The shelves in our cookbook library overflow with volumes beautiful, useful, stained, dog-eared, and deeply loved, but we’d be tempted to toss a few to make room for this exquisitely beautiful set of 20 reissued classics from Penguin UK. The books’ authors range from contemporary celebrities — Alice Waters, Calvin Trillin — to truly vintage classics like Isabella Beeton’s The Campaign for Domestic Happiness and Alexandre Dumas’s culinary abecedarium From Absinthe to Zest. _Designed by Coralie Bickford-Smith, arguably the British book world’s most famous cover designer, the covers take inspiration from ceramic patterns found on pieces produced at roughly the same time as the books’ original manuscripts. (Bickford-Smith told _Fast Company that the feathery leaves adorning M.F.K. Fisher’s Love in a Dish and Other Pieces came from a vintage bowl designed by Eva Zeisel.) The Penguin Great Food series will be available in the U.K. in April; the American editions — currently available for pre-sale on Amazon.com — will be released in October.
Above: Love in a Dish and Other Pieces by M.F.K. Fisher; Murder in the Kitchen by Alice B. Toklas; The Campagin for Domestic Happiness by Isabella Beeton
Above: A Dissertation upon Roast Pig by Charles Lamb; Recipes from the White Hart Inn by William Verrall; From Absinthe to Zest: An Alphabet for Food Lovers by Alexandre Dumas
Above: A Middle Eastern Feast by Claudia Roden; The Chef at War by Alexis Soyser; A Taste of the Sun by Elizabeth David
Above: Buffalo Cake and Indian Pudding by Dr. A.W. Chase; The Well-Kept Kitchen by Gervase Markham; Everlasting Syllabub and the Art of Caring by Hannah Glasse
Above: The Elegant Economist by Eliza Acton; The Pleasures of Life by Brillat-Savarin; The Joys of Excess by Samuel Pepys
Above: Exciting Food for Southern Types by Pellegrino Artusi; Eating with the Pilgrims and Other Pieces by Calvin Trillin; Notes from Madras by Colonel Wyvern