It’s not a recipe book, but a reference book for anything culinary. Edited by BBC foodie Tom Jaine, the encyclopedic The Oxford Companion to Food is written engagingly with British flair and covers aardvark through zwieback. South Africans eat aardvarks, which reportedly taste like pork, not chicken. Along with entries on edible flora and fauna (bananas, pine nuts, pigeons) and particular dishes (fudge, pancakes, steak and kidney pie), the Oxford Companion explores national cuisines in detail (Armenia, Norway, name your country) as well as the historical lineage of particular foods. Spread by Muslim traders, shish kebab became the inspiration for everything from satay in Indonesia to ćevapÄići in Serbia.
