"Do not be alarmed," wrote Pellegrino Artusi in 1891, apropos a recipe for strudel, "if this dessert seems to you to be a strange concoction, or if it looks like some ugly creature such as a giant leech or a shapeless snake after you cook it; you will like the way it tastes."
This is not the sort of sentiment you encounter very often in contemporary cookbooks. Food is not allowed to be ugly – never mind as ugly as a giant leech – in the kind of glossy books most mainstream publishers churn out, in which text is fitted around pictures and everything must look appetising, regardless of how it actually tastes. Nor is this entirely a bad thing. We are living in a glorious era for food photography. Some of the work of the best photographers – Jason Lowe, Jonathan Lovekin, Georgia Glynn Smith – can rival the food still lifes of the Dutch golden age. It is absurd that, in many cases, convention still decrees that the "writer" is given top billing, above the photographer whose images supply the book with its only real originality and beauty. It's a pity that the quality of the prose as a rule is nowhere near that of the pictures. Looking back to 1999, Nigella Lawson's How to Eat was a remarkable achievement as one of the last occasions when a cookbook sold itself purely on the power of the text.
If anything, things have got worse over the last couple of years. Food publishers – like all publishers – are suffering a crisis of confidence. Why buy cookbooks at all when it is possible to Google the ingredients for supper and come up with a clutch of free recipes in minutes? Some publishers have assumed that the way to go – unless they have a celeb cookbook linked to a TV programme – is to produce giant coffee-table books, which in their massiveness and intricate page layouts offer something completely different from the breeziness of the internet. Several of last year's biggest releases – notably Thai Street Food by David Thompson and Noma: Time and Place in Nordic Cuisine by René Redzepi – were so immense that they were hard to lift, never mind to flick through on a kitchen counter.
Penguin's new Great Food series – which features Artusi along with 19 other writers from the 17th century to the present day – has adopted the opposite approach. Instead of giant picture books, these are tiny portions of pure text, about 100 pages each. Some are filleted from longer books; others are pieced together from various sources. They are covetable objects, a reminder that even little books can still do something that Kindle and Google cannot. The dazzling covers, which have all been designed by Coralie Bickford-Smith, are reminiscent of patterns on china: Middle Eastern fritware for Claudia Roden; Sèvres porcelain for Brillat-Savarin; Brislington blue-and-white earthenware for Samuel Pepys; textured Japanese crackle-glaze for Calvin Trillin, the witty New Yorker writer. I found myself fingering them, like fine pottery plates.
As for the content, they are eloquent reminders that food writing is not just about food. These books have the power to summon up – and often prescribe – an entire way of life. In Notes from Madras the Anglo-Indian Colonel Wyvern tells us to throw away an over-roasted coffee bean "as you would a reptile". This instantly evokes the world view of the Raj: martial, superior, impatient. Wyvern is the kind of man who berates "native cooks" for laziness and thinks you can never have too much redcurrant jelly around the place, even in India. There's a very different perspective in Recipes and Lessons from a Delicious Cooking Revolution by Alice Waters, chef at the legendary Chez Panisse in Berkeley. To read Waters on the contents of her daughter's lunchbox – a pot of vinaigrette with "a selection of things to dip into it" ranging from romaine leaves and shaved carrot curls to radishes, fennel and leftover fish or chicken – is to get a glimpse of the good life in California circa 2007: a little rarefied, perhaps, but deeply ethical. Waters is engaged in transforming school food across the United States.
Or take Agnes Jekyll, a very grand food writer of the early 1920s. A Little Dinner Before the Play brilliantly summons up the atmosphere of brittle boredom that plagued society hostesses after the first world war. Her view of food is Manichean in its divisions. There is food for the Punctual and food for the Unpunctual; food for the "too thin" and food for the "too fat". "No one likes to be fat," she briskly tells us. "It is unbecoming, fatiguing and impairs efficiency." Jekyll's greatest worries seem to be over whether to eat before or after an evening play. "There is a sharp cleavage of opinion between the pleasure-seekers who prefer a reinforced tea or a stirrup-cup of soup and a sandwich before an evening's entertainment, with the prospect of supper to come, and those who will have the accustomed meal at 6, 7 or 8 and won't wait." Jekyll's sophistication is a far cry from the simple Dr AW Chase (1817-1885), a plain-speaking American salesman – and new to me – whose idea of a good time is "Pumpkin Butter as Made in the North Woods" or "Fritters-Plain-Quick". Chase's Buffalo Cakes and Indian Pudding embodies the homespun frontier life: nothing is too fancy but it is all aimed at people with a very sweet tooth – lashings of maple syrup, molasses and sugar.
