The worst kind of cookbook is one whose recipes just don’t work, of course. A close second is a database of recipes with no context, explanation, or personal story—recipe as equation that will give as clockwork and uninspired a result as a multiplication table. The kinds of cookbooks I love are personal, passionate, and preface each and every recipe with enough detail to know why it mattered to the cookbook author to include it, and how to judge the results as the reader and cook.

But even that kind of cookbook is primarily a tool—for expanding one’s repetoire of flavors or skills or simply grasp of how the other half eats. I’ve concluded, though, that my most favorite cookbooks are something beyond tools. They are what I hereby officially dub Narrative Cookbooks.

A Narrative Cookbook is not a Memoir with Recipes—a fine genre, and have I mentioned lately that I myself have written a Memoir with Recipes?—but its distinct own thing. In a Memoir with Recipes, the primary purpose is to tell the personal story, and in this particular case the personal story is very much bound up with food, so the author would like you the reader to taste or at least imagine the taste of the food that informed the life.

By contrast, a Narrative Cookbook is still more about the food than the life, but it recognizes that you can’t extract the one from the other, and the food won’t come to life without the life itself being reported alongside the recipe.

In my entirely unscientific survey, I find that Narrative Cookbooks span a spectrum from most essay-ish to most memoir-ish and the whole range in between…

Just about a month away now from the launch of I Am a Brave Bridge, my memoir with recipes of a year in Slovakia 1993–1994, I thought it was time to give a little love to an unjustly neglected cuisine at the four corners of a defunct empire.

The Cooking of Vienna’s Empire is how the Time-Life “Foods of the World” characterizes it and accordingly entitles that entry in the renowned series. I imagine the Hungarian half of the Austro-Hungarian Empire would be rather irritated by their absence from this name, but as usual, Slovaks have more cause to complain: author Joseph Wechsberg fails to include a single recipe attributed to Slovakia (even “Liptauer Cheese,” the German name for a spread from the Liptov region of Slovakia), presumably assuming—as Czechs are wont to do—that Slovak is a subset of Czech.

For all that, it’s a marvelous cookbook and a good place to start if, as is generally the case in the English-speaking world, central Europe is kind of a blank on your mental map…

When we last saw our heroine, she was departing France in a blaze of glory, forever unleashed from bondage to the strictures of cookbooks and their hidebound recipes.

Well, not really, to be honest. I still have a great big cookbook collection and I still use them all the time, though I am considerably less obedient than while I was acquring the skills and concomitant instincts of an intuitive cook.

However, the intuitive-cook-skills-and-instincts have, over time, resulted in a great deal of grumpiness about cookbooks. (See some of that grumping here.) Excessive fussiness, no attention to streamlining the use of bulky pots and pans, taste bought for a huge sum instead of through skillful execution, and constantly reinventing the wheel rate high on my list of complaints.

Which is why Lateral Cooking was a game changer all over again…

Sometime in 2012 I was languishing in France because I had nothing good to read. Still weirdly resistant to ebooks, unwilling to pay the postage for overseas delivery, and having reread everything on my own shelf, I searched with faint hope through the selection of English novels available in the local bookstore. They were (pinch nose here) “literary.” Beautiful sentences about nihilistic individuals, containing nothing so bourgeois as a plot. I resolved never again to pick a work of fiction sight unseen off the shelf and resigned myself to reading through all seven volumes of Harry Potter again because nothing else was worth the trouble.

Then hope twinkled anew, because I found The Flavour Thesaurus…

*This “you” is a composite of the many people whose kitchens I’ve snooped in. Don’t worry, your identity is safe with me!

If I have spent any time at your house, then you have caught me rooting through your fridge.

Later, despite a puzzled look or even a rebuke, you have seen me give a guilty start when you found me in your pantry.

Then you caught me red-handed sorting your plastic storage containers and quite possibly trying to throw some of them out.

Yes, it’s a bad habit, but if I have been engaged in such nefarious activities in your kitchen, then you know that I also ended up cooking you dinner.

You liked this part.

The one is logically connected to the other. Please sit back, digest, and allow me to explain…

Ten years ago I paid my first and only visit to Israel/Palestine and I had a conversion experience. Not to Jesus or Judaism or any of the many flavors of ancient Christianity on offer.

No, I was converted to olives.

