This NPR story from Friday, “Long before social networking, community cookbooks ruled the stove,” was an interesting part of culinary history. I would, however, disagree with this statement: “With community cookbooks, Smith says, “you get an insight into history that isn’t there from any other source, it’s not in newspapers.” After all, newspaper food sections had a long of sharing recipes. Readers regularly wrote in to ask about an old recipe they had lost or about how to replicate a dish from a local restaurant. The above book is a collection of such requests and responses from a food reporter at the Los Angeles Times. 

I sad to read that writer Nora Ephron died yesterday. While she is best known for her films, she was also a great food writer. Here is a great column about how she included food in her work.The writer notes: “But as was Ephron’s style, her personal stories were most often the stuff of inspiration. So it was with food, which not-so-subtly crept its way into her work. In 1975, she penned “Crazy Salad: Some Things About Women.” Her 1983 novel,Heartburn, which was adapted into a movie with Meryl Streep and Jack Nicholson three years later, features a food writer protagonist who works at a New York magazine. The novel…