The Best Books About Food

Five books about food to get your teeth into this summer…

Tasty Reads To Enjoy

Most Brits could read a shopping basket as though it were a character sketch’ writes Pen Vogler in Scoff (Atlantic, £20). The theme of this thoroughly enjoyable, lively and humorous book is how social class has influenced what, when and how we have eaten down the centuries – even the book’s title is a double entendre about food snobbery. Vogler has fun with differences in our eating habits: what do you expect when someone invites you to ‘tea’? And how food is defined by class: consider the conflicting resonances of ‘gravy’ and ‘jus’, or that icon of 1970s English social aspiration, the avocado. This is a well- informed history of food, from ancient times to the present day, enlivened with many examples drawn from literature, especially Austen and Dickens, but ranging as widely as Kenneth Graham and Beowulf. It is a story of constant change and a bewildering array of influences, inextricably woven into our national story.

Robert Penn’s book, Slow Rise (Particular Books, £17.99), is a hymn to bread. ‘Its story,’ he writes, ‘is the story of humanity.’ This is both a history of bread, and its production from the dawn of civilisation to the present day, and an account of Penn’s attempts to emulate our forefathers in growing his own wheat in order to produce his very own bread. His way is complete immersion in his subject, the literary equivalent of method acting. He travels to the mountains of Anatolia where early man first baked bread and to the Great Plains of the American Midwest, where modern man grows millions of tons of grain. He borrows an acre of Wales on which to sow and then reap his own wheat, discovering at first hand what a tiresome job threshing is. He finds a mill to grind it and finally bakes his own bread. The result is a fascinating account of man’s most important staple, greatly enlivened by Penn’s enthusiasm and curiosity.

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