The hungry mind

No wonder stores are well stocked with not just memoirs of food professionals, including those of Jacques Pepin, longtime restaurant critic Mimi Sheraton, British food writer Nigel Slater and restaurateur Sirio Maccioni of Le Cirque, but also of amateurs out to tell their own stories a bite at a time, as in "Fried Butter" or "The Language of Baklava." The literary quality is often high enough that they warrant reviews in major publications.

Many of these books will be summer reading for Rose's customers. "A lot of people come in and stock up on paperbacks when they're going on a cruise or off to Europe," she says. While they're away, "they can't cook, so they read." Others will be recreational reading for empty-nesters: "People who can't cook anymore want to read."

And some will be picked up by Food Mafia wannabes, books such as Amanda Hesser's "Cooking for Mr. Latte" (fantasy primer for a food writer) and "The Soul of a Chef," Michael Ruhlman's recounting of his year at the Culinary Institute of America (calling the next Thomas Keller). Rose says Sheraton's "Eating My Words" sells because "if you want to be a restaurant critic, that is the blueprint."

But Rose will also be catering to "readers," the kind who she said are as likely to spend time on "A Meal Observed," Andrew Todhunter's exhaustive ruminations on Taillevent in Paris, as on Philip Roth's "The Plot Against America." If it were fiction, "A Meal Observed" could not be more writerly.

Todhunter's previous books were on extreme sports and climbing, which apparently makes him a publisher's dream. Scribner's Wareham, for one, sees a big void in food books on science but believes "it's hard to find a really good writer.

"When people are going to write about food they adopt this precious, gooey voice," she says, and they also "get too caught up in minutiae." Cookbook writers trying to write nonfiction, she says, are "like Michael Jordan playing baseball -- it doesn't really translate."

Too many books, Wareham says, are "recipe headnotes gone bad and gone long. Also, there's a perception that food writing doesn't have to be very good, and it does. It's the same standards you judge a novel by."

Lee Stern, cookbook buyer for Barnes & Noble, notes that many of the books that most exemplify the trend toward recipe-free treatises were not targeted for the food audience.