A foodie’s summer reading list

Summer means lots of things to foodies: sparking wine, al fresco dining, a million uses for tomatoes, and so on. It also means diving into something delicious to read, and this year there’s plenty of terrific material to choose from.

On the cookbook front, I love three: Ina Garten’s new Back to Basics, the Times-Picayune’s Cooking up a Storm, and The Crescent City Farmers Market Cookbook by Poppy Tooker (a super manual for all fans of Louisiana farmers markets.)

There’s great memoir material out there, too, including new releases from familiar names like Ruth Reichl and Amanda Hesser. I’m in the midst of Hesser’s Eat, Memory, a compilation of food essays published in the New York Times Magazine in Hesser’s column of the same name, and it’s lovely. A range of writers chime in about life’s significant moments, and how food happened to play a part along the way. Reichl’s Not Becoming My Mother: And Other Things She Taught Me, released in April, is a poignant reflection on Reichl’s mother, Miriam, whose kitchen ineptitude is the subject of the author’s earlier lighthearted works.

While not recent releases, Laurie Colwin’s Home Cooking and Happy all the Time are breezy and fun, and longtime fans of Gourmet magazine will enjoy reconnecting with one of the magazine’s beloved columnists, whose untimely death in 1992 saddened faithful readers. Finally, anything by Calvin Trillin, the southern humorist who writes about food adventures while traveling with his wife Alice, is a delight. He’s dry, clever, and often laugh-out-loud funny.

Offer up your favorite foodie reads here.