The authors whose words are as delicious as their recipes.

Food is deliciously subjective. Any writer, preferably a good writer, can talk about it, dipping in to the memories it evokes. And there’s plenty to dip in to. Meals punctuate the hum of everyday life, while also punctuating each year with feasts and festivities. The best food writers draw you in with wit and humour, often exposing their own vulnerabilities through the deceptively simple subject of food. As Ms MFK Fisher once said, “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.” And so, whether you regard yourself as a gourmand or not, here are three food writers who will elevate your bookshelf as well as your palate.

Mr Richard Olney was born in the US, but it was Provence in southern France that captured his imagination. Once he moved to the tiny village of Solliès-Toucas – “a tapestry of… blues and violets… punctuated by bushes of wild rosemary, feathery shoots of wild fennel and the spring growth of oregano and winter savory” ­– he never left. Mr Olney was at times considered a recluse, yet he often invited friends such as Ms Elizabeth David and Ms Alice Waters, who recalls it was like stepping into a Mr Marcel Pagnol film, to his humble home on the hillside. He began his gourmet career writing a column in Cuisine Et Vins De France called “Un Américain (Gourmand) à Paris”, which evolved into his first book, The French Menu Cookbook, in 1970. His recipes are detailed and precise, yet his writing is unpretentious and his palate was impeccable. Simple French Food is considered to be his masterpiece, but Lulu’s Provençal Table, inspired by his vivacious neighbour, Ms Lulu Peyraud, is the book to read for culinary escapism.

_**Lulu’s Provençal Table (1994) by Mr Richard Olney

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Mr Anthony Bourdain’s first book burst onto the literary scene in a cavalcade of sex, drugs and expletives. He was so often seen as confrontational, blunt, shocking that it’s easy to forget what a brilliant writer he was. He undoubtedly had swagger and he was savagely honest, but his writing is also funny, warm, often sensitive and heartfelt. He wrote Kitchen Confidential when he was still working the line, among “the noise and clatter, the hiss and spray, the flames, the smoke and the steam”. And he relished “the cuts and burns on hands and wrists, the ghoulish kitchen humour, the free food, the pilfered booze, the camaraderie that flourished within rigid order and nerve-shattering chaos”. When he said his “naked contempt for vegetarians, sauce-on-siders, the ‘lactose intolerant’ and the cooking of the Ewok-like Emeril Lagasse is not going to get me my own show on the Food Network”, well, he was wrong. And though he’s probably best known for shows such as A Cook’s Tour and No Reservations, his influence on chefs and food writers is hard to overstate. He shaped the way we write about food.

_**Kitchen Confidential (2000) by Mr Anthony Bourdain

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Romantic comedy drew Ms Nora Ephron into the limelight – she wrote and directed Sleepless In Seattle, You’ve Got Mail and Julie & Julia among many others – but her wit and humour lent themselves rather splendidly to writing about food. Her frank, often hilarious, personal essays have been assembled in collections such as Crazy Salad, Scribble Scribble and Wallflower At The Orgy, which includes a spectacularly gossipy piece from New York magazine about the “Food Establishment” in the late 1960s. “The typical member of the Food Establishment,” she quips, “takes himself and food very very seriously. He has been known to debate for hours such subjects as whether nectarines are peaches or plums.” Ms Ephron didn’t consider herself a food writer, but even her novel Heartburn, which tells the story of a cookery writer betrayed by her husband, is peppered with recipes and culinary anecdotes.

_**Heartburn (1983) by Ms Nora Ephron

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