The pleasures of eating and drinking and traveling well make for good reading during the summer, not least at the beach when you can pick out a few recipes, then go shopping and cook them up that evening. Here are books that seem particularly valuable this season.

Native Wine Grapes of Italy by Ian D’Agata (University of California Press)–No one knows more about Italian wine that Ian D’Agata, whose training as a physician has caused him to turn a prognostic eye on the vast number of wine grapes found from Alto-Adige to Sicily. It is easily the most comprehensive volume on the subject–ever–and promises to be so for years to come. In the case of each varietal, based both on ampellograpy and tastings, D’Agata gives a complete description and history coupled with “Which Wines to Try and Why.” And he skimps on nothing: a relatively unknown grape like Bombino or Nascetta gets as thorough an entry as one on Primitivo or Canaiolo Nero. You also get to meet the people from small estates who make the best of the varietals. At 620 pages, there’s little anyone could possibly want to find out about Italian viticulture and viniculture that isn’t here. It is a magnum opus of daunting authority.

The Old-Fashioned by Robert Simonson (Ten Speed Press)–Usually I’m not much impressed by 168-page single subject books, but Robert Simonson is such an engaging author that he makes this the perfect book to accompany an easy chair and a well-made Old-Fashioned cocktail. Fully 65 pages of the book are meant for that–an incisive, impeccably researched story of this too often forgotten classic cocktail, resulting in some good rollicking stories that American history is rich in. He takes you back to the 19th century, to Chicago during Prohibition, and the drink’s “Postwar Heyday,” when the New Yorker Magazine declare the drink “a national institution.” Following are dozens of recipes and variations, all of it well packaged in a small size with fine illustrations.

The Food Lover’s Guide to Paris: The Best Restaurants, Bistros, Cafés, Markets, Bakeries, and More by Patricia Wells (Workman Publishing Company)–Way back in 1984 Patricia Wells published the first edition of this requisite guide to Parisian gastronomy, not just to the Michelin-style restaurants and famous bistros but to her personal favorites among bakeries, chocolate shops, cheese stores and boulangeries. Now, 30 years later, she has completely revised her classic, and this new book shows just how much the Paris food scene has and has not changed in all that time. “Many chefs have come and gone,” she writes. “Others have matured into excellence. And, most exciting, I have had the pleasure of covering the new group of energetic young cooks who are expanding the culinary `musts’ into up-and-coming Paris neighborhoods.” You’ll still find some old favorites, like Le Duc and Au Trou Gascon, updated along with new listings for new places like L’Atélier de L’Éclair and Albion, and Wells shows just how international Paris has become with good Italian, Thai, Chinese and other ethnic restaurants and eateries.

Marc Forgione: Recipes and Stories from the Acclaimed Chef and Restaurant by Marc Forgione (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt)–No chef has ever been prouder of his pedigree than Marc Forgione, whose father Lawrence, was a pioneer of what was called the New American Cuisine of the 1980s. That Marc has distinguished himself by building on his legacy is evident on every page of this splendid new book, three years in the making. He has some good stories along the path to opening his restaurant–including the time he unknowingly threw out a reporter from the NY Times– then proceeds with a great deal of technique lessons in order to get the beginner to attempt dishes like his cuttlefish with papas bravas, chorizo and spicy mayonnaise and suckling pig face with mustard and pickles. There’s a good section on cheeses and cocktails, too.

In The Charcuterie: The Fatted Calf’s Guide to Making Sausage, Salumi, Pâtés, Roasts, Confits, and Other Meaty Goods by Taylor Boetticher (Ten Speed Press)–There have been several charcuterie books that have come out in the past few years, but this is easily the most authoritative and clear in its approach to a kind of food many people are fearful of trying at home. For a dish like the duck and lemongrass sausage patties alone, this book would be worthwhile, as for the pork bollito misto and the rabbit porchetta, which expand the usual repertoire of charcuterie. Some dishes are relatively simple, others take some doing and long prep, but everyone of them is packed with enormous flavor, and the instruction have been carefully edited for maximum ease.

