There's a glorious randomness about Mina Holland's world tour of 39 cuisines. Why not 38 or 40? Why three in Africa and five in Italy? Not that it matters. Reading The Edible Atlas is like being on a long car journey with someone who never stops talking, and constantly strays off the point, yet who entrances you with their insight and experience. In the least didactic way possible, The Edible Atlas is educational. It meanders down well-trodden highways and byways of gastronomic and cultural knowledge, celebrating diverse cooking traditions in a wholehearted way, but then homes in with precision on their essential elements. The paired-down larder list Holland gives for each culinary region helps nail it.
Her writing is pleasurably evocative. Istanbul, for instance, "is a wonderful racket of visual splendour". But her observations are refreshingly free from the cliched linguistic incontinence that often attaches to this genre. She can be funny too: the Rhône-Alpes she describes as "a great place to be piggy, but perhaps not to be a pig". There are recipes, too, but the rest of the text is so engaging, it would have stood alone without them.