The Folio Book of Food and Drink is an anthology of culinary delights, stimulating appetites with literary extracts including Jane Austen, Charles Dickens, Elizabeth David and Nigel Slater. This collection – exclusive to Folio – features a mouthwatering introduction by food writer Jojo Tulloh, and a selection of cartoons and 19th-century illustrations.

From Aristophanes to Nigel Slater, from the disgusting to the delicious, and from the sober to the inebriate, this selection of comestible literature encompasses fiction and non-fiction, poetry, prose and drama.

A light, literary smorgasbord of delights, there is something here to tempt everyone, whether they crave a festive feast, a roadside picnic or a midnight snack. As well as extracts from food writers including Ken Hom, Julia Child and Anthony Bourdain, there are selections from Jane Austen, Charles Dickens, Oscar Wilde, Jan Morris, Amy Tan and more – proving that life and literature always keep half an eye on the dining table.

PRODUCTION DETAILS

Quarter-bound in cloth with textured paper sides, blocked and printed with a design by Alice Pattullo

Set in Bembo with Butler display

352 pages

Over 60 integrated black & white illustrations

Blocked slipcase

9½˝ x 6¼˝

MOUTHWATERING CELEBRATIONS OF FOOD

Feast on titbits that summon flavours and scents so vividly they induce cravings – Elizabeth David paints a dizzying picture of the foods available in a Mediterranean market while Jane Grigson sings the praises of snails freshly chased down and plucked from your own garden walls. Alongside mouthwatering celebrations of food, you will find evidence of stranger appetites – dog meat and roasted rattlesnake, and even, from Moby Dick, a pudding made from whale brains. M. F. K Fisher offers advice on how to gastronomically ‘un-seduce’ a lover; Sir Ernest Shackleton recommends keeping penguin steaks warm inside a hairy sleeping bag; George Orwell proposes 11 rules for brewing the perfect cup of tea.

And to wash all this down are the pleasures, and dangers, of alcohol: the delights of enthusiastic (if inexperienced) wine tasting in Brideshead Revisited and Bertie Wooster wondering at the miraculous properties of Jeeves’s ‘pick me up’, the vital restorative for ‘a fellow who is hanging to life by a thread on the morning after’. Less palatable is the 1700s craze of downing your drink and then biting through the glass (not recommended for even the hardiest of imbibers).

In her warm and witty introduction, food writer Jojo Tulloh details the many ways that literature and food intertwine, describing the collection as a ‘gastronomical diversion of the highest order’. The perfect edition for any connoisseur, The Folio Book of Food and Drink features a selection of humorous cartoons and 19th-century illustrations.

ABOUT JOJO TULLOH

Jojo Tulloh is an editor, author and pamphleteer. Formerly the food editor of current affairs magazine The Week, she has written about food and gardens for a number of national newspapers and magazines. Her first book, East End Paradise, was published in 2009, and her second, The Modern Peasant: Adventures in City Food, won the 2014 Fortnum & Mason Food Book of the Year Award. In 2017, she was named Fortnum & Mason Cookery Writer of the Year.