Understand that up to this point my primary acquaintance with olives was in the form of the flabby black rings that came from a can and looked and tasted like tires. Or, more rarely, a pimento-stuffed one nicked out of a parent’s martini: hard to say which was worse, the drink or its garnish.

I was always rather sad about this because olives seemed, in principle, to be cool and sophisticated. I wanted to be the kind of person who eats olives. Alas. I was not.

And then, by one of those odd series of circumstances in life in which you end up at the Greek Orthodox monastery attached to the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem (not the Armenian Apostolic or the Roman Catholic monastery, mind you), I was confronted with a lavish feast amidst which sat a plate heaped with glistening, oozing olives. They were honestly black, not chemically black, wrinkled and puckered and very inviting. I don’t like olives, I said to myself. But a taste can’t hurt.

Well, I won’t bother you with the immoderate and propagandistic praise of the convert. Let’s just say that I love them now—the real ones, not the imitation horrors that show up on pizza.

This naturally led me on to Israeli cookbooks to make good use of my newfound love…

Not too long ago I wrote about Vegetables Every Day, which I named the best vegetable cookbook ever written. This post is about the second-best: Power Vegetables.

It could not be more different from the first in tone, coverage, or layout. To start with the latter, the book is full-color and filled with photographs that proudly reclaim the goofy palette and styling tricks of the 1970s. (Never underestimate the force of nostalgia.) You can see the plasma globes on the cover nestled amidst artichokes and eggplants. A picture on the inside features a guy in a pretend superhero outfit; another has a plastic dinosaur attaching a Caesar salad…

Vegetables are sexy now and getting hotter by the minute. Between the moralism of the anti-meat crowd, anxiety over the planet, and finally something like a decent farmer’s market trade flourishing in the U.S., people raised on frozen limas and canned green beans are actually excited about botanical foodstuffs again. And that’s to say nothing of the kale phenomenon.

Accordingly, publishers meet the demand by cranking out one gorgeously photographed cookbook after another, with increasingly weird fusion combos and an ever-receding horizon of Amish-sourced heirloom varietals to keep the revenue churning.

But they’re all latecomers to the game. The best veg cookbook ever was published almost twenty years ago already. Allow me to reintroduce you to Jack Bishop’s Vegetables Every Day…

Years ago when Mark Bittman’s How to Cook Everything was my Bible, I studied every page like a good little novice, and approximately 882 pages later I came across the no doubt often overlooked section, “Fifty Cookbooks I’d Rather Not Live Without.” This led to many happy finds but none so happy as Flatbreads and Flavors: A Baker’s Atlas by Jeffrey Alford and Naomi Duguid, which in due course upended HtCE as All-Time-Favorite-Cookbook.

Is this the point at which I mention that I hung out last week with Naomi Duguid? No, that’s spoiling the surprise too soon.

Anyway…

So I got my copy of F&F in 2005 and away I went. You see, for years already then (and still now) I’d been haunted with guilt because the first time I attempted to make bread from scratch I forgot to add the yeast. It was only once I had a supple dough in hand that I realized my mistake and—close your eyes, here it comes—thinking there was nothing more to be done about it, I threw it out.

I sometimes feel that when I face Judgment Day, that wasted bread dough will be dangled in front of my nose, an outrageous combination of wastefulness and ignorance…

If I can’t travel, I cook. I’ve never been to Mexico, and used to think I hated the cheesy-beany glop that claims to be its cuisine, but that all changed when I found Rick Bayless’s first, Authentic Mexican. I’ve never been to Thailand, but back when I was so new to cooking that I’d never even baked bread or knew what to do with most of the vegetables in the produce section I scouted out lemongrass, kaffir lime leaves, and turmeric root (before it was trendy) to make everything I could from Vatcharin Bhumichitr’s Vatch’s Thai Cookbook. French, Italian, Chinese, you name it.

Unless you named Japanese. Then I was stumped. Raw-fish sushi was a nonstarter and back then the only ramen I knew about was the hangover-cure with a toxic flavor packet you got in college. Despite its name, Shizuo Tsuji’s Japanese Cooking: A Simple Art was encyclopedic and forbidding.

Then, one happy day, I came across a reference to Elizabeth Andoh’s Washoku: Recipes from the Japanese Home Kitchen, and in keeping with the frugal habits of grad school poverty I checked it out of the library…