The recipes books that are about much more than recipes.

A cookbook can be so much more than the sum of its recipes. The very best tell a story, draw you in with wit and honesty, and can just as easily be found on a bedside table as a kitchen shelf.

From some of the earliest cookbooks written by the chefs of kings to home-cooking manuals à la Mrs Beeton to the desire for armchair travel in the 1960s and multiculturalism of the 1980s, cookbooks are at once a symptom of their time and a comment upon them. They can be aspirational, critical, subversive, political. Some offer delectable escapism or practical advice. And some just have wonderfully kitsch photography.

At a time when bestselling cookbooks are written, in name at least, by clueless celebrities and influenced by the fickle world of social media, these books are to be celebrated and savoured. From timeless classics to bizarre reprints, here are five vintage food books worth adding to your bookcase.

How To Cook A Wolf by Ms MFK Fisher (1942)

An American culinary icon, Ms Mary Frances Kennedy Fisher can be bracingly personal in her writing, but always witty and wise. Despite being about thrifty cooking during WWII, How To Cook A Wolf is also surprisingly seductive, at times polemical and subversive. The wolf in question is the one at the door, but for Ms Fisher it’s “about living as decently as possible with the ration cards and blackouts”. This isn’t just about frugal cooking, though. There are chapters on How To Rise Up Like New Bread and How To Be Cheerful Through Starving. Unlike most food writers, who confine their writing to recipes, Ms Fisher eschews mundane details and uses food as a cultural metaphor. “People ask me,” Ms Fisher once wrote, “why do you write about food, and eating and drinking? Why don’t you write about the struggle for power and security, and about love? It seems to me that our three basic needs, for food and security and love, are so mixed and mingled and entwined that we cannot straightly think of one without the others.”

Further reading: Consider The Oyster (1941) and the autobiographical Gastronomical Me (1943).

**A Book Of Mediterranean Food by Ms Elizabeth David (1950) **

Few writers influenced British post-war cooking as much as Ms Elizabeth David. In 1950, with A Book Of Mediterranean Food, she brought sunshine into the kitchens of ration-bound Britain and over the next four decades – through seven more books and trenchant journalism – she arguably did more than anyone to change the country’s food culture. Based on a collection of recipes she researched and cooked while living in France, Italy, the Greek islands and Egypt, this book offered pure escapism at a time when it was sorely needed. Ms David offered respite from “the frustration of buying the weekly rations” and instead wrote about “real food cooked with wine and oil, eggs and butter and cream, and dishes richly flavoured with onions, garlic, herbs and brightly coloured southern vegetables”. The recipes are undeniably tempting, but it is her precise prose and rich, evocative descriptions that have made this book a classic.

Further reading: French Country Cooking (1951) and the collection of essays An Omelette And A Glass of Wine (1984).

**Be Bold With Bananas, author unknown (1970) **

Most cookbooks tempt readers with perfectly styled photos of food that make you salivate as you flick through the pages. This book, however, may put you off eating for ever. Originally published by Fruit Distributors Ltd, a New Zealand banana importer, the description on the back cover states that “among the extraordinary features of this book are the beautiful, full-page, colour photographs of many of the delectable recipes”. Delectable? Horrifying would be a more apt description. Recipes include banana sausages, banana and fish salad, potato and banana nests, banana paella and banana candle, which consists of a banana stuck in a pineapple slice, with mayonnaise and a maraschino cherry on top. Disgusting as those might sound, the bizarre topic and kitsch 1970s photography intrigued photographer Mr Martin Parr enough to reprint the book with his own front cover. “I was immediately struck when I saw Be Bold With Bananas,” he says. “It had some wonderful sexual undertones and was just plain surreal.”

Further reading: thought it couldn’t get any weirder? Try The Romance Of Food by Dame Barbara Cartland (1984).

**The Theory And Practice Of Lunch by Mr Keith Waterhouse (1986) **

The Theory And Practice Of Lunch is not a recipe book but rather a manifesto on the most agreeable meal of the day. Journalist, playwright and novelist Mr Keith Waterhouse is very clear about what lunch is not. “It is not prawn cocktail, steak and Black Forest gâteau with your bank manager. It is not civic, commemorative, annual office or funeral. It is not when either party is on a diet, on the wagon or in a hurry.” And he is equally precise about what lunch is. “It is a midday meal taken at leisure by, ideally, two people. Three’s a crowd, four always split like a double amoeba into two pairs, six is a meeting, eight is a conference... A little light business may be touched upon, but the occasion is firmly social. Whether they know it or not, for as long as they linger in the restaurant, they are having an affair. The affair is lunch.” In summary, this is your new (old) manual on the art of the long lunch.

Further reading: Mr Waterhouse’s critically acclaimed novel Billy Liar (1959).

**Home Cooking by Ms Laurie Colwin (1988) **

Many a modern gourmand will agree with Ms Laurie Colwin’s assertion that “one of the delights of life is eating with friends; second to that is talking about eating”. And that is exactly what Ms Colwin does in this collection of essays. She talks to the reader as if they are a close confidant, sharing jokes, opinions, fears and mishaps. In essence, Home Cooking is all about building up a repertoire for home entertaining (often in her tiny New York flat), including a recipe for fried chicken “that makes people want to stand up and sing ‘The Star-Spangled Banner’”. There are plenty of recipes, but this book is as much about life, including kitchen disasters, feeding fussy eaters and revolting meals remembered. Warm, funny and timeless, it is essential reading for any enthusiastic cook. As Ms Colwin notes in the foreword, “No one who cooks cooks alone. Even at her most solitary, a cook in the kitchen is surrounded by generations of cooks past, the advice and menus of cooks present, the wisdom of cookbook writers.”

Further reading: More Home Cooking (1993) and her second novel Happy All the Time (1978).

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