Tea & Sympathy by Anita Naughton.
Not sure if this counts, as it has recipes, but is not really a recipe book so much as a tea-culture book, one of the best I've ever read for describing a particular place and time's tea-culture. If you look at standard book review sites the results are mixed, with people complaining that it mostly seems to just be name-dropping celebrities, without really understanding the context.
Tea & Sympathy catered to Anglo-American New York, and was sort of a common ground between Brits in New York hustling to become stars, Brits in New York who succeeded, and Anglophiles looking for a local version of a Victorian fantasy tea. It is really in the same category as the old "Mid Atlantic Man" essays by Tom Wolfe.
So there is always mention of little old ladies having tea and cake in the background, WASP interior designers trying to inspire themselves through Britishness, Anglophile tourists from overseas ordering weird cream teas, etc., and for them it is more similar to the stereotypical British tea experience. Then there are the British expats, for whom the place is more like a donut shop or 24-hour diner would be seen in the U.S., not really an escape into fantasy but a place to come back down to reality, marred by the fact that a lot of them came to New York to make it and succeeded. The author actually really captures the sort of provincial star-struckness; there's a gag in the book where the Dalai Lama shows up for brunch and the waitress only knows who it is because one of the other patrons recognizes him, because, after all, he isn't in the entertainment industry.
It also does an excellent job of helping to explain what it is about tea-culture that makes the culture happen; the author frankly states that the two most popular teas were Typhoo and an unnamed Earl Grey. Granted, these weren't quite as easy to find in the 90s, but there didn't need to be ultra-boutique tea simply due to the nature of the tearoom itself.
The contrast between the American Anglophiles and the British Yankophiles does a good job outlining the spectrum of tea-room culture from the escape-from-reality type that the Japanese tea ceremony and to some degree the Taiwanese tea-art ceremony and grand hotel British ceremony draw from, and the fabric-of-reality type that you see in cha chaan teng type places in Hong Kong that are sort of the tea equivalent of the donut shops and 24-hour diners I mentioned, in that if you pointed out to someone that a donut shop was in fact a coffeeshop, or that a 24-hour diner where people sit at a bar drinking coffee was in fact a coffee bar, they would say, "Well yes, they sell coffee, but they have waitresses not baristas, it's not the same..." trying to phrase this spectrum but not having good words for it.
There are also some touching personal stories. The book does a great job of capturing the chaotic behind-the-scenes lives of service-sector workers, which is easier to forget in the tea-art rooms because more effort is made to subliminate for the sake of the fantasy. There are also a few hard-swap stories that are interesting, where Americans who came to escape get thrust back into reality unexpectedly, or where Brits who came to ground themselves found themselves shot back up into the sky.
I would definitely recommend it.