100 Books Like High on the Hog

As a transplant to Atlanta from Los Angeles, I’ve been fascinated by the regional cuisines and culinary traditions of the south. But after being caught up in the romance of pimento cheese, mint juleps, and fried chicken, I knew there was so much more to the story that I was missing.

This book tells that untold story, showing us the immeasurable debt southern food owes to Africa and enslaved peoples brought to America. What I love about this book is not just the history being told but how Twitty tells it, combining a mix of genres, from narrative nonfiction to genealogical documentation, historical account to personal memoir.

Just as cooking is a highly creative act that fuses together diverse flavors and ingredients, writing about food needs to be equally creative and equally diverse.

This is absolutely a new classic - an award-winning coming-of-age story about the Sunday a soul food cooking grandmother finally opens up her culinary secrets to the next generation. Winsome Bingham’s vivid language is perfectly matched with C.G. Esperanza’s electric illustrations. I also appreciate the tiny details like the uncle who watches the football game on an itty bitty TV. Brings me back (kids will never understand that pre-smartphone life!) And apparently, the mac n’ cheese recipe is on point, so don’t miss that.

Angela Shanté and Seth Rogers have constructed a beautiful story around the infamous pastime in Black families sitting down for Sunday dinner.

While Sunday dinner's origins are rooted in chattel slavery, when enslaved Africans only day of rest was Sunday. Black families looked forward to a larger feast on those days. But while the options provided to the enslaved weren’t the best, Black Americans have always been able to transform the little they had into revolutionary additions to American cuisine.

The story of the Black Sunday dinner is one of resilience and community in the face of adversity. Sunday dinners with the main character expand in community as their family welcomes guests to join their weekly family ritual. When his teacher asks the class to share a family tradition, Sunday dinner becomes the obvious choice. 

When it comes to ethnic cookbooks this is one of my all-time favorites. I didn't know where to start with soul food except that I wanted to make it at home, and this book is perfect for that.

While it’s not chock full of traditional recipes, each is full of flavor and is also healthier than what you’d get at a restaurant. 

“They came hungry,” begins the first chapter of this delightful look at the gastronomy of America’s desert quarter.

The whole dining table is here: huevos rancheros, tamales, chili, oranges, russet potatoes, rotgut whiskey, the chimichanga (which McNamee calls “a crispy torpedo of goodness”) and the Apache home-brewed beer called tiswin.

It’s one thing to enjoy Southwestern cooking. It’s another to understand its roots.

I love that Mol weaves together three different narrative voices on the page simultaneously to force me out of my linear perspectives. In the process, I need to explore many of the meanings of food and eating as human activities.

I love gaining a new angle on something that seems so basic, fundamental, and therefore easy—eating. But Mol provides a new set of understandings of eating and all its related processes so that I learn that what I thought was basic and fundamental is instead just a meaning that I make. 

I was quite taken by Laudan’s attention to the preparation of foods, from deep time to the present, in many of the regions of the world. She is attentive to mixtures: in any dish, in the kinds of dishes served for meals of different kinds, in the sharing and exchanging of tastes, and in the close relationships between dining and worship.

Beginning with the simple motions of a woman grinding grain on stone for the daily meal, or pounding hulls in a vessel, to the innumerable kitchen attendants needed to turn raw materials into ingredients for palace feasts, or the labor-saving kitchen appliances of fast-paced modernity, the ability to break bread in community has long depended on local ecologies and ways of life, as well as human ability to make the best of what is to hand. In fact, she sees the rise of distinctive world food cultures not as… show more.

Food in History is a pioneer work on the deceptively simple theme. Its purpose is to examine the forces which have shaped the nature of man’s diet throughout the course of thirty thousand years and to show, without special pleading, something of the way in which the pursuit of more and better food has helped to direct – sometimes decisively, more often subtly – the movement of history itself. To demonstrate, in effect, that in some senses, at least food is history.

This book literally walks the reader through the history of food, how we evolved from foraging to an agrarian community, and how supermarkets evolved from farmers markets. Weaving food into politics, religion, and economics Food in History is an expose on humanity's complex relationship with food and our reliance on both produce and meat as the basis of the human omnivore diet.   

This isn’t just a book—it’s a feat of cultural anthropology, an ark of the world’s wondrous and unique food cultures on the brink of erasure due to the encroachment of industrial food and globalization. The photos are mesmerizing, and the accounts of the families are both fascinating and heartrending.

I keep this book on my desk and open it anytime I have a little downtime. I can disappear into the world of, say, subsistence farmers in Bhutan or marvel over the mouthwatering array of dishes a Turkish mom churns out for her family of six from a one-bedroom apartment in Istanbul. I never cease to be amazed—or hungry.

At our house, we love books that allow us to visit new worlds. This book explores food from 13 different countries across the globe and will make you want to travel all the way around the world (or maybe just go to a local restaurant for now) to try all the delicious dishes.

From Sweden to Nigeria and Pakistan to Peru, it’s interesting and tantalizing to learn more about each place through what’s on their plates.