Gift Guide 2018: Why Not a Book?

December 22, 2018

Too late to order by mail?  You can still support your local bookstore.  Lots of possibilities there. For an  Italian food lover, for example, you might put together a selection of regional recipe books, covering Tuscany, Rome, Puglia, Venice.  For those who are enamored of the food of the middle east there are a number of great new books on the market (there’s always Ottolenghi, and I’m especially fond of Anissa Helou’s new Feast) .

They can, of course, buy these books for themselves.  This book, however, is one that seems meant to be a gift.

I’m generally suspicious of coffee table gift books, but there’s something so appealing about Let’s Eat France!: 1,250 specialty foods, 375 iconic recipes, 350 topics, 260 personalities, plus hundreds of maps, charts, tricks, tips, and everything else you want to know about the food of France,  that I find myself unable to put it down.  I’m pretty sure that anyone who loves the food of France will feel the same way about this quirky compilation.  Weighing in at 6 pounds, it covers  everything from famous chefs to glassware, pasta, historical menus, writers

cheese, fruit, tripe

The book, in short, is everything a gift book should be: big, bold, unusual, fun – and not the sort of thing a person is likely to buy for herself.

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