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The rise of the slow food movement and the return to home gardens mean cooks are donning gardening gloves as often as oven mitts. Modern cooking is heading back to its roots, with home cooks embracing local ingredients and down-to-earth recipes. With more and more of us discovering the delight of preparing and eating freshly harvested food, Herbs for the Gourmet Gardener is the indispensable guide to what to grow, cook, and eat.

A feast for the eyes and the table, this user-friendly resource traverses the realms of both the garden and the kitchen, addressing the cultivation, storage, and preparation of more than sixty herbs. Practical growing tips, fascinating histories, nutritional information, and classic recipes appear alongside botanical illustrations drawn from the Royal Horticultural Society’s cherished collection. With both familiar varieties and novel options, Herbs for the Gourmet Gardener will inspire you to create a world of new shapes, colors, and tastes.

Beatrice Ojakangas, the oldest of ten children, came by it naturally—the cooking but also the pluck and perseverance that she's served up with her renowned Scandinavian dishes over the years. In the wake of the Moose Lake fires and famine of 1918, Ojakangas tells us in this delightful memoir-cum-cookbook, her grandfather sent for a Finnish mail-order bride—and got one who’d trained as a chef.

Ojakangas’s stories, are, unsurprisingly, steeped in food lore: tales of cardamom and rye, baking salt cake at the age of five on a wood-burning stove, growing up on venison, making egg rolls for Chun King, and sending off a Pillsbury Bake Off–winning recipe without ever making it. And from here, how those early roots flourished through hard work and dedication to a successful (but never easy) career in food writing and a much wider world, from working for pizza roll king Jeno Paulucci to researching food traditions in Finland and appearing with Julia Child and Martha Stewart—all without ever leaving behind the lessons learned on the farm. As she says, “first you have to start with good ingredients and a good idea.”

Chock-full of recipes, anecdotes, and a kind humor that bring to vivid life the Finnish culture of northern Minnesota as well as the wider culinary world, Homemade delivers the savory and the sweet in equal measures and casts a warm light on a rich slice of the country’s cooking heritage.

More than one hundred authentic recipes center around Hopi staples of beans, corn, wheat, chilies, meat, gourds, and native greens and fruits.

Pizza, pasta, and olive oil: today, it’s hard to imagine any supermarket without these items. But how did these foods—and many more Italian ingredients—become so widespread?

In this book, Diego Zancani maps the extraordinary progress of Italian food, from the legacy of the Roman invasion to its current, ever-increasing popularity. Starting with medieval manuscripts, he traces Italian recipes in Britain back to the thirteenth century, and draws on later travel diaries to explore British and American encounters with Italian food abroad. The book also shows how Italian immigrants, from ice-cream sellers and grocers to chefs and restauranteurs, had a transformative influence on the spread of the cuisine, championing Italian food at pivotal moments throughout history.

Lavishly illustrated with material from the archives of the Bodleian Library and elsewhere, this sumptuous book also includes Italian regional recipes that have come down to us through the centuries, and celebrates the enduring international appeal of delicatessens, pizzerias, trattorias, and the Mediterranean diet.
 

The 1920s marked the high point of refined dining, when silver tray–bearing white-gloved waiters circulated among guests and starched linens and candlelit tables were de rigueur. For the decadent class that came to prominence during the post-war period, achieving a reputation for throwing the most recherché dinner parties meant instant social success, and many an enterprising host or hostess sought advice in J. Rey’s The Whole Art of Dining.

By turns a collection of practical advice and a catalog of eccentricities, The Whole Art of Dining, republished by the Bodleian Library as How to Dine in Style, contained everything the would-be socialite needed to know in order to elevate food to high art, from tricks for putting together a proper French menu or throwing a garden party to practical tips on serving wines in the correct order and at the right temperature. Throughout the book are stories of astonishing excess, such as the search for ever-more-elaborate themes and venues, and the more daring of the book’s devotees might have been tempted to emulate efforts like those of the intrepid hostess whose mountaineering-themed dinner party had guests rappel to the rooftop of her Chicago home or American millionaire George A. Kessler, whose infamous “Gondola Party” flooded— for the first and only time—the central courtyard of the Savoy.

A captivating glimpse into the golden age of fine dining, this book will be consumed with interest by discerning diners and fans of the Roaring Twenties—and it may even inspire readers to try their hand at throwing a stylish soiree of their own.