Anthony Bourdain’s ultimate food book reading list: “An absolute timeless classic”
If you want to know about good food, start at the library. That feels like a fucking insane sentence to type, but for Anthony Bourdain, it rang true.
Sure, food is all about taste, but for Bourdain, it was always more than that. Food was a social tool, a thing to bring people together and bridge gaps. It was a cultural element that he spent his life imploring everyone to get involved in becoming a true citizen of the world. To him, gathering around a dinner table and sharing a meal had real power and wasn’t something to be underestimated. Across plates of goddamn delicious food, everything could be healed, moods could be lifted, and any problem could be solved.
As someone who truly cut his teeth in the kitchen, learning his craft by doing, it was the chaos in part that appealed to him. “Few things are more beautiful to me than a bunch of thuggish, heavily tattooed line cooks moving around each other like ballerinas on a busy Saturday night,” he once said, adding, “Seeing two guys who’d just as soon cut each other’s throats in their off hours moving in unison with grace and ease can be as uplifting as any chemical stimulant or organised religion.”
But on the flipside to that, Bourdain also encouraged people to sit down in a quiet room with a good book. In particular, he thought that if you wanted to know about food, and I mean really, truly know about food, you should hit the books.
That’s why he wrote his own, joining the masters who came before him, who deeply inspired his career and inspired him to think deeper about food than simply enjoying the plate in front of him. Through those books, he learnt more about the psychology of food as well as new thoughts on how to prepare it and what it truly means in our lives.
During an episode of The Layover, Bourdain was in his hometown of New York rifling through the shelves at Kitchen Arts and Letters, a shop sitting at 1435 Lexington Ave that you can still visit. Specialising in literature about food, Bourdain looked around while sharing his essential reading list of the best books on the topic.
From a span of different decades and a cast of very different writers, his collection is eclectic. On Food And Cooking by Harold McGee was his first choice as the chef said, “This is an absolute timeless classic.” But elsewhere, his choices are more niche and specialised. “As far as I’m concerned, this is the walking Buddha right here,” he said about Fergus Henderson and his book The Whole Beast, which is about how to cook each and every part of a pig.
He also celebrates the work of Ludwig Bemelmans, picking two of his books, but especially saying that La Bonne Table is a book that “every sentient human being who claims to love food should read.”
One choice is a fiction book, as he picks out The Belly of Paris by Émile Zola. “For pure high-test food porn, this is really one of the greatest books ever,” he said, describing the novel “about a starving anarchist in Paris surrounded by the most fantastic food and food preparation imaginable.”
From specialist non-fiction choices to help improve skill, to literary selections simply about the joy of food, Bourdain’s reading list perfectly represents his own feelings towards his work, combining knowledge with pure love.
Anthony Bourdain’s recommended books about food:
- On Food And Cooking – Harold McGee
- The Whole Beast – Fergus Henderson
- When You Lunch With The Emperor – Ludwig Bemelmans
- La Bonne Table – Ludwig Bemelmans
- Heat – Bill Buford
- The Belly Of Paris – Émile Zola
