According to Spang, the forgotten inventor was Mathurin Roze de Chantoiseau, a figure so perfectly emblematic of his time that he almost seems like an invention himself. The son of a landowner and merchant, Roze moved to Paris in the early 1760s and began floating a variety of schemes he believed would enrich him and his country at the same time. He published a kind of early Yellow Pages, advocated a bizarre currency that would decrease in value each time it changed hands and, in 1766, opened an establishment in Paris that claimed to serve “only those foods that either maintain or re-establish health.”

What Roze’s projects had in common was a desire to improve circulation, whether the thing circulating was banknotes or bodily fluids. “The invention of the restaurant,” Spang writes, “was but one component in Roze’s plan to fix the economy, repair commerce, and restore health to the body politic.” The earliest restaurants specialized in cuisine that seemed very progressive at the time: strong broths that, by extracting all the nutritive virtues of various meats and vegetables, offered nourishment without any of the hazards of solid food. There was no fiber to chew, no fat to digest.

By finding a scientific basis to the food they served, restaurants did their part in the Enlightenment’s grand project of improving life through the careful application of reason. They also claimed to minister to those who suffered from “weakness of chest” — a mysterious ailment afflicting people who boasted of refined artistic and intellectual sensibilities, for whom the sipping of delicate broths “served as a social marker, as a way to differentiate the sophisticated urbanite from the coarse worker capable of digesting whatever was placed before him.”

Much of this information is ignored in the standard food histories, and Spang’s excavation of it makes for interesting reading, particularly because the French Revolution and its aftermath would change restaurants almost beyond recognition, into something very like the places where we go out to eat today. By the early 19th century, bouillon sipping was falling out of fashion; in its place, restaurants offered just the kind of rich, decadent foods that would have sent the “weak of chest” into fits of asthma.

As the restaurants’ broths ceased to be their primary attraction, they came to be distinguished from inns by their secondary characteristics. One ordered at will from a menu instead of taking what the innkeeper was serving. One was charged only for what one ate rather than a flat fee. One sat at a small table, alone or with acquaintances — not with strangers at a large, boisterous table d’hote. This last innovation was perhaps the most significant: Setting restaurant customers off from one another at a little distance made it possible to watch and be watched, to eat in private and in public simultaneously. In a literal sense, it marked the birth of conspicuous consumption.

According to Spang, after the revolution the French launched on an eating binge so excessive that they felt compelled to justify their hedonism by turning food into a field for specialists. The creation of “gastronomy” transformed the restaurant from a social phenomenon into an object of aesthetic analysis — into art as distinct from life. This development led, Spang argues, to the perception of the restaurant as an intimidating temple that could be appreciated only by a priestly caste of illuminati. Spang’s ambitious goal is to reclaim restaurants from the clutches of gastronomy.

One of the many virtues of “The Invention of the Restaurant” is that it takes as its unlikely hero Roze de Chantoiseau rather than any of his more famous successors whose establishments may have offered better eating. Because restaurants were just one of Roze’s many ventures, Spang sees him as a prelapsarian figure whose very lack of expertise makes him preferable to the specialists who would later control the restaurant world. Spang might have noted, however, that restaurants have climbed down from their pedestals in the past few years, and now walk among the people. The modern American restaurant seduces its audience with movie-set design, stage lighting, celebrity chefs and themed menus. Like many other things in this country, restaurants are a branch of the entertainment industry. It’s a transformation that the entrepreneurial Roze would have appreciated.

I also had a vague notion that roaches carry disease. I am now quite clear on that account. Roaches have been found to carry polio, hepatitis, salmonella, streptococcus, shigella, hookworms, tapeworms, dysentery-causing amoebi, leprosy and bubonic plague. Even a squeaky-clean cockroach can make you sick (or kill you) if you happen to be allergic: Roaches are the prime culprits in the inner-city asthma epidemic that takes the lives of hundreds of children each year.

As an avatar of urban dread, the only rival to the cockroach is the Norwegian rat, and polls show that more people fear roaches. I do, too, even though I’ve faced both rats and roaches in my kitchen and a rat is by far the more formidable enemy. But rats generally travel alone. Roaches come in swarms. Killing the roach you see on the countertop does nothing to the legions of others who are hiding in the cabinets or streaming in from under the sink or waiting behind the walls. Rats are brilliant strategists, but roaches are an invisible army, and what you can’t see is always more terrifying that what you can.

Schweid explores both the reasonable and the unreasonable fears that roaches inspire. He seems to have met every scientist who studies the order Blattaria, which takes in the 10,000 or so known species of cockroach. At Vanderbilt University, he meets a researcher named Terry Page, who is trying to locate the insect’s biological clock, the part of its body that controls circadian rhythms. Looking at a roach under a microscope, Page remarks, “After you’ve done this as many times as I have you realize that each cockroach has its own individual face. Each one is slightly different.”

“So saying,” Schweid writes, “he used a single-edge razor blade and tweezers to make a slice down the middle of the roach’s forehead and peel the flaps of skin back from it,” exposing “a pearl-gray blob of brain.”

Scientists who make a living doing this sort of thing are invariably filled with respect for how cleverly cockroaches are engineered. The common domestic roach, for example, can survive without water for two weeks. It doesn’t waste a drop. “Rectal pads, located almost at the end of the animal’s excretory system, squeeze water from the mass to be excreted just before elimination,” Schweid writes. “This liquid gets recycled to places like the fat body, and the insect’s only excretion will consist of dry solids.” Whether you like “The Cockroach Papers” will depend a great deal on your tolerance for reading about things like fat bodies and rectal pads. I couldn’t put it down myself.

