Alexandre Dumas, best known for such classic novels as The Three Musketeers, The Count of Monte Cristo and Man in the Iron Mask, wanted to be remembered for a far more esoteric book.  Food was his real passion in life and his Grand Dictionnaire de Cuisine was the one book the great novelist cared about.  Mark Hilton reads extracts from Alan and Jane Davidson's translation,  Dumas On Food.

Willie Fowler's Countryman's Cooking was written for men. He joined Bomber Command in WW2, flew Lancasters, was shot down by the Germans and ended up in Stalag Luft 3. When he returned to Cumbria after his release in 1945, he took to farming mink, then daffodils, while rediscovering the delights of hunting, shooting and fishing, not to mention cooking, eating and womanising. We have three extracts read by Rupert Baker to whet the appetite…

Screenwriter, novelist, award winner, journalist, playwright… just a few of the words that describe the literary careers of James and Kay Salter.  They are also responsible for one of the most delightful musings on food in print, Life Is Meals: A Food Lover's Day Book published by Knopf. Whether writing about Peanut Butter, The Sandwich, Samuel Johnson's appetite for good eating or The Siege Of Paris this quirky collection is unequalled in its information, erudition and utter originality. Extracts from the book are read by their son, the actor Theo Salter.

Ursula Heinzelmann is a freelance German food and wine writer, a sommelière and a gastronome. She was a good cook before she had learned to read, according to a radio interview on HR2-Kultur, and she was a practitioner before she began to write about food. She has twice been awarded the annual Sophie Coe Prize in Food History at the Oxford Symposium on Food and Cookery, most recently in 2006. In 2008 she won the Prix du Champagne Lanson for her wine journalism on Slow Food Magazine. In 2014 Reaktion Books published her well-received Beyond Bratwurst, a chronological history of food in Germany. Ursula recorded three chapters from Beyond Bratwurst for Talking of Food.

Matthew Fort, one of the judges on The Great British Menu, reads extracts from his highly acclaimed new book Summer in the Islands, published by Unbound. In it, he records his meetings with the people he encountered as he toured the islands of Italy and his thoughts about a country he has loved as his life. Unmissable.

Elizabeth Luard reads an extract from the Introduction to her first book, European Peasant Cookery. First published in 1984, it was republished in the UK in 2007 by Grub Street.

The experiences of a young trainee cattle market auctioneer from 1954 to 1960;  a unique memoir of a bygone time. John Shrive's memoir, "Done, finished, you lose it!"was written in 1980 and relates to experiences at both Kettering and Market Harborough Cattle Markets, when the Auctioneers were Messrs Berry Bros and Bagshaw and J. Toller Eady.