Pages & Proofs

Pancakes are delicious enough to deserve our attention way beyond Shrove Tuesday (February 28) and the start of Lent. The editors at AbeBooks.co.uk have selected eight pancake cookery books offering recipes that span the world, from California to Russia and Scandinavia, and show numerous forms of this humble but versatile dish. The original reason for […]

In honour of the 150th anniversary of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, AbeBooks has created a video describing how to make the ‘Ultimate Alice Birthday Cake.’ Have you made a literary cake?

Over all the years of book love, I’ve come across so many weird and wonderful books, from rare and collectable automobile repair manuals to children’s potty-training books to unimaginably beautiful books of art and everything in between. Some of my favourites have been cookery books. Since we all eat, you’d think cookery books would bring […]

What WHAAAAAAT! Yes yes y’all, the rumours are true – whether or not you can take the heat, it is definitely time to get in the kitchen, so you can create some culinary chaos with Rapper’s Delight: The Hip Hop Cookbook (96 pages, Dokument Press). Authors Joseph Innis (a foodie), Ralph Miller (a writer) and […]

The biggest prize in the cookbook genre was announced yesterday and a book describing the long and complex legacy of British cuisine has picked up the main award. The James Beard Foundation Book Awards named Historic Heston by English chef Heston Blumenthal as cookbook of the year. Blumenthal, owner of The Fat Duck, details the identity […]

Over at The Guardian, children’s author Katherine Rundell has selected her top 10 favourite descriptions of food in fiction. I like her selections. My youngest daughter is reading Little House in the Big Woods right now. 1. Everything Roald Dahl wrote I have eaten a lot of chocolate in my life, but nothing has ever been […]

I’d like to introduce a new genre to both bookselling and cooked meat – it’s called Literaturwurst. I give you German artist Dieter Roth, who apparently created around 50 ‘literature sausages’, according to the Museum of Modern Art in New York, which put on a Dieter Roth exhibition earlier this year. To make each sausage […]

In 1946, author George Orwell published an essay in the Evening Standard newspaper called A Nice Cup of Tea. If you like a nice cuppa then you’ll enjoy this piece: A Nice Cup of Tea, January 12, 1946 If you look up ‘tea’ in the first cookery book that comes to hand you will probably […]

Liberace Cooks! Of course, he did. Every celebrity worth their salt has a cookbook and Liberace was no exception. Enjoy this gem from 1970 – Liberace Cooks! Hundreds of Delicious Recipes for You from His Seven Dining Rooms. The cookery book is illustrated with pictures of the great man’s home.

Food and music – a good combination. Alex Kapranos of Franz Ferdinand is a former kitchen porter, chef and kitchen washer upper from Glasgow. In 2004, his rock band Franz Ferdinand enjoyed a series of hits and embarked on a world tour. As Kapronos toured the world, he toured the world’s restaurants and wrote about […]