The New Cast Iron Skillet Cookbook: 150 Fresh Ideas for America’s Favorite Pan by Ellen Brown (Sterling Epicure)–There have also been a few cast iron skillet books out recently, so that it has almost become a genre of its own. The superiority and versatility of cooking on well-used, well-seasoned cast iron, which is very much in the American, not European, tradition should be unquestioned after paging through a volume that makes perfect sense out of using the utensil for everything from basic steaks and burgers to Rhode Island clam cakes, Vietnamese spring rolls, Cajun halibut, an a marvelous array of upside-down cakes. I doubt many cooks anywhere have the depth and breadth of Ellen Brown, who in her career has written books on everything from wraps to gluten-free breads. I’d trust her to cook a shoe for Charlie Chaplin and have him gobble it up with pleasure.

Hungry for France by Alexander Lobrano (Rizzoli)–I’ve long believed Alexander Lobrano, who’s lived in Paris for 30 years, is the finest chronicler of all that goes on in French cuisine today. His enthusiasm alone makes reading him pure joy, and here he covers the different regions of France and its sprawling diversity of styles, from an Alsatian tarte flambé to from a Provençal ratatouille gratin. Lobrano starts each section telling you about the region’s best cooks and restaurants, largely favoring bistros with delightful names like Youpla, Au Chapeau Rouge, Les Glazicks, and Ttotta, accompanied by a fine series of evocative photos by Steven Rothfield. It’s good to have a dining partner like Lobrano who writes, “To be sure, some people have been kicking France’s ankles in a double-decade take-down of Gallic gastronomic superiority. But the wonderful news is that they’re all more wrong than right. I defy you to find another country anywhere in the world where you can so reliably find a spectacular meal–at all levels of the food chain–in it most remote and forgotten villages.

We would have made a timelapse of this three hour video, but we didn’t want to ruin the surprise. You’re welcome.

And thank you, Clickhole, for doing what the rest of us were afraid to do.

Beef. It’s collectively what’s for dinner. And with chicken and pork and every other kind of meat, it’s increasingly what’s for breakfast and lunch. Worldwide meat consumption has doubled over the past 20 years, and is expected to double again by 2050….

Goodies’ 1952 vintage van slinging frozen custard and other old-fashioned treats now has a brick-and-mortar counterpart in National Harbor. Founder Brandon Byrd opened his new frozen custard and soda bar over the weekend, just in time for the first day of summer. The menu is an expanded version of what the Goodies truck serves, with an array sundaes, […]

When restaurateur Paul Ruppert opens a new spot, the space and people come before he ever decides on a concept. So it wasn’t until the co-owner of The Passenger, Room 11, and Petworth Citizen found chef Makoto Hamamura that he decided his next venture, Crane & Turtle, would be a French-Japanese restaurant. After all, Hamamura […]

Growing up I spent a lot of time on my grandparents small farm in the Ozarks. We baled hay, fed and milked cows, helped in the garden, and collected eggs. And I pretty much hated all of it. Years later, after my grandparents were gone, I started loving and respecting what I’d gained from knowing my simple, happy, kind, hardworking and loving grandma and grandpa. Before I started Askinosie Chocolate, I knew I wanted to honor the cocoa farmers we work with in as many ways possible. It was and is personal for me. From day one we have worked directly with farmers: first in Ecuador; then the Philippines; then Honduras; and Tanzania. We travel to each country every year, meet with farmers, stay in their homes, and get involved in their communities, in many cases. We also pay very high prices for their cocoa beans — we pay directly to the farmers above world market price, which they typically receive only 70 percent of — and then when we return to buy the next crop several months later, we profit share. We translate our financials into the language needed, explain it line by line, and then disperse the profit share cash. Sounds easy? Well, it’s not. It’s the most complicated and professionally challenging thing I’ve ever done. And before I started this chocolate factory I was a criminal defense lawyer specializing in the most serious felony cases. That was challenging. This is more so.

I’d like to tell you a story about one of our origins, that is near and dear to my heart, that exemplifies these challenges. Four years ago when we sourced Tanzania cocoa beans and bought our first crop from Tenende, we found a village that had no improved water source. We found a school with no textbooks or electricity. We found students hungry, both literally and figuratively. We found farmers who had never sold their cocoa beans directly to a chocolate maker (not uncommon). So we worked to build partnerships in the community and together we achieved some successes. We had specifically sought a woman led farmer group, which we found. The Tenende cocoa farmer group was called UWATE and it was led by Mama Kyeja.

Group Travel: Since 2010 we have been bringing local high school students to this remote spot in the southwest corner of Tanzania to meet farmers, participate in a Direct Trade relationship, learn a little about cocoa beans and lot of about life. A handful of the students come from privileged families and pay for themselves and over half are full scholarship, for whom we raise money to cover all of their expenses. This August, we’ll be taking the third class of Chocolate University high school students to Tanzania.

