Gastronomy Books - Page 10

Things Cooks Love: Implements, Ingredients, Recipes

Sur La Table, Marie Simmons

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 6 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

Editorial Review:

"The first time I stepped into a Sur La Table store many years ago, it instantly became my favorite kitchenware store, and it still is. Its variety never fails to surprise me. I have always found what I needed or even what I didn't know I needed until I saw it there." --Marcella Hazan, godmother of Italian cooking in America and author of Essentials of Classic Italian Cooking

Things Cooks Love: Implements. Ingredients. Recipes., the first in a series of Andrews McMeel Publishing books by the trusted culinary authority Sur La Table, speaks to the love that cooks of all levels feel for their tools. Whether you're passionate about the gorgeous copper pot you just received as a gift, a rice cooker you have always wanted to try, or your grandmother's well-aged cast-iron skillet, award-winning author Marie Simmons provides inspiration to make the best use of your cookware along with delectable recipes to enhance the experience.

Since the 1972 opening of its flagship store in Seattle's Pike Place Market, Sur La Table has become the destination of choice for iconic chefs from Jacques Pepin and Martha Stewart to Mario Batali. A favorite of culinary connoisseurs and gadget gurus alike, Sur La Table sells the A-to-Z of kitchenware and prides itself on teaching how to properly buy, use, care for, and cook with your newfound kitchen additions.

Things Cooks Love presents more than 100 satisfying recipes along with 125 detailed descriptions of commonly used and more unusual kitchen implements. Simmons focuses on how to choose basic cookware, and then branches out to an international array of essentials for Asian, Mexican, French, Indian, Iberian, and Moroccan kitchens. Each recipe includes preparation and cooking times, serving portions, and implements necessary to prepare the dish. Alternative cookware is offered for kitchens that aren't stocked with the exact cookware or tools.

Unlike any other tool-focused book on the market, this book celebrates the deep connection between cooks and their treasured tools. Things Cooks Love is more than a reference tool or a cookbook--it is a cook's book.

The Black Dog Summer on the Vineyard Cookbook

Joseph Hall, Elaine Sullivan

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 31 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

Editorial Review:

The Black Dog Tavern on Martha's Vineyard is a cult classic--and anyone who's eaten there will recognize the distinctive black-lab T-shirt that fans of the restaurant all over the world wear. Now, with The Black Dog Summer on the Vineyard Cookbook, by Elaine Sullivan, those same diners can bring the Dog's savory new New England fare back home as well. The best of these 100-some recipes center around the Black Dog's specialty: breakfast. Aficionados will find such familiar favorites as Eggs in the Grass (poached eggs over asparagus with hollandaise sauce), "M" Go Blue (banana and blueberry pancakes; the name recalls a University of Michigan cheer), and Huey, Louie, Andouille (a pepper, onion, and andouille sausage omelet). The book's step-by-step depiction of omelet preparation is particularly useful, even for veterans; the illustrations for this and other cooking technicalities, like clam opening, are precise and educational. Other standout recipes include Quahog Chowder, Crunchy Pecan Chicken with Lemon Sauce, Caramelized Scallops with Smoked Chili Cream, and Seared Tuna on Watercress Salad. Desserts such as Fudge Bottom Pie, Blueberry Pudding with Lemon Sauce, and Black Dog Ginger Cookies evoke the Black Dog's comfy-cosmo flavor, while scattered pictures and vignettes evoke the restaurant's casual vibe. With a pantry listing and useful cooking tips, this exuberantly designed book is a happy, well-produced effort.

Climbing the Mango Trees: A Memoir of a Childhood in India (Vintage)

Madhur Jaffrey

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 12 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Enjoyable 4 out of 5 stars.
3 of 3 people found this review helpful.

I know the author by her association with Said Jaffrey, an actor of some repute
in India, and her famous cookery show and books in the same domain.
Apparently, at one time the author was married to Mr. Jaffrey, but has since
divorced and is now re-married to a gentleman in New York and settled in the
same city. I presume she still writes books on Indian cooking. In any case,
the Jaffrey name and the title were enough of a ruse to get me to read the
book. What emerges is a tale of a priviledged childhood in pre-independence
India: her family traces its roots back to the time of emperor Aurangzeb
(the last Mughal ruler of India) in whose court Madhur's ancestors used to
ply their craft as writers. The emperor gifted land to her ancestors in what
would later became New Delhi, enabling Madhur a luxurious childhood by Indian
standards. Her family was well to do: grandfather was a barrister, father
owned mills, the family took trips to Europe and possessed two American cars -- and
this is in pre-independent India, mind you. The book itself is composed of short
chapters, each one detailing some memory of childhood: cousins, siblings, aunts and
uncles, grandparent, summer trips to Simla, train rides, traumas, first love, the
travails of a joint family, etc. A common thread that runs through all the chapters is
the association of food with the memories. Madhur (which means "sweet, honey-like" in
Hindi) draws upon her strength -- food -- to permeate each chapter. The writing
style is informal and colloquial, but enjoyable nonetheless. As an added bonus, the
last portion of the book contain her favorite recipes. (July 2007)

