Kitchen Person

Rachel Cooke has been writing a monthly food column for The Observer since 2009. This book brings together fifty of her best pieces. She says in the introduction that food has always been unusually important to her, and that she aspires to a state of enlightened greediness, a notion that I can get behind.

Cooke is unfussy, intolerant of fads, and happy to air her opinion on everything ranging from asparagus to mayonnaise, to salt, vinegar, lasagna, biscuits, macaroons, and many other things besides. She writes about restaurants, cook books, celebrity chefs, food markets, eating alone, and learning to cook.

She's funny, engaging, and refreshingly honest about all the changes that have happened around food ever since chefs began to cook on TV, since home delivery became an everyday thing, and food fads took over the world.