For brief background reading—and for stocking stuffers—try one of the short books in the Edible Series from Reaktion, a division of the University of Chicago Books. Since 2008 it has been publishing monographs on subjects from pancakes to chocolate to the one I recently read: Olive, by Fabrizia Lanza, an art historian and scholar who has taken over the Anna Tasca Lanza Sicilian cooking school, which her mother started on the family’s Sicilian estate—a town, really, and an immersion into fin de siècle rural aristocratic life. The book takes olives from the bible to a skeptical northern Europe that set olive oil at war with butter to today’s Mediterranean diet, and of course includes recipe, illustrating the account with photographs of art and archaeological finds.

University of Illinois Press

More history for anyone who loves Italian food, and what’s become of it in America, comes from the historian Simone Cinotto in The Italian-American Table: Food, Family, and Community in New York City. I started reading the book out of interest and out of loyalty to the University of Gastronomic Sciences in Pollenzo, Italy, started by Slow Food, where we both teach. But I kept reading for the picture of immigrant life I knew about piecemeal, and the finely textured portrait of what life was like for the mostly southern Italian immigrants in the New York of the 1920s through the postwar era. Though there are nostalgic pictures of fruit-and-veg street vendors and the kind of corner stores selling olives, cheese, and homemade bread we all want to return to, Cinotto does not romanticize the erosion of the traditional Italian family structure as children wanted to assimilate, or the disappearance from immigrant tables of the foods we now want to go back to—particularly the bitter, strange vegetables many Italian-Americans rejected generations ago like broccoli rabe and, yes, kale.

“Vegetarians, You Have Blood on Your Hands!” So reads one of the chapter headings in Patrick Martins’s loose, angry, funny Carnivore’s Man!festo: Eating Well, Eating Responsibly, and Eating Meat (the exclamation point in the title will give you an idea of the tone). Martins, founder of Heritage Foods USA, was also the founder of the American branch of the Slow Food movement, and never lost its ideals or its founder, Carlo Petrini’s, habit of “shooting first, apologizing later.” His way of taking action has been to start a national network of farmers who raise and sell meat. Despite his business and the title of the book, he isn’t trying to convert vegetarians back to eating meat. He does invite them to examine their convenient underlying assumptions about the virtues of their choice, as does the former environmental lawyer and now rancher Nicolette Hahn Niman, who wrote often on our site about her choice to raise and sell but not eat meat, and has now collected her thoughts in the elegant, strongly argued Defending Beef. In this endearingly bombastic manifesto, much of which sounds dreamed up in long bar sessions with his co-author, Mike Edison, Martins offers one of the best and most succinct arguments for buying sustainable food, which is sustaining the community that makes and sells it: “Spreading your dollars over many small businesses and encouraging independence is a key to the sustainable food movement.”

Artisan

Martins advocates choosing your butcher “the way you choose your life partner”—another case of his acting on his beliefs, in that he married his cheesemonger, the great Anne Saxelby. Like him, Tom Mylan, another Food Channel contributor, is exuberantly profane. His Meat Hook Meat Book, named for the Brooklyn butcher shop he started with his two best friends (a venture he admits was a recipe for disaster but was the very rare case that resulted in stronger friendships) is less a recipe book or a guide to understanding cuts of meat, though it is both, than it is to understanding the mind of a butcher. (The diehard meat cook who just wants the well-illustrated, concisely explained facts will find help in The Gourmet’s Guide to Meat: How to Source it Ethically, Cut it Professionally, and Prepare it Properly, by Cole Ward with Karen Coshof, which comes with a CD.) Mylan loves what he does, and that comes through in his advice about picking knives, picking cuts, buying grinders—all of it the result of hard-won knowledge and mistakes, yes, but more importantly all of it things he really cares about. Keeping farmers solvent and building a community of customers (whom he invites to come with him and his workers on rambling jaunts to visit farmers) is, as with Martins, his reason for staying. He’s exactly the kind of artisan you hope to find far outside of Brooklyn and pick, if not as a life partner, as someone you want to keep in your neighborhood.