Too many food books these days are conceived as either Page Six-style tell-alls or as blatant boosters for brand-name chefs. Like the best novels, the best of this genre, whether memoirs, references, or cooking manuals, tend to be obsessive, sometimes unexpected in their intensity, and even uplifting. They remind us that food is more than fuel. These five books are my personal favorites of 2007.

The Tenth Muse by Judith Jones (Knopf, 288 pages, $24.95)

As a young and penurious assistant to a Doubleday editor in Paris in 1954, Judith Jones refused to type a rejection letter for English-language rights to a manuscript that had been submitted: She thought the book was that compelling. Bowing to her enthusiasm, the house did indeed publish “Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl.” That was a signal that Ms. Jones had a special eye for books that would be both important and highly profitable. As a junior editor at Knopf in New York in 1959, Ms. Jones again pushed hard to publish an enormous cookbook manuscript that had arrived unbidden. Despite the temper of an era that dictated that modern cooking was all about convenience and speed, Knopf published Julia Child, Louisette Bertholle, and Simone Beck’s “Mastering the Art of French Cooking” in 1961, calling both sexes to the kitchen for long hours in a spirit of pleasure rather than drudgery.

In this modest yet sharply observed memoir of the publishing life, Ms. Jones seems to either edit — or at least befriend — just about every key player on the American cooking scene, not least including James Beard, M.F.K. Fisher, Marcella Hazan, and Claudia Roden. Unsurprisingly, though, it’s the gigantic personality of Child that dominates. The author’s description of Child’s method of yanking the tough tendons from the legs of a Christmas goose is memorable. But no less so than Ms. Jones’s own recounting of baking the tail of a too-pesky beaver captured from the pond of her Vermont summer home.

The Oxford Companion to Italian Food by Gillian Riley (Oxford, 576 pages, $35)

By turns learned and carnal, this is a not a text meant to lure you into the kitchen. It’s food for the brain. Even an entry on a topic as seemingly simple-minded as the broad bean is rife with arcana: how the broad bean has been associated with the dead (favei dei morti); ways of dealing with the “windiness” it begets; notes on springtime banquets that included young broad beans, and even how a frothy foam for the bath can be made from bean flour. The entry for pig, running to four pages, seems beyond comprehensive. But it is followed by complementary entries on pig’s blood, pig’s extremities, pig’s fat, and pig’s offal. If all that leaves you a trifle queasy, go directly to the entry on vegetarianism, which ends with a recipe by the early cooking writer Corrado, calling for “dried beans cooked in water with bay leaves served with a sauce made from ripe sorb apples, bottarga, anchovies, chilis, garlic, oregano, and basil pounded together and diluted with olive oil, lemon juice, vinegar, and fish stock.”

Cooking, by James Peterson (Ten Speed Press, 624 pages, $40)

In the foreword to this encompassing work, the author writes about his boyhood experiments with acids so strong that they dissolved glass, requiring him to buy a gas mask. Luckily for all concerned, in young adulthood Peterson switched over from chemistry to the analytics of cooking. He gained classic kitchen skills in French restaurants and at Le Petit Robert, his own place in Greenwich Village. Mr. Peterson means “Cooking” to be a one-stop manual, and he succeeds. His first chapter explains 20 basic cooking methods, beginning with roasting, and you’ll immediately learn why basting a bird in the oven is useless, why roasting racks are worse than useless, and how convection oven temperatures differ from those of conventional ovens. The text is sprinkled with correctives to common misconceptions: why a New England “boiled dinner” is actually poached, and why a macaroon is not a macaron. Mr. Peterson, obviously a control freak, has done his own highly useful photography, as when he zooms in on a pair of lobster bottoms to show sex differences. The book’s 120-page section on baking could stand as a volume on its own. In all, a masterwork.

Veganomicon, by Isa Chandra Moskowitz & Terry Hope Romero (Marlowe & Co., 336 pages, $27.50)

Even those of us not wishing to become vegetarians, much less vegans, may wonder if such regimens could offer pleasures as lip-smacking as foie gras on toast or a grilled lamb chop flecked with rosemary. The authors make their vegan-ist case by being sassy rather than preachy (“this is the book that was the proverbial flax-egg before the unchicken,” the authors write). They vividly convey the savor of such dishes as Vietnamese seitan baguette with savory broth dip and tea-poached pears in chocolate sauce. Like everything else in these pages, weights and measures can be quirky, as in the suggestion to keep around a bag of unbleached flour “the size of a small child.” The authors don’t over-promise, admitting that vegans, like meat-eaters, may struggle with their weight. Swearing off cheeseburgers while still in grade school, my daughter announced that she’d no longer “eat anything that had a face.” Vegans go the extra step by refusing products that come from anything that had a face. A grim choice for the rest of us, but you’d never know it from “Veganomicon’s” positive energies.

Aromas of Aleppo, by Poopa Dweck (Ecco, 256 pages, $50)

Food books this large and beautiful usually have the emotional content of cotton candy. But “Aromas of Aleppo” is tinged with the bittersweet memories of a community that lovingly upholds table traditions of the city that evicted all its members (ending a Jewish presence over millennia, as the last Aleppine Jew left in 1997). Like most of the still close-knit community, the author lives in Brooklyn and summers in Deal, N.J. She evokes Aleppo as if it were home, describing how a colored string would be tied to a family’s pot of Sabbath food in the communal oven so that it could be identified, and how the mystics of the community would go into the fields to greet the Sabbath. Fruits find special roles in the Aleppine kitchen, as in the recipes for “tangy tamarind bulgur salad” and “sweet cherry-stewed meatballs.” The recipes of Jewish Aleppo, refined but not daunting to undertake, are special. But it’s the fervent embrace of tradition by an evicted community that makes this book glow.