Food as history

I read Anthony Bourdain's Kitchen Confidential and enjoyed it (although his defensive machoism (drugs, sex, endurance cooking) does get a mite irritating at times), and I'm enjoying Poppy Z Brite's New Orleans chef/restaurant series (Liquor and The Value of X, so far; I'm behind). This book, however, starts off like these ones - the grinding and unattainable perfection of restaurant cooking, the repetition, the training, and the slow process of getting it, interspersed with tidbits of history or technique - but ended up somewhere else; one of those books which gives you something you needed, but hadn't expected or even necessarily conceived of, beforehand.

( Heat, by Bill Buford )