Textbooks: We worked with the headmaster of Mwaya Secondary School (the aforementioned school with no textbooks or electricity) to identify focus subjects and purchased textbooks worth $10,000 with a grant from our local Rotary Club. They were the school’s first ever textbooks — even for the teachers.

Water: Askinosie Chocolate, along with students from Chocolate University, raised $15,000 to drill a deep water well in Tenende to provide potable water to its 2,000 citizens. Residents told us last year that because of the well, they suffered much less from waterborne diseases, cholera and typhoid, than the neighboring villages during the rainy season.

Technology: On our second Chocolate University trip we worked with the students to set up five projectors and five laptops, loaded with more than 3,000 educational Khan Academy videos, which have given teachers and students at Mwaya a new way to learn in their resource-strapped environment. There are now students with computer skills in a place where it was unimaginable just a few years ago. This was made possible by a gift from our friends at Brewer Science.

Empowered Girls Club: Our Chocolate University program, along with Convoy of Hope, funded a club for girls to learn about self-esteem, pregnancy and STDs including HIV/AIDS, goal-setting and life skills.

Lunch: Most students in Tenende came to school on an empty stomach. Their only meal was at night. So, we started an innovative school lunch program called A Product of Change™ — we buy gourmet rice from local farmers who are also Mwaya School PTA members, we ship the rice to our factory on our container of beans, sell it at a premium, and return all of the profits to the PTA to source local rice and beans to provide lunches for each student, each school day. Now, the attendance rate has improved as well as test scores and graduation rates; the benefits are plentiful.

Now for the disheartening part of the story: We purchased beans from UWATE farmer group in Tenende in 2010, 2011 and 2012. We helped them open a bank account in Tanzania so they could be paid directly. Our profit-sharing model helped our cocoa farming partner, UWATE, to diversify their business. In 2013 they decided to convert their cocoa bean warehouse into the Tenende village’s Coca-Cola depot. That’s right, Coke. They would not have the cocoa beans for us. We were devastated.

As UWATE reduced its reliance on their cocoa business, we saw benefits in working with another group of nearby farmers who are solely focused on growing cocoa — we were fortunate to find the Mababu farmer group and its leader, Mama Rahabu, in a village about 10 miles down the road from Tenende.

I actually met the Mababu farmers on my first trip to the area in 2010. The village of Mababu is not far from Tenende and UWATE farmers told us that they would be calling upon their neighbors to help supply our cocoa bean order. We buy approximately 8 to 10 metric tons of dried beans which means that 30 to 40 metric tons of wet beans are needed by farmers to meet our order. For loosely organized farmers in deep poverty who are just beginning to learn about the importance of post-harvest, calling upon neighbors makes good sense. It also builds community and cooperation.

So what does that mean for our programs in Tenende? It means a renewed focus on sustainability. During our visit there last September, we met with parents, teachers, students and government leaders to talk about how the programs can operate without outside help within five years. And we discussed the different roles that parents, teachers, students, and government will have in making this innovative, profit-based model for feeding a school to be something imitated by other schools. We are bringing our third group of Chocolate University students to Tanzania this August and while we’ll be in Mababu, we’ll also be working at Mwaya, as always. We have doubled down in our commitment to the school regardless of its distance to our new cocoa bean village. This is personal. It’s not just about business. Only one girl passed the Form 4 exam in 2013 from the entire school. We’re starting a new Saturday tutoring program aimed at 130 girls at Mwaya to prepare them for the test.

The details of the transition from Tenende to Mababu has more twists and turns than room here to describe. It was not a breakdown of communication. It was cultural and tribal with super complex layers. The first resulting emotion for me was one of sadness and disappointment. What about “kujengana — Swahili for “build each other up?” How could this be after, well, after all of the connection and partnership on important issues?

Direct Trade is messy. Community development is messy enough in my own neighborhood, but it’s exponentially messy in the developing world. It’s a good reminder for me because I know that we must change our parameters of what success means, and success here was them selling Coke, us finding this new outstanding farmer group whose beans are superb and who we’re thrilled to develop a long relationship with and that is also led by a woman.

I visited Mababu in September and representatives from my company have been there multiple times since then. The village and its farmers have proven more than capable of practicing Direct Trade with us and together we are “building each other up.” Kujengana continues.