in the mood to spend BIG on books

[awilda]

a bonus is burning a hole in my pocket / a small hole but enough to buy a shelf of books / and I want to buy my food books for the next year RIGHT NOW !!!

what would you buy ???

not into cook books / looking for reading not cooking . . . .

[russ parsons]

Gosh, that's such a hard question. But such a pleasant dilemna. I'm going to start off the top of my head and I'm sure others will remind me of people I'm missing. I'm going to assume you have the usual suspects, or can find out about them, so I'm going to concentrate on folks who too often get overlooked.

Richard Olney, Simple French Food. There's recipes but so much common sense.

Patience Gray, Honey from a Weed. Wonderful sense of food and place. One day I'd love to meet her.

Roy de Groot, Auberge of the Flowering Hearth. A pure romance, but if you don't fall in love with this book, you don't love food.

Anything by Joseph Wechsberg, but particularly Blue Trout and Black Truffles, a great collection of essays that serves as a real reminder of what a magnificent food culture there was in Europe before WWII ... and NOT just in France.

Madeleine Kamman, When French Women Cook.

Ludwig Bemelmans, "La Bonne Table." Great behind the scenes restaurant stuff. no brides bent over, though.

Waverly Root, "Food of France". Not to be taken literally, but there is some very good stuff and if you get one of the early editions, it's got some lovely Paul Child photographs.

The Alice B. Toklas Cookbook. A wonderful sense of France before the war.

Edward Bunyard, Anatomy of Dessert. Just pure purple prose. I love it because there's hardly a dessert in it, all juicy descriptions of the best varieties of fruits (my kind of eater!).

Idwal Jones, Sheila Hibben, gosh, there are so many.

OK, so who did I leave out?

[Mottmott]

Jim Crace, Devil's Larder (and a physically beautiful book, too-great for gifts)

[Tremor]

Outlaw Cook by John Thorne.

Mr. Parsons, thank you for your in-depth answers throughout this thread. It's been VERY interesting reading!