What are the best food books that aren't cookbooks?

A cookbook lives in the kitchen, splattered and propped open. A food book lives on the bedside table and gets read in order, start to finish, like a novel. The best ones make you hungry without giving you a single quantity. These four cover memoir, restaurant life, everyday cooking and full-blown obsession.

The Gastronomical Me, M.F.K. Fisher (1943)

Fisher's book is a memoir told through meals. It moves from her childhood through her years in France and the start of the Second World War, and through love, marriage and loss, using food as the way into each memory. What makes it remarkable is that it is less about eating well than about appetite in the wider sense: wanting things, missing things, being young somewhere new.

It is often described as a forerunner of the modern food memoir, and you can feel its influence in almost every writer who came after. Read it slowly, ideally with something good in a glass beside you.

Kitchen Confidential, Anthony Bourdain (2000)

Bourdain's book grew out of a 1999 essay in The New Yorker and turned a working chef into a household name. It is a memoir and an exposé of professional restaurant kitchens: the hours, the heat, the misfits who staff them, how restaurants make their money, and a few tips for diners who would rather not be taken for a ride.

It is loud, profane and very funny, and it changed how a lot of people look at the swinging door between dining room and kitchen. Not for readers who like their food writing gentle.

An Everlasting Meal, Tamar Adler (2011)

Adler, who cooked at Chez Panisse and Prune, wrote a book of essays about cooking with what you already have: few tools, little waste, and a lot of attention. It builds openly on M.F.K. Fisher's wartime book How to Cook a Wolf and shares its belief that resourcefulness matters more than money.

There are recipes in it, but they sit inside the prose rather than in tidy lists. It is the book most likely to change what you actually do on a Wednesday night, mostly by making leftovers and scraps feel like a beginning rather than an ending. It pairs naturally with our page on /food/what-to-cook-when-the-fridge-is-empty/.

Heat, Bill Buford (2006)

Buford, a New Yorker writer, gave up his desk to work unpaid in the kitchen of a busy New York Italian restaurant, starting at the bottom as a prep cook and working his way across the stations. The book then follows him to Italy to learn from the people and places that shaped that kitchen's cooking, including fresh pasta in Emilia-Romagna and butchery and sausage-making in a traditional shop in Chianti.

It is a big, generous, self-mocking book about what it takes to cook professionally, and about how much an amateur can learn if he is willing to be humiliated daily.

Which one first?

• For beautiful sentences: Fisher.
• For a page-turner: Bourdain.
• For changing your own cooking: Adler.
• For an Italian adventure: Buford.