I just learned that John Thorne died last week. I hadn’t thought of him and his wife Matt Lewis Thorne in ages, but I love their food writing. They rank right up there with M.F.K. Fisher for writing about food and eating. One of the things I value about their books (and I used to have a bunch of their newsletters as well) is that while they do have some recipes, they more often have what I would call patterns for a dish, narratives of a variety of approaches to some main ingredient or technique.