![]() ![]() Now along comes Frank Browning's "Apples." Like Kurlansky, he's practiced what he preaches, coming from a long line of Kentucky orchardists. Wall Street Journal reporter Amal Naj's "Peppers," one of the best books ever written about food, proved that the Portuguese were responsible for nearly every modern food trend and lately we've feasted on Mark Kurlansky's "Cod," a brief historical and environmental epic by a one-time cod fisherman. These treatments remained at least partly academic, but subsequent contributions have been more slender and written in a more popular vein - you can read them lying down while a dog licks your feet without loss of comprehension. Two prototypes were "Sweetness and Power," an exhaustive neo-Marxist study of the history and economics of sugar by Sidney Mintz, and "Corn," Betty Fussel's lengthy and abundantly illustrated exploration of the romance of maize. Riding the coattails of this trend has been a handful of non-cookbooks devoted to individual foods, often with a few recipes thrown in to enhance their appeal among cookbook consumers. ![]() ![]() There's been an avalanche of cookbooks published over the last decade on increasingly obscure and constricted topics - I recently received one devoted entirely to chocolate cookies. ![]()
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