Food writer Corby Kummer took Boston Public Radio behind the scenes of his end-of-year list of the best cookbooks on Tuesday. The list appears in The Atlantic and is a diverse collection of food literature.

"I tried for cultural variety, I tried for something that's educational, and I tried for something we don't know, I don't know, in addition to the cook book literature," he said. "The ones I picked were stuff I didn't know about, and was so excited to learn."

Kummer described one of his selections, "Jubilee: Recipes From Two Centuries of African American Cooking" by Toni Tipton-Martin, as more than a cookbook, but a piece of "deep scholarship."

"She decided to do a beautiful out and out picture book," he said. "The whole book was delayed two years because of her insistence that the food stylists and photographers be African American. It's been so hard for them to break into the publishing biz and food styling biz. It took a long time, the publisher was willing to wait, they did it, and it's a gorgeous book."

Corby Kummer is executive director of the Food and Society policy program at the Aspen Institute, a senior editor at The Atlantic and a senior lecturer at the Tufts Friedman School of Nutrition Science and Policy

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