Editorial Review:

Whether acclaimed food writer Madhur Jaffrey was climbing the mango trees in her grandparents' orchard in Delhi or picnicking in the Himalayan foothills on meatballs stuffed with raisins and mint, tucked into freshly baked spiced pooris, today these childhood pleasures evoke for her the tastes and textures of growing up.

This memoir is both an enormously appealing account of an unusual childhood and a testament to the power of food to prompt memory, vividly bringing to life a lost time and place. Included here are recipes for more than thirty delicious dishes that are recovered from Jaffrey’s childhood.

It Must've Been Something I Ate

Jeffrey Steingarten

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 24 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

About Jeffrey, Not About Food 2 out of 5 stars.
2 of 3 people found this review helpful.

I made it through about 5 or 6 of the essays in the book. I was expecting a book about food, but I got a book about Jeffrey Steingarten. In one column he writes about injuring his foot and being bed-ridden for awhile. Occasionally food is mentioned when a company like Starbucks or Ben and Jerry's sends him something, but mainly it's about his bed rest, and I don't find that very interesting.

He's petty. He had a bad experience on a plane where he accidentally ate some garnish. This caused an nasty reaction that lasted a good twenty minutes or so. By using his leverage as the food writer for Vogue (he mentions how the stewardess turns pale when he shows her his business card), he makes Northwest go through what's basically a witchhunt to find the person responsible for including the poisonous garnish with the food. Finally Northwest tells him that identifying the catering company is as far as they can take it. He even gets a couple of calls from the catering company, but in the end he's disappointed because the person responsible wasn't punished. I understand that he had a bad experience (and his foolish wife even worse), but to take the whole thing to such an extreme when it was a matter of a twenty minute unpleasant experience just shows to me that he's not a very good person. That's not what I wanted to read about when I picked up the book.

On one page he complains about being "impecunious." A few pages later, he's talking about his vacation home in San Diego that he travels to from him apartment in Manhattan. Presumably his wife, whom he appears to be frequently apart from, as she's often out of the country on business, floated the cash necessary for the poverty-stricken Steingarten to afford even such meager trifles.

One might say that I'm simply jealous, and fair enough. Sure I'd like to have a vacation home in San Diego and the clout to push around Northwest Airlines, but the bottom line is I wanted a book about food, and I ended up with a book about a guy that I just don't like very much.

All that said, he is a good writer, so I gave it two stars instead of one.

Editorial Review:

In this outrageous and delectable new volume, the Man Who Ate Everything proves that he will do anything to eat everything. That includes going fishing for his own supply of bluefin tuna belly; nearly incinerating his oven in pursuit of the perfect pizza crust, and spending four days boning and stuffing three different fowl—into each other-- to produce the Cajun specialty called “turducken.”

It Must’ve Been Something I Ate finds Steingarten testing the virtues of chocolate and gourmet salts; debunking the mythology of lactose intolerance and Chinese Food Syndrome; roasting marrow bones for his dog , and offering recipes for everything from lobster rolls to gratin dauphinois. The result is one of those rare books that are simultaneously mouth-watering and side-splitting.

Cuisine and Culture: A History of Food and People

Linda Civitello

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Total reviews: 2 Average rating: 5.0 of 5

Editorial Review:

An illuminating account of how history shapes our diets-now revised and updated

Why did the ancient Romans believe cinnamon grew in swamps guarded by giant killer bats? How did the African cultures imported by slavery influence cooking in the American South? What does the 700-seat McDonald's in Beijing serve in the age of globalization? With the answers to these and many more such questions, Cuisine and Culture, Second Edition presents an engaging, informative, and witty narrative of the interactions among history, culture, and food.

