Any survey of great American food writers must include the work of Laurie Colwin, an astute observer of human behavior who is often compared to Jane Austen. Those of us who read and think about Colwin cannot help but lament her sudden death in 1992 from heart failure when she was just 48 --  and will always wonder what more she might have produced. But we are grateful for what she did leave behind: five novels, three books of short stories, and two collections of food writings.

"Home Cooking" and "More Home Cooking," are exemplary collections of essays that demonstrate the value and significance of writing about food when a gifted writer takes it on. Many writers are perceptive and witty and may even write with grace. Colwin's work has all of those qualities and more -- what I can only describe as heart, the ability to see the world from the point of view of others and to respond to them with warmth and understanding.

Colwin was keenly interested in the domestic lives of people because she believed that everyday life disclosed the most important truths about them, and that what they cooked and ate was especially revealing. This is true of her novels as well as her food essays, many of them first published in Gourmet magazine. In one of her novels, for instance, a character, the wife of a well-heeled, New York lawyer, has a mandatory brunch for her family on Sundays and always serves the exact same food, beginning with expensive Nova salmon. She disapproves of supermarkets and buys food exclusively from expensive shops that deliver. So, already we know this is a privileged person who tries to maintain some control over her adult children by creating immutable standards, tendencies guaranteed to cause tension with her daughter, the main character in the novel. Such details as these have led to comparisons with Jane Austen, the ultimate novelist of manners who examined domestic behavior.

Taking on food processors, microwaves and vegetarians

Most striking about Colwin's food writing is the intimacy she creates by giving her readers the feeling that we are with her in her kitchen drinking tea, nibbling on gingerbread, and chatting about our kids and what we plan to cook for dinner. She loved English teas especially, admitting this preference relates to having read English children's books as a youngster. Her pleasure in cooking comes through in her essay, "The Low Tech Person's Batterie de Cuisine" where she tells us that although she understands the wonders of the food processor, she nevertheless carried on with a blender, a strainer, a food mill and a box grater next to which she always kept a package of Band-Aids. She felt she already owned all the tools she needed, and I suspect she enjoyed taking the extra steps in cooking that food processors rendered obsolete. As for a microwave, she thinks they are unnecessary, dangerous, and to be avoided "unless you are running a fast-food operation or, like one of my cousins, you are amused by watching eggs explode".

Fundamental to great food writing is expressing lots of opinions. Heaven knows, M.F.K. Fisher had a lot of those, and Colwin does as well. She sounds off humorously about the varieties of vegetarians she runs across, saying, "Like Protestants, they come in a number of denominations. Lactovegetarians will eat dairy, eggs and usually fish, but some lactovegarians will not eat fish. Vegans will not eat dairy products or eggs or fish. And some people say they are vegetarians when they mean they do not eat red meat, leading you to realize that for some people chicken is a vegetable." She also pokes fun at people who will readily eat an entire strawberry shortcake but will recoil at the thought of ingesting red meat. She writes brilliantly about disastrous meals that "linger in the memory with a lurid glow, just as something exalted is remembered with a kind of mellow brilliance." She goes on to describe spectacularly awful meals including one that featured a medieval fish pie full of squid, flounder, apples, onions, lots of cinnamon and something called galingale, a kind of frankincense.

Lying awake with thoughts of food

And Colwin is not averse to being a little critical of herself, telling us, for instance, that her closest friends are sick and tired of eating the baked chicken she is always feeding people. She has no ego about her cooking -- just honesty and wit.

She also is disarming. I felt a bit letdown when reading her rave about a restaurant dish she loved: boiled beef enrobed in amber aspic, a texture I hate. But then she goes on to say she never tried to make it, and admits that even if she did she probably could not get anyone to eat it, for "The world, as we know, divides unequally between those who love aspic (not too many) and those who loathe and fear it (most)."

Instead of counting sheep or reading mysteries on sleepless nights, Colwin would lie in bed thinking about food -- about menus, about new dishes she planned to try or figuring out what new ingredients to add to the Thanksgiving stuffing. And her insights about Thanksgiving clear up a longstanding mystery for me as to why I am reluctant to cook a turkey any other time of year. She feels the same way and explains that "Although turkey is delicious in itself, it is burdened with context as they say in the literary criticism racket. A turkey without seasonal angst … is like a baseball game without the national anthem … the complications [of the event] are a kind of emotional condiment, the secret element that gives turkey its essential spirit."

Such insights give Colwin the stature of a great food writer. Unlike other writers who write personally about food, she is never moralistic or intent on taking us on long journeys in search of some transformative experience meant to change our lives. She was already satisfied with the way her life was going and for her, self-improvement meant the discovery of a wonderful new dish she could make at home for people she loved.

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