Before I get started here, let me offer a caveat:  This series is no longer in print (hasn't been for a long time, actually), and that is a damn shame.  You can still find them here and there at your local thrift store, which, to quote the imprisoned Martha Stewart, "is a very good thing."  See, there is SOOOOOOO much information contained in this set of books, that you might not even need to go to culinary school to know all there is to know about cooking.

   Okay, that's a lie, but there is a grain of truth in that statement.

   Most cookbooks you buy nowadays are not a whole lot more than a set of recipes that either A) the author came up with on a whim, B) the author came up with over the course of his career, or C) recipes developed by the author's staff that the author approved for inclusion in a book.  (According to my chef instructor at school, there's at least a 50 percent chance that the recipes you see in cookbooks won't work, i.e. crappy results.)  So these books aren't teaching you anything about cooking, but rather are teaching you how to follow recipes.  Any idiot can do that, and it's insulting to those of us who actually want to *learn* about food.

The Food of the World series, published in the late 60s and early 70s, was a collection of 28 cookbooks plus recipe books based on various cooking genres around the planet.  They covered everything from Russian food to Japanese, Middle Eastern to Provincial France.  And, since it was published by an American company, there are no fewer than six cookbooks dedicated exclusively to American cuisine.  For food nerdy cooks like me, these books are freakin' GOLD.

Lemme explain something.  When I read a cookbook, I don't want to read recipes.  Not only can any idiot follow a recipe, any idiot can come up with a "recipe" for something that may or may not work.  It's still a recipe, it just might suck or (more politely) it might not suit your palate.  The Food of the World books don't bombard you with recipes, instead they take you on a trip through all these different styles of cooking, so that you can learn about how these people cook, or what ingredients are native to their country/region and when those ingredients are in season and at the top of their flavour.  To me, THAT's what's important.  Once I know that, I can make up my own recipes using those ingredients, or incorporate some of the ingredients into some sort of fusion recipe.

And that's what's offered here.  Each book checks in around 200 pages, and they do include a token amount of recipes after each chapter (in case, like me, you can't find the recipe books anywhere and still would like to cook Switzerland's berneplatte).  But they also have a ton of pictures of people enjoying food (my favourite picture so far has been in the Japanese book--go figure--of a delivery "driver" balancing about 15 lacquered bento boxes and stuff on one arm whilst riding his fricking BIKE through downtown Tokyo) and little sidebars of additional information, like festivals that demand a specific sort of chow.

What I like most about these books is that they're fueling my fire to get out there and check out some food that I otherwise wouldn't have paid a second thought to.  I'd love to try out some "cod head and shoulders" (cod's head stuffed with cooked roe, onions and parsley, popular in the British Isles), gari foto (a West African dish of eggs, ground meal and tomatoes) or kvas (a Russian beer made by soaking brown sourdough in water for a couple days).  Come on, how cool is is that?  Tell me Tony Bourdain didn't get some of his inspiration for "A Cook's Tour" by reading these books.

About the only thing these books lack is timeliness, as over 30 years has passed since their printing.  Fortunately, the recipes, ingredients and methodology that are inscribed on the pages are traditions that have been handed down since before the country was an officially recognized country.  The fashions have changed, the landscape has changed, hell, the whole society has changed, but great-great-great-great gramma's recipe hasn't.  THAT's important.  That's what defines a culture when it comes to culinary arts.  It's the sort of stuff that Emeril couldn't possibly hope to code down in his latest set of lab-tested recipes that he's never seen before.  You want to know the true meaning of cooking?  The way that your mom and her dad and his mom and her mom did stuff?  Check these books out.

Rating:  Fancy Book Learnin' out of 10