Life with Bees

I'm trying to read books for pleasure again. Lately I've realised that I've been reading books so I can interview their authors, or get up to speed with politics, and it's feeling a little too much like work. But in the last few weeks I've set aside time to read a couple of slim volumes on food. To make sure it's all about pleasure, the books suit different moods. Alan Davidson's The Pleasures of English Food is a mini Penguin paperback, part of a new series of reissued classic extracts and essays. (I've also bought Vita Sackville-West's musings on gardens for a dear friend.) A former diplomat, Davidson writes lucidly, cleanly about Bramley apples and teacakes and toad in the hole. Mrs Beeton and Stilton and stargazey puddings. Exploring the ancestry of each familiar, unexciting dish and the ways we consume it, Davidson conjures up nursery comforts and the cool landscapes of country England. It's all very colonial and quietly authoritative.

In a completely different tone is Michelle Maisto's The Gastronomy of Marriage, which chronicles the effects of food on Maisto's relationship with her fiancee in modern day Brooklyn. The scenery is deeply American – makeshift kitchens in college dorm rooms, trips to the markets of Chinatown on the subway, Maisto and her fiancee arguing over soba noodles in their tiny New York apartment. Davidson slips easily into my work bag and is perfect for dipping into for five minutes as I scarf down leftovers in the lunch room (it's been barbecued baby octopus and stir fried vegetables all week). He's like a pack of good cigarettes, quickly consumed but deeply savoured. Maisto is a little more work, takes a little more concentration – I find some of the writing just a tiny bit twee. But some of her dilemmas ring true: what to do when you and your partner have different tastes but both love food? What power structures do you have to negotiate when one person does the cooking and the other the washing? (A seemingly trivial division which can rapidly turn into the emotional faultline of a relationship, cutting deep to the bubbling lava of resentment - oh believe me!) Each book suits a certain frame of mind, a certain landscape. Reading them in tandem as I am, dipping into one and taking up with the other as the mood strikes, they make for an unorthodox and satisfying combination - like buttermilk chicken and waffles. Or cucumber sandwiches with a dot of Louisiana hot sauce.