From prehistory and the earliest societies around the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers to today's celebrity chefs, Cuisine and Culture, Second Edition presents a multicultural and multiethnic approach that draws connections between major historical events and how and why these events affected and defined the culinary traditions of different societies. Fully revised and updated, this Second Edition offers new and expanded features and coverage, including:

• New Crossing Cultures sections providing brief sketches of foods and food customs moving between cultures
• More holiday histories, food fables, and food chronologies
• Discussions of food in the Byzantine, Portuguese, Turkish/Ottoman, and Austro-Hungarian empires
• Greater coverage of the scientific genetic modification of food, from Mendel in the 19th century to the contemporary GM vs. organic food debate
• Speculation on the future of food
• And much more!

Complete with sample recipes and menus, as well as revealing photographs and illustrations, Cuisine and Culture, Second Edition is the essential survey history for students of food history.

The Story of Corn

Betty Fussell

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Total reviews: 6 Average rating: 5.0 of 5

Editorial Review:

The Story of Corn is a unique compendium, drawing upon history and mythology, science and art, anecdote and image, personal narrative and epic to tell the extraordinary story of the grain that built the New World. Corn transformed the way the entire world eats, providing a hardy, inexpensive alternative to rice or wheat and cheap fodder for livestock and finding its way into everything from explosives to embalming fluid.

Betty Fussell has given us a true American saga, interweaving the histories of the indigenous peoples who first cultivated the grain and the European conquerors who appropriated and propagated it around the globe. She explores corn’s roles as food, fetish, crop, and commodity to those who have planted, consumed, worshiped, processed, and profited from it for seven centuries.

Now available only from the University of New Mexico Press, The Story of Corn, is the winner of a Julia Child Cookbook Award from the International Association of Culinary Professionals.

“Written in a lively and nontechnical style.”—Library Journal

“Fussell has clearly done a good deal of research and a lot of traveling—peering over a precipice at Machu Picchu, descending into a restored ceremonial kiva of the Anasazi people in New Mexico, visiting the sole surviving corn palace from the Midwest boosters’ glory days of a century ago.”—Kirkus Reviews

1001 Foods You Must Taste Before You Die

Universe

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Editorial Review:

From single press extra-virgin olive oils and artisanal cheeses to more exotic fare such as zebra jerky, this compilation is a cornucopia of culinary delicacies from every cuisine around the globe. Featuring luscious photographs and descriptions of must-eat foods from sweet to savory, this culinary gazetteer of the world offers expert guidance on how to really eat like a local when in Rome or how to find the most authentic Peking duck when visiting Beijing. Any foodie will delight at the fact-filled descriptions and marginalia and sidebars bursting with culinary history and trivia. Whether looking for the "must-taste treats" to seek out on your next vacation or inspiration for a romantic dinner for two, this compendium is sure to be a source of gourmet inspiration, certain to expand even an experienced epicure’s mental grocery list. The book is divided into sections based on food type (meats, dairy products, fruits, vegetables, sweets and confections, etc). Included are classics as well as delicacies little known outside their home turf. Each entry features authoritative yet opinionated descriptions as well as anecdotes about the producers or the region ensuring that this book will have wide appeal to connoisseurs and novices alike.

Renewing America's Food Traditions: Saving and Savoring the Continent's Most Endangered Foods

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Total reviews: 2 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Editorial Review:

Renewing America's Food Traditions is a beautifully illustrated dramatic call to recognize, celebrate, and conserve the great diversity of foods that gives North America its distinctive culinary identity that reflects our multicultural heritage. It offers us rich natural and cultural histories as well as recipes and folk traditions associated with the rarest food plants and animals in North America. In doing so, it reminds us that what we choose to eat can either conserve or deplete the cornucopia of our continent.

While offering a eulogy to a once-common game food that has gone extinct--the passenger pigeon--the book doesn't dwell on tragic losses. Instead, it highlights the success stories of food recovery, habitat restoration, and market revitalization that chefs, farmers, ranchers, fishermen, and foresters have recently achieved. Through such "food parables," editor Gary Paul Nabhan and his colleagues build a persuasive argument for eater-based conservation.

In addition, this book offers the first-ever list of foods at risk in America (more than a thousand), shows how all of us can personally support and participate in such recoveries, and lists food festivals held across the continent to honor and enjoy some of the country's most iconic foods, from crab cakes to maple syrup and filé gumbo. Organized by "food nations" named for the ecological and cultural keystone foods of each region--Salmon Nation, Bison Nation, Chile Pepper Nation, among others--this book offers an altogether fresh perspective on the culinary traditions of North America.

