Americans love food (well, doesn’t everyone?). If you like to read about food, check out these food writing anthologies or books about Clementine Paddleford, a food writer raised in Kansas who achieved international renown.

Clementine Paddleford

Hometown Appetites: The Story of Clementine Paddleford, the Forgotten Food Writer Who Chronicled How America Ate
Kelly Alexander and Cynthia Harris
In Hometown Appetites, an award-winning food writer and a leading university archivist come together to revive the legacy of the most important food writer you have never heard of. Clementine Paddleford was a Kansas farm girl who grew up to chronicle America’s culinary habits.

How America Eats
By Clementine Paddleford
Published in 1960, this book includes over 800 recipes collected by Paddleford in her travels throughout the United States. Paddleford also writes about these travels and the people she meets, depicting culinary life at the time.

A Flower for My Mother
By Clementine Paddleford
Paddleford’s memoir about her childhood in Kansas was published in 1958.

Food Writing

American Food Writing: An Anthology with Classic Recipes
Edited by Molly O'Neill
A celebrated food writer gathers the very best from more than 250 years of American culinary history and chronicles the astonishing variety of American cuisine. The contributors cover a range of subjects and perspectives on all things food related. This book also includes more than 50 classic recipes.

A Stew or a Story: An Assortment of Short Works by M.F.K. Fisher
Gathered by Joan Reardon
Like the savory, simple dishes she favored, M. F. K. Fisher's writing was often "short, stylish, concentrated in flavor, and varied in form," writes Joan Reardon in her introduction to this eclectic, lively collection. Magazine writing launched and helped to sustain Fisher's long, illustrious career and in these fifty-seven pieces we experience again the inimitable voice of the woman widely known to have elevated food writing to a literary art.

Endless Feasts: Sixty Years of Writing from Gourmet
Edited by Ruth Reichl
Reichl offers an enchanting compendium of food and travel essays from Gourmet magazine's extensive archives. Included are wonderful contributions by Anita Loos, James Beard, Madhur Jaffrey, Robert P. Tristam Coffin, Laurie Colwin, and many others.

Choice Cuts: A Savory Selection of Food Writing From Around the World and Throughout History
Edited and illustrated by Mark Kurlansky
Award-winning food writer Mark Kurlansky serves up a true smorgasbord of "choice cuts" by the world's most discerning gourmets and gourmands through the ages. From Plato on the art of cooking to Louis Prima at the pizzeria to Pablo Neruda on French fries and M.F.K. Fisher on gingerbread, Choice Cuts offers more than 200 selections--all enhanced by Kurlansky's original drawings.

Secret Ingredients: The New Yorker Book of Food and Drink
Edited by David Remnick
This anthology of food writings from the New Yorker addresses cuisine both haute and bas, not only in prose but with a generous selection of hilarious cartoons.

The Gastronomical Me 
By M.F.K. Fisher
In 1929, a newly married M.F.K. Fisher said goodbye to a milquetoast American culinary upbringing and sailed with her husband to Dijon, where she tasted real French cooking for the first time. The Gastronomical Me is a chronicle of her passionate embrace of a whole new way of eating, drinking, and celebrating the senses. As she recounts memorable meals shared with an assortment of eccentric and fascinating characters, set against a backdrop of mounting pre-war tensions, we witness the formation not only of her taste but of her character and her prodigious talent.

Some book descriptions provided by BookLetters.