Not that Schweid hasn’t made some peculiar choices. He quotes extensively from works of fiction in which roaches are mentioned but doesn’t always get around to weaving them into his narrative. Even more incongruous are his long first-person accounts of his travels in the third world. He spends six pages on glue-sniffing kids who prowl the streets of Managua; there’s not a roach in sight until the last sentence, when the kids’ leader confesses that he once accidentally bit into a roach that had crawled into something he was eating.

I never thought I’d complain that a book contained material that didn’t have anything to do with cockroaches, but Schweid writes about these insects so respectfully that his digressions are surprisingly unwelcome. Fortunately, there aren’t many of them. Most of the time he gives the cockroach a long cold look and keeps looking when most of us would turn away, until a subject that seemed disgusting becomes fascinating. Now I have nothing but admiration for cockroaches. Which is why I’ve taken to sleeping in gloves and boots.

Of course, making Fisher’s tangerine sections requires an old-fashioned steam radiator. But there are other components, just as essential: the soldiers, the Rhine, the snow on the windowsill and, most of all, Al. Without Al, the recipe will fail like a cake without eggs. The point is that a recipe broken down into a neat series of ingredients and procedures can never capture the thing that makes food memorable. Fisher, in her sly, elliptical way, is telling us: You had to be there. Our meals are always tied up with the rooms where we eat them, the people we share them with.

In her new memoir, “My Kitchen Wars,” Betty Fussell, the cookbook author and food historian, recounts a lifetime’s worth of eating and cooking, showing how closely her meals were bound with her life until the meals add up to an autobiography. There is a bleak, frontier-style upbringing in the orange groves of Southern California where, as a young toddler, she breaks into the icebox and eats an entire pound of butter before she is discovered. After her mother kills herself by dipping into an open tin of rat poison, Betty falls into the hands of a dreadful stepmother whose relationship with food is best described as adversarial: She steams all meals into submission with a pressure cooker and teaches young Betty to chew a full 50 times before swallowing.

At Pomona College, Betty discovers french fries and Coke. She also meets an aspiring writer, Paul Fussell, and when they marry she finds herself with a kitchen full of wedding presents. In learning to use those toasters and percolators and blenders, she becomes a new person: the ’50s housewife.

Fussell wants to perform in the kitchen, but she is stuck with an unappreciative audience. One night she gets creative and throws some peanuts into the blender with her salad dressing. It would be years before Thai restaurants turned up across America, and Paul is not interested in being ahead of his time. “Salad dressing is one thing, peanuts are another,” he tells her.

So she saves her inventions for dinner parties, which become ever more ambitious as the clam dip and Ritz crackers of the Betty Crocker years give way to the blanquette de veau and riz ` l’Impiratrice of the Julia Child era. Fussell’s sardonic accounts of the changing fashions in the suburban dinner party are delightful bits of social history. As she and her friends fret over their ovens while their soufflis rise, or don’t, a nation outgrows its provincialism. It was a watershed moment in the way Americans thought of themselves, and Fussell gets the significance, and the silliness, just right.

What she doesn’t manage to convey is any real sense that food can bring pleasure. In her first chapter, she explains that she sees cooking and eating as brutal acts. “Hunger, like lust in action, is savage, extreme, rude, cruel.” She chases her food-as-battleground conceit through the entire book — even the chapters are given militaristic titles, like “Attack by Whisk and Cuisinart.” (Like a rodeo cowboy with more balls than brains, Fussell has a dangerous habit of getting in the saddle of a wild metaphor and holding on when she should jump to safety. Of her feverish adulterous encounters with a friend of her husband’s, she writes, “Now my body felt like one of my meals, the interstices of ears like snails, the hollow of armpits like the hollow of a pitted avocado, the smooth valleys between thigh and groin like a sauce parisienne.”)

For someone who has devoted her life to food, Fussell’s insistence on seeing it as something negative and aggressive is strange, to say the least. The war trope leads her to some unusual insights, but it also keeps her from depicting any scenes of peace. After a while you start to wonder: Why did these people keep throwing parties and going out to dinner if they weren’t enjoying it? The answer, you start to suspect, is that they did enjoy it, at least once in a while. Fussell just won’t allow herself to say so. After all, war is hell.

War, though, does seem an apt word for life with Paul Fussell. An aesthete, an Anglophile (“like some nationalist transsexual, he felt he’d been born an Englishman in an American’s body”) and an ambitious academic, Paul made verbal jabs at his wife that didn’t stop with her salad dressing. Even after he had won fame for such books as “The Great War and Modern Memory,” he seemed to resent Betty’s writing. When she lands her first book contract, he opens a bottle of champagne but then stops short. “My God,” he says, “I’d better get upstairs and get cracking.”

Writing about her marriage, Fussell never finds the tone of bemused detachment that lets her laugh at her attempts to stage eight-course dinners that would have capsized a professional kitchen. Her anger is still fresh two decades later as she exhumes private moments and thrusts them into the light. Her readers hear about the time she caught Paul naked in the library with a young man he was teaching at Princeton. We learn that her sessions with her lover usually took place outdoors and that one afternoon in Italy the two of them got up and discovered that they had been rolling in a pile of goat shit.

Opening her photo album to the page where she keeps these special Kodak moments, Fussell might say, is simple honesty. But there is honesty and there is truthfulness. A truthful account of most 30-year marriages would include ugly, degrading moments, but it would also reflect some that weren’t so bad. You know you’re finally over a lousy relationship when you can admit that once in a while you and the creep had some fun. Betty Fussell remembers her creep as someone who was creepy all the time.

Who would want to write a memoir of a lifetime of ruined meals? More to the point, who would want to read it? Fussell has tried to serve up something fresh and original, but her appetite for revenge poisons the effort. It seeps all through this memoir, leaving a taint of bitterness that won’t go away.