On the specific experience of reading books about food and what they do to hunger: Elizabeth David's books, specifically French Provincial Cooking, are not cookbooks in the functional sense. They're sustained sensory essays about the experience of eating in a particular place and time, and they produce a specific kind of reading appetite that is not satisfied by cooking the recipes.

I've read French Provincial Cooking three times without making more than five recipes from it. What I'm reading for is the sensory world David creates — the heat, the specific light of the Midi, the market smells, the sound of the kitchen. The recipes are documentary evidence that the world described existed.

MFK Fisher is the American parallel. Her prose about hunger and eating is the best prose about either in the language.