BOOKS: Food Porn

If you got here after typing "food" and "porn" and "fetish" in Google, you're about to be very disappointed. Best go here instead. Okay? Okay.

I love cooking.

Now, by that I don't mean I like going to the store to buy ingredients, and then at some indeterminate future date remembering to them out of the cupboard, then torturing them with utensils until they yield -- through the magic of food alchemy -- something delicious to eat. And then, god forbid, having to wash the dishes afterward.

No, I love the idea of cooking. I like to watch other people cook... preferably food that will end up in my belly. But if that's not a possibility, I like cooking shows. I like beautiful, glossy, lavishly photographed food magazines and cookbooks. I like the relatively new sub-set of non-cookery books for foodies, which has been labelled food literature but let's be honest: a better term would be food porn.

In other words, picture a person perched on the edge of her chair watching Martha Stewart (oh, Martha, you filthy little kitchen minx, you) uninhibitedly throw whole cream and pounds of fresh creamery butter into her food processor. Then picture that person eating a bowl of cold cereal at the same time that she's watching this orgiastic culinary free-for-all. That's me.

Like all fetishists, I have a small trove of books I like to read under the covers when I'm in the mood:

• The Tuscan Year: Life and Food in an Italian Valley by Elizabeth Romer
• A Year in Provence (and its follow-ups, which were good, if not as good as the original) by Peter Mayle
• The Alice B. Toklas Cookbook, with a forward by M.F.K. Fisher (which contains a recipe for pot brownies with the drily witty suggestion: "it might provide an entertaining refreshment for a Ladies' Bridge Club or a chapter meeting of the DAR")
• The Pasta Bible by Christian Teubner, Silvio Rizzi & Tan Lee Leng
• The World Encyclopedia of Cheese by Juliet Harbutt (My sister gave this to me as a joke, but I love it. It contains one of the best sentences I've ever read: "France has many of the most fascinating cheeses in the world.")
• The Soup Bible by Debra Mayhew (Don't even get me started about soup.)

The latest addition to this collection was sent to me for my birthday by Wing Chun, who, in addition to being witty, brave and having the strength of ten Grinches plus two, always knows exactly what to give.

Hey There, Cupcake! is so my kind of book, it's not even funny. I'm familiar with Clare Crespo's earlier book, The Secret Life of Food, which features beautifully photographed (by the uber-talented Eric Staudenmaier) recipes for freaky fare like the spaghetti and eyeballs shown at the top of this entry (I tried so hard to find a photograph of the mutant chicken, because I desperately wanted to show it to you, but no luck; you'll have to get your hands on the book), so her recipes for tasty little oddities such as crop-circle cupcakes (above) and sushi cupcakes (below) came as a surprise, for sure, but not a shock.

Crespo is a fabulous domestic-arts weirdo, of Amy Sedaris's ilk, as this interview attests. Every new thing I learn about her (such as the fact that she's part of a diorama club) confirms my girl-crush on her. I'm a vegetarian, but for Clare I'd eat mutant chicken.

What's your favourite foodie porn? Let's get nasty in the comments section.