Many of the writers remind us how disappointing food can be. Recipes from the White Hart Inn by William Verrall, an 18th-century gem, is good on the horrors of attempting to cook without adequate tools, where the only sieve has been used by a servant for sanding "nasty dirty floors" and the frying pan is "black as my hat" with "a handle long enough to obstruct half the passage of the kitchen". Eating can go wrong, too. The Pepys volume, a distillation of some of his best diary entries on food, brings home all too vividly how quickly the pleasures of dinner can disintegrate as the evening progresses. With Pepys, a meal may start well, with lobsters, capons, cheesecakes, only to end with him vomiting "in the bayson". What those glossy picture books can never show are the consequences of indulgence. "And so to dinner, where good cheer and discourse," Pepys writes. "But I eat a little too much beef, which made me sick." We hear Pepys resolve to stop drinking, only to find "I know not how" that he has downed so much wine "that I was almost foxed and my head aked all night".
Alexis Soyer, who set up field kitchens in Crimea with Florence Nightingale, writes about food as a facet of war: how to cook soup for a regiment of 1,000 men (the main problem, apparently, was carrying the 30 quarts of water needed for each of the 20 saucepans). The essayist Charles Lamb (1775-1834) recognises that eating, and the rules we devise about it, are facets of morality. He is best known for his "Dissertation upon Roast Pig", included here (summary: man discovered cooking when a house containing some pigs accidentally burned down and for the first time in human history someone tasted "crackling!"). The humorist Calvin Trillin ponders the relationship between food and culture – the arbitrariness by which Thanksgiving is celebrated by eating turkey instead of spaghetti carbonara, Trillin's preferred dish – and how foods swim in and out of fashion: "What happened to brie and Chablis?"
Not every volume gains from being cut down to size. If you don't already own the complete Mrs Beeton, Eliza Acton or Hannah Glasse, you might enjoy these reduced versions, but they feel diminished. Similarly, it seems a shame to experience Alexandre Dumas's Grand Dictionnaire de Cuisine, one of the wittiest reference works of all time, in such a truncated form. And The Alice B Toklas Cookbook is a masterpiece, whose meandering rhythms should not be messed with (though I must admit that Murder in the Kitchen is a great title).
The real surprise, however, is that most of the series works so well. In the best ones, we feel we are getting down to the core of the writer, their essential voice. The Elizabeth David volume is a revelation. I own all her books and thought this might feel like a tired rehash. Yet by cleverly weaving together writings from no fewer than seven books, the editor makes her speak to us fresh (a similar trick has been performed with MFK Fisher). We get a strong impression of David's scariness: "Let it be understood by all members of your household that there will be serious trouble if your knives are borrowed for screwdriving, prising open packing cases, cutting fuse wire or any other purpose for which they were not intended." The condensed David is frequently in a bad mood: about electric toasters; the word "starter"; and those ignorant cooks who use stock cubes when they should use wine. And then a sentence comes along reminding us that she can still summon the pleasures of the table better than anyone: "Soft, pale, creamy, untroubled, the English fruit fool is the most frail and insubstantial of English summer dishes."
Another famous writer who seems absolutely new and bright in this format is Claudia Roden. Reading A Middle Eastern Feast (the shortened version of her Book of Middle Eastern Food, first published in 1968) is to be reminded of what Roden does so well. Her recipes – whether for chicken with olives, spiced rice with pine nuts or Moroccan mint tea – are both meticulous and sublime. But what stays with you is the yearning for the tastes and textures of the Cairo she has left behind: "No one who has ever walked through a Middle Eastern spice street can ever forget the intoxicating effect of mingled scents nor the extraordinary displays of knotted roots, bits of bark and wood, shrivelled pods, seeds, berries, translucent resins, curious-looking plants, bulbs, buds, petals, stigmas, even beetles."
Some of these books are a welcome chance to discover much more obscure writers, such as the mysterious Gervase Markham from 1615. Through him we enter an alien world of haslets (giblets), malkins (rags used to clean the oven), and pottles (a measure). When Markham wants to say that something is insipid or tasteless, he describes it as wallowish, which is wonderfully expressive. "How to help bastard being eager" is one of his recipes, which translates as "how to stop sweet wine going sour". But my favourite of the entire series is Artusi, a legend in Italy who is hardly known here. He addresses us with such endearing wit and exaggeration that it is impossible not to feel a lifting of the spirits. "Cheer up, for if you eat these cookies you will never die." Or: "Cooking is a troublesome sprite. Often it may drive you to despair. Yet it is also very rewarding, for when you do succeed, or overcome a difficulty in doing so, you feel the satisfaction of a great triumph."
What are these writers really writing about when they write about food? The answer is anything and everything. Fisher's peerless essay on being the only customer in a French restaurant staffed by a single fanatical waitress is not really a great example of food writing – it is just great writing. She might just as well be talking about love or travel or family. As Fisher herself puts it: "Anything can be a lodestar in a person's life, I suppose, and for some fortunates like me, the kitchen serves well."
The books in the Great Food series are published by Penguin at £6.99 each. To order copies for £5.59 each with free UK p&p call Guardian book service on 0330 333 6846 or go to theguardian.com/bookshop
