The Best 20 Food Books of 2007 as Chosen by Leite's Culinaria

or the past several weeks, all of us here at Leite's Culinaria have been digging out those slips of paper, flipping through notes, uncovering comments, and deciphering scribbles that we collected throughout the year to come up with our top 20 books of 2007. Hands down, the biggest challenge we face every year is choosing a balanced selection that represents what's going on in the world of food and in the lives of our readers and testers, without discounting those books that caught our eye. Our "Best of" isn't just a popularity contest; each book that makes it to the final list is carefully weighed against similar books — often requiring countless trips to the bookstore, in order for us to be satisfied with our choices.

One of the trends we see continuing is vegetarian cooking. Mark Bittman, author and journalist from the New York Times, put out the tome How to Cook Everything Vegetarian: Simple Meatless Recipes for Great Food. When asked why he wrote such a comprehensive book on vegetarian cooking, Bittman said he "was seeing the handwriting on wall" and that "the days of all-meat-all-the-time...could not go on." The point is made even more apparent in Isa Chandra Moskowitz's and Terry Hope Romero's meat-, dairy-, and egg-free recipes featured in Veganomicon: The Ultimate Vegan Cookbook. Even Deborah Madison's Vegetarian Cooking for Everyone was re-released this year — after having sold more than 300,000 copies during the last decade.

Memoirs and essays remain strong, and some worthwhile buys are Service Included: Four-Star Secrets of an Eavesdropping Waiter by Phoebe Damrosch, The Devil in the Kitchen: Sex, Pain, Madness, and the Making of a Great Chef by Marco Pierre White, and Alone in the Kitchen with an Eggplant, a collection of essays from writers, edited by Jenni Ferrari-Adler, focusing on the often emotionally charged subject of eating alone.

Ever since they became hot topics during the new century, sustainable foods and eating locally have attracted their admirers as well as detractors. Just take a look at Best Food Writing 2007 for some of the pros and cons being batted about by the press. In addition, writers from every genre are turning their pens to the topics. Cynics say it's to cash in on a passing fad. Others say because the issues are so pressing, no one can remain silent any longer. One of those writers who has turned her talents to the cause, if you will, is novelist Barbara Kingsolver. In her newest book, Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life, she chronicles a year during which she and her family ate only home-grown or locally grown foods. The facility of her prose, which doesn't preach but, rather, carefully builds a narrative that captivates the reader, is why we've chosen it as our Book of the Year.

In addition to our 20 best books, honorable mentions go to Adventures of an Italian Food Lover: With Recipes from 254 of My Very Best Friends by Faith Heller Willinger, Cooking with Shelburne Farms: Food and Stories from Vermont by Melissa Pasanen and Rick Gencarelli, A Love Affair with Southern Cooking: Recipes and Recollections by Jean Anderson, and Pure Dessert by Alice Medrich.

One last book worth a look, but which to include in our top 20 or in our list of honorable mentions would be a conflict of interest, is The Taste of Conquest: The Rise and Fall of the Three Great Cities of Spice by Michael Krondl. (Full disclosure: I was thanked by Krondl in the introduction — apparently, for two phone calls in which I'm sure I was of no help whatsoever — and Gary Allen, our food history editor, blurbed the book.) Nonetheless, this entertaining and educational romp through the spice trade makes for fascinating reading.

Congratulations to all the winners. — David Leite and Linda Avery