My SO is a major food geek, and one of my great pleasures in life is to find cookbooks and recipe collections for him.
He really likes recipe books with stories and backgrounds on the food. “Farmhouse Cookery” from Reader’s Digest, which I found in a second-hand bookstore/restaurant, has turned into a great favorite. So has the annotated Apicius I gave him for Christmas one year.
So, any recommendations? Quirky recipe books, with lots of rambling text and stores. There must me lots of them, surely?
The Wise Guy Cookbook by Henry Hill (of “Goodfellas” fame) is a great mix of Italian-American recipes and stories of his life in the Mafia and in witness protection.
I love “A Gracious Plenty,” edited by John Edge, and Charleston Receipts - both are fun to read. Caveat: I don’t cook much from either book, so I can’t vouch for the quality of the recipes. I read cookbooks for inspiration, and seldom follow any recipe exactly.
If he’s interested in sciencey stories and learning the why’s of recipes as well as the what-to-do, then he may really enjoy the works of Cook’s Illustrated/America’s Test Kitchen. They are a group of food scientists/cooks who, inthis book, break down some of the most common dishes and compare recipes and tweak every step in the process. Their recipes are not necessarily complicated, though, just optimized for best result.
I’ve not looked closely at their other stuff, but I think it’s similar. A bit of often lighthearted or even slightly snarky* narrative describing the what, how and why and then a traditionally written recipe follows.
(I believe this is the book where they describe an attempt at the perfect roast chicken recipe, and out of a sheer cussedness to try *every *possible method of cooking it, they skinned a whole chicken, spread out the skin like a little crucified poultry-skin Jesus, and secured it with toothpicks so they could roast it separately from the chicken. It was decided that, yes, this yielded perfectly cooked meat as well as perfectly cooked crisp, browned skin, but the whole idea was impractical and “too stupid to live” and not included in the final recipe.)
*do I really mean snarky? Dopers, are they a little snarky sometimes? Or is it just me?
The Virginia Bentley Cookbook by, duh, Virginia Bentley, is utterly charming. Each page has a comfort food type recipe, hand written, with little anecdotes and ruminations. Out of print but can be found online at used book places.
I really enjoyed Zarela Martinez’s Food From My Heart. It is exactly the type of cookbook you are describing: personal narrative and culinary history interspersed with lots of solid recipes. It is the cookbook that spurned my exploration of Mexican cookery.
If you want something a lot more academic, there’s David Thompson’s Thai Food. It goes about two hundred or so pages before hitting the first recipe, and is the most well-researched, complete resource on Thai cookery in the English language that I’ve come across. That said, it isn’t really conversational in tone, if that’s what you’re looking for. This isn’t a bad thing. I love the book; I’m just trying to manage expectations. If you’re a true food geek and love Thai food, you really can’t do better than that tome. (And it really is a tome–over 700 pages.)
The Whistle Stop Cafe Cookbook by Fannie Flagg: the recipes are traditional but good and there are tons of her personal stories. I don’t recall any fictional stories based on the Fried Green Tomatoes characters, fr anyone who is curious, just her own.
Cross Creek Cookery by Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings: great Old Florida recipes (both practical and critter-based) by a great Florida author. It really doesn’t get any better.