If you seek inspiration in your quest for foods to eat before you die, get your hands on the book "1,001 Foods to Die For."

The $39.95 tome, published this year by Andrews McMeel, is one of the most fun food books I've ever seen. (It's not to be confused with the very similar "1001 Foods You Must Taste Before You Die," edited by Frances Case and published last month by Universe, which I haven't yet seen. Universe also just published "1001 Wines You Must Taste Before You Die.")

The Andrews McMeel "1,001 Foods" weighs in at 4 1/2 pounds, and its 960 pages (Universe's $36.95 book is that big, too) are packed with not only delicious-sounding and -looking foods and recipes you'll want to try, but also keenly interesting facts about edibles of all sorts from around the globe.

Wonder what a Bakewell Tart is? The book explains that this "rich delicious tart hails from the picturesque Derbyshire village of Bakewell in England, where it was known as Bakewell pudding until the 20th century. It consists of a pastry crust spread with a layer of jam and filled with a thick egg and almond mixture" -- a method that supposedly started by a cook's accident.

As you leaf through sections from appetizers to meats to beverages, you can learn about foods you may have heard about but never tried and some you've never heard about. Balti Chicken (Pakistani finger food). Callaloo (Caribbean soup). Gougeres (French cheese puffs). Lotus Root (water lily). Snert (Dutch pea soup). Toad-in-the-Hole (sausage in Yorkshire pudding). Zwiebelkuchen (German onion tart).

There are recipes for everything from "Devils on Horseback" (prunes wrapped in bacon and broiled that I included in a prunes story earlier this year) to "Scrambled Eggs" and other concoctions, many of them international classics.

But there are also plenty of, shall we say, acquired tastes, such as the Pie Floater. The book gives the National Trust of South Australia's description of "a bowl of green mush gruel with something solid in it" -- say, pea soup with a ground meat pie doused in ketchup. I would definitely eat one if I were lucky enough to be in Adelaide, where doing so "is something of a social event, albeit spontaneous and informal. The carts are often open late into the evening, making them a perfect gathering point for nighthawks looking to fend off hunger pangs."

As big as it is, this compendium doesn't include many important foodstuffs (it seems heavier on British and thinner on Asian fare; a South Indian would decry the lack of a reference to aviyal, or coconut vegetable stew). You could always get the other "1001 Foods" book, too. But this one certainly is enough to make your stomach growl in many languages.

"Hunger may be the best sauce, but I would add that curiosity is the indispensable seasoning," writes Corby Kummer, senior editor and food writer at The Atlantic, in his comparatively scant two-page introduction. The pieces on various foods and recipes, put together by project editors, are non-bylined, but most are credited in the back to food-loving contributors including Mark Bittman, Marcella Hazan, Nigella Lawson, Jane and Michael Stern and more.

This book might send you off to books and recipes by them, if not to distant lands, and to some new insights into what we humans eat. As Mr. Kummer concludes, "The combination of unfamiliar foods and names, with generous, sometimes unbearably tempting photographs fulfills the chief obligation of any book on food: instilling curiosity and appetite in nearly equal measure."