you are trying to get more into cooking in the months or year ahead or for someone else. Like, I think of this as a book that would make a great gift as, like, a housewarming gift for somebody who's buying their first home or for, like, a college grad who's moving into their first apartment.
Amelia Hruby:Like, that's the kind of person I would give this book to So they can really kind of develop the cooking essentials. And then these are skills that you can take to any other cookbook you would ever buy, and you'll just know how to do things. And also so that you can put meals together for yourself without needing recipes, which I think is, like, such a skill and one that I used to have and, like, don't really anymore. So I need to return to this book myself and that is Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat by Samin Nosrat. The second cookbook on this list is the newest book on this list and that is what goes with what, 100 recipes, 20 charts, and endless possibilities by Julia Tershyn.
Amelia Hruby:I love Julia Tershyn's work. I think that she is just such a compelling writer, and I really appreciate that she comes to cooking also with an anti diet approach. I feel like we share a lot of similar values around food and life, and that's important to me when I engage with people's work. So in this new cookbook, it literally came out, like, a few weeks before I am releasing this. This book is full of simple, no frills, utterly satisfying recipes.
Amelia Hruby:But more than that, it teaches you Julia's problem solving approach to, like, figuring out what to cook. So this book reminded me a lot of an everlasting meal, but it's presented in more of a cookbook way than a set of essays way because here, you're going to learn a way to think about cooking that helps you put a meal together no matter what you might have on hand. And so where Tamar Adler did that through essays and a sort of, like, philosophical creative approach in what goes with what, like, Julia Tershyn is doing that with charts and recipes and, you know, a much more, like, visual tactical approach. And so I just really appreciate that and definitely think this is, like, a foundational cookbook for home cooks, and that's why it made it onto my top 8 nonfiction reads for foodies. And that takes us to the final book on this list.
Amelia Hruby:So we have already gone through 7 of my top nonfiction reads for foodies. We have talked about my favorite essay collection, 2 memoirs, 2 nonfiction argument books, and 2 cookbooks, and we are landing with, surprise of all surprises, a business book. So if you ask me what book had changed my thinking the most in the past 2 or 3 years, it would be this book. It would be unreasonable hospitality by Will Guidara. The subtitle of this book is the remarkable power of giving people more than they expect.
Amelia Hruby:And this book chronicles Will Guidara's career in hospitality working for, like, juggernauts, like Daniel Boulud and Danny Meyer, and then taking the helm at 11 Madison Park and spending more than a decade there, evolving that restaurant to eventually be named the best restaurant in the world. So this is a book that is about food, but it's really about hospitality culture. And so any foodie who loves restaurants and who loves the restaurant experience and who loves everything about hospitality, this is a book for them. And not only are you gonna get that behind the scenes peek into 11 Madison Park, which was fascinating to me, it also is like a teaching tool. This book really teaches you how to center unreasonable hospitality in your own work, in your own life.
Amelia Hruby:And so I read it as a business owner, really taking up the call to think about how could my business, which is a podcast production studio, how could this podcast production studio be a hospitality business? How could I be in the business of hospitality even when I'm doing something, like, so far outside of that industry, which we would typically think of as, like, restaurants, hotels, etcetera. Right? So I love the premise at the center of this book, which is that we can transform ordinary transactions into extraordinary experiences. And the writing is wonderful, the stories are great, and the lessons are just remarkable.
Amelia Hruby:So, like, I put this book last because it really, like, sparkles for me, chef's kiss, pun intended. It is probably my favorite nonfiction read at all of the past few years and definitely definitely makes my top 8 nonfiction reads for foodies. So that's the whole list my friends. We have now talked about An Everlasting Meal by Tamar Adler, Burn the Place by Elena Regan, Crying in H Mart by Michelle Zauner, Eat and Flourish by Mary Beth Albright, No Meat Required by Alicia Kennedy, salt, fat, acid, heat by Sona Nasrat, what goes with what by Julia Turshen, and unreasonable hospitality by Will Guidara. If you love food, eating, plants, the world, yourself, your body, anything else, I hope that you might pick up one of these books.
Amelia Hruby:And as always, the links are there for you in the show notes. That does take you to my bookshop affiliate page. And if you make a purchase through that link, I will receive just a tiny little payment as a thank you for sharing the book, spreading the word, etcetera. So thank you so much again for tuning in to this episode of Pleasure Reading. It's been a joy to do our 1st nonfiction episode together, and I can't wait for many more episodes to come.
Amelia Hruby:Cheers to your next best book.