Bon Appetit
A big, sumptuous feast of recipes and ideas, drool inducing photos, probing interviews, memoirs, travel, tips on technique, culinaria, restaurant guides, product reviews, what to drink, trends, pop culture, and eternal culture.
Cook’s Illustrated
This is a great cooking magazine. The authors have grown from a really good magazine that people in the know swore by, to a great website, to a TV show, and have recently added another magazine.
DIY Cocktails: A Simple Guide To Creating Your Own Signature Drinks By Marcia Simmons & Jonas Halpren
I own several bartending guides and I’ve seen many others, but I have never seen anything like this.
The Foie Gras Wars: A Story Of The World’s Fiercest Food Battle By Mark Caro
Rich, complex, not like any other liver, more akin to eating a stick of the richest buttery cream cheese imaginable.
The Tummy Trilogy By Calvin Trillin
The Tummy Trilogy is actually three books in one, all long out of print, but occasionally available used.
The Art of Beef Cutting: A Meat Professional’s Guide to Butchering and Merchandising By Kari Underly
The best teachers can address the novice and still educate the expert, and that is exactly what Kari Underly does in this fine guide.
The New Wine Country Cookbook: Recipes from California’s Central Coast By Brigit Binns
This beautiful book whisks readers back to a lyrical time when California was a simpler place?? before it overflowed with too many people seeking Paradise?? to a fertile region nestled between Monterey and Santa Barbara.
Whole Beast Butchery: The Complete Visual Guide to Beef, Lamb, and Pork By Ryan Farr With Brigit Binns
Farr is a classically trained chef, butcher, and butchery instructor, at his 4505 Meats in San Francisco. In three chapters, Beef, Pork, and Lamb, he demonstrates his craft in hundreds of photographs.
The Cook and the Butcher: Juicy Recipes, Butcher’s Wisdom, and Expert Tips by Brigit Binns
Four chapters: Beef, Pork, Lamb, Veal. A lifetime of incredible recipes for cooks who are bored with the same old same old.
The Great Meat Cookbook by Bruce Aidells Review
Bruce Aidells has been a working butcher. He founded a sausage company and I’ll bet you’ve seen Aidells Sausages on your grocery shelves.
The Meat Buyers Guide: Meat, Lamb, Veal, Pork and Poultry by NAMI (North American Meat Institute) 8th Edition
Edited by NAMI (formerly NAMP), this is the definitive reference on all the different cuts of meat, with charts, excellent photos, a glossary, and nutritional info.
Catching Fire, How Cooking Made Us Human by Richard Wrangham
In the book “Catching Fire, How Cooking Made Us Human” (Basic Books, 2010), Richard Wrangham describes how cooking changes the chemistry of food and how that made it easier for proto humans to chew, digest, and extract energy and nutrients. It also includes insight for us who love to hang out at the grill.
Food Rules: An Eater’s Manual by Michael Pollan
A short paperback that you can easily swallow on a short airplane trip, Pollan, the author of such important books as the Ominvore’s Dilemma, In Defense of Food, and The Botany of Desire, summarizes what he has learned about good eating habits in the form of “rules” which he describes in a few sentences.
The Omnivore’s Dilemma by Michael Pollan
This may be the most important book about food since Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle drew back the curtain on the Chicago stockyards in 1906. Both books take an analytical and critical look at how food gets to our table. The New York Times named The Omnivore’s Dilemma one of the 10 best books of 2006.
The Science of Good Food by David Joachim and Andrew Schloss
The authors explain what ingredients are made of, how they behave when cooked, and how various methods work. A very thorough A to Z encyclopedia of food science.