When Mimi Sheraton published 1,000 Foods to Eat Before You Die: A Food Lover’s Life List (Workman, $24.95) late last year, she probably had much the same experience as Tom Sawyer did when he hid in the rafters at his own funeral. Not that she didn’t deserve the praise, but she was variously lauded as the second coming of Brillat-Savarin, M.F.K. Fisher, and Julia Child, and every restaurateur to whom she ever gave a well-considered review hastened to return the favor. Mimi Sheraton earned all those accolades long before she wrote this book.
1,000 Foods really is something of a masterpiece, but we’d liken it more to Remembrance of Things Past than to any more analytical tome. It is a memoir of tastes enjoyed, repeatedly sampled, and understood. We’ve barely scratched the surface of the 900-plus pages of text, and we’re looking forward to reading through a little at a time, savoring each bite. This single book is a distillation of one very perceptive writer’s ideas about what is worth eating.
We doubt we will ever achieve Mimi Sheraton’s easy familiarity with so many world cuisines, but we know Spanish cuisine very well and can quite appreciate the way she handled it. Her coverage ranges from the rarefied (a meal at the now-shuttered elBulli) to the commonplace (eating tapas standing at the bar with friends). 
She treats both extreme delicacies such as angulas (glass eels, shown above with chef Fernando Canales at Restaurante Etxanobe in Bilbao) and more humble dishes such as sopa de ajo (garlic soup with a poached egg) with equal respect and enthusiasm. She offers a knowledgeable treatise on the pricey ingredient of saffron, and speaks lovingly and intelligently about the most famous dish to use it, Valencian paella. At right, a waiter presents a pan of paella at La Pepica in Valencia. As Sheraton notes, it is the place in Spain to eat the dish.
We can’t think of a single signature Spanish flavor that Sheraton missed, and we look forward to using the book as a guide to exploring cuisines with which we’re less familiar.