Kitchen Literacy: How We Lost Knowledge of Where Food Comes from and Why We Need to Get It Back

Ann Vileisis

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Total reviews: 6 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Editorial Review:

Ask children where food comes from, and they’ll probably answer: “the supermarket.” Ask most adults, and their replies may not be much different. Where our foods are raised and what happens to them between farm and supermarket shelf have become mysteries. How did we become so disconnected from the sources of our breads, beef, cheeses, cereal, apples, and countless other foods that nourish us every day?

Ann Vileisis’s answer is a sensory-rich journey through the history of making dinner. Kitchen Literacy takes us from an eighteenth-century garden to today’s sleek supermarket aisles, and eventually to farmer’s markets that are now enjoying a resurgence. Vileisis chronicles profound changes in how American cooks have considered their foods over two centuries and delivers a powerful statement: what we don’t know could hurt us.

As the distance between farm and table grew, we went from knowing particular places and specific stories behind our foods’ origins to instead relying on advertisers’ claims. The woman who raised, plucked, and cooked her own chicken knew its entire life history while today most of us have no idea whether hormones were fed to our poultry. Industrialized eating is undeniably convenient, but it has also created health and environmental problems, including food-borne pathogens, toxic pesticides, and pollution from factory farms.

Though the hidden costs of modern meals can be high, Vileisis shows that greater understanding can lead consumers to healthier and more sustainable choices. Revealing how knowledge of our food has been lost and how it might now be regained, Kitchen Literacy promises to make us think differently about what we eat.

Home Cooking: A Writer in the Kitchen

Laurie Colwin

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 22 Average rating: 5.0 of 5

Heartwarming Culinary Essays. Great Read for Foodies 5 out of 5 stars.
9 of 9 people found this review helpful.

'Home Cooking' by Laurie Colwin is the kind of book that really makes you wish you could become friends with the author. Unfortunately, the author is no longer with us, so there is a lot more than the usual barrier between celebrity and mere mortal between reader and writer.

The chapters in the book are essays composed of both culinary and autobiographical material, although the book is not a memoir a la Ruth Reichl's two books. It is also not culinary criticism or exposition in the style of John Thorne. It is most similar to the kind of essays written by Elizabeth David, one of the author's heroes, and M.F.K. Fisher.

The author has the advantage of most good writers in that she has lived in interesting circumstances providing fuel for her writing. One premise for much of her culinary advice is based on the fact that for several years, she lived in a very small Greenwich Village apartment with no oven, two hot plates, no sink and a tiny refrigerator, with literally enough room to hold no more than three people at a time. Amazingly, the author was able to actually entertain in this tiny space, using the bathtub and commode as a means of washing up the dishes.

Much of the culinary advice is quirky and some is actually a bit dated, as it predates the microplane and the cheap plastic mandoline. I suspect the author may have changed some of her opinions if these tools had been available. Colwin's advice about knives is also a little dated, as she swears by carbon steel blades rather than modern stainless steel. Since there is no evidence that she sharpened her own knives, I suspect a modern Santoku knife may have changed her opinion. Even so, the essays are a testament to cooking with only the bare minimum of equipment and space.

It is not surprising that Ms. Colwin's recipes never made the 'Best of' series, as they are quirky rather than true gourmet fare. While another of Ms. Colwin's heroes is Edna Lewis, the very influential writer on Southern cooking, Ms. Colwin's recipe for Southern Fried Chicken does not follow Ms. Lewis' lead on a number of things such as an overnight buttermilk marinade. He does, however, keep to the gospel of pan frying rather than deep-frying.

Ms. Colwin's writing provides much more food for the soul than it does food for the gut. Reading this book makes one wish that Karen Duffey would have channeled her not inconsiderable talent for the simple in her book 'A Slob in the Kitchen' into a style more like Ms. Colwin's very entertaining twists on culinary matters.

Highly recommended reading for foodies.

Editorial Review:

Share the unsurpassed pleasures of discovering, cooking, and eating good, simple food with this beloved book. Equal parts cookbook and memoir, Laurie Colwin's Home Cooking combines her insightful, good-humored writing style with her lifelong passion for wonderful cuisine in essays such as "Alone in the Kitchen with an Eggplant," "Repulsive Dinners: A Memoir," and "Stuffed Breast of Veal: A Bad Idea." Home Cooking is truly a feast for body and soul.