Gastronomy Books - Page 2

The Silver Spoon

Phaidon Press

Amazon Price: $26.37 List Price: $39.95 Usually ships in 24 hours By: Phaidon Press Amazon Marketplace: 46 new & used starting at $11.49

Buy at Amazon.com

Browse similar items by category:
Subjects -> Cooking, Food & Wine -> Gastronomy -> History
Subjects -> Cooking, Food & Wine -> General
Subjects -> Cooking, Food & Wine -> Reference

Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 155 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Editorial Review:

First published in 1950 and revised over time, Italy's bestselling culinary "bible," Il Cucchiaio d'argento, is now available in English. The Silver Spoon boasts over 2,000 recipes and arrives in a handsome (and weighty) photo-illustrated edition complete with two ribbon markers. Its chapters make every menu stop from sauces and antipasti through cheese dishes and sweets, with many standout dishes like Genoese Pesto Minestrone, Eggplant and Ricotta Lasagna, Pork Shoulder with Prunes, and Chocolate and Pear Tart; the book also includes a number of "eccentricities," like sections on patty shells and bean sprouts, surely not an Italian dining staple. Meant to be inclusive, the book also offers a wide range of non-Italian, mostly French formulas, supplemented by a few "exotic" and other non-traditional entries.

Though the recipe range is vast, it must be said that American readers, anxious to cook this authentic fare, will encounter problems. Translating a cookbook from one language to another requires cultural recasting as well as word substitution, and in this the book's editors have been lax. The problems include non-idiomatic usages, for example, calling for "pans" when "pots" is needed; awkward conversions from the metric system, resulting in requirements like eleven ounces of zite; and the inclusion of ingredients like cavolo nero (Tuscan cabbage), tope (a Mediterranean fish), and pancetta copatta (ham-stuffed pancetta) that are unavailable here and for which no alternatives are suggested. In addition, the recipes themselves are often insufficiently specific or detailed--even seasoned bakers will pause before cake recipes that don't specify pan size--and can also lack yields. Space considerations have also meant printing recipes in single, one-column paragraphs, which can make place-finding while cooking difficult, and there are typos and other goofs (one recipe for four specifies six cups of sliced scallions; another requires that a marinade be "stirred frequently for five to twelve hours").

All this said, many cooks--casual and serious alike--as well as cookbook collectors, will want The Silver Spoon. It's an essential document of the Italian table and as such a classic. Indeed, it would be hard to imagine a complete cookbook library without the book--a welcome evocation of a much-beloved repertoire by those who know it best. --Arthur Boehm

A History of the World in 6 Glasses

Tom Standage

Amazon Price: $10.17 List Price: $14.95 Usually ships in 24 hours By: Walker Publishing Company Amazon Marketplace: 57 new & used starting at $7.88

Buy at Amazon.com

Browse similar items by category:
Subjects -> Cooking, Food & Wine -> Gastronomy -> History
Subjects -> History -> World -> General

Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 48 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Editorial Review:

From beer to Coca-Cola, the six drinks that have helped shape human history
Throughout human history, certain drinks have done much more than just quench thirst. As Tom Standage relates with authority and charm, six of them have had a surprisingly pervasive influence on the course of history, becoming the defining drink during a pivotal historical period.

A History of the World in 6 Glasses tells the story of humanity from the Stone Age to the 21st century through the lens of beer, wine, spirits, coffee, tea, and cola. Beer was first made in the Fertile Crescent and by 3000 B.C.E. was so important to Mesopotamia and Egypt that it was used to pay wages. In ancient Greece wine became the main export of her vast seaborne trade, helping spread Greek culture abroad. Spirits such as brandy and rum fueled the Age of Exploration, fortifying seamen on long voyages and oiling the pernicious slave trade. Although coffee originated in the Arab world, it stoked revolutionary thought in Europe during the Age of Reason, when coffeehouses became centers of intellectual exchange. And hundreds of years after the Chinese began drinking tea, it became especially popular in Britain, with far-reaching effects on British foreign policy. Finally, though carbonated drinks were invented in 18th-century Europe they became a 20th-century phenomenon, and Coca-Cola in particular is the leading symbol of globalization.

For Tom Standage, each drink is a kind of technology, a catalyst for advancing culture by which he demonstrates the intricate interplay of different civilizations. You may never look at your favorite drink the same way again.

Judgment of Paris: California vs. France and the Historic 1976 Paris Tasting That Revolutionized Wine

George M. Taber

Amazon Price: $10.20 List Price: $15.00 Usually ships in 24 hours By: Scribner Amazon Marketplace: 18 new & used starting at $7.98

Buy at Amazon.com

Browse similar items by category:
Subjects -> Cooking, Food & Wine -> Drinks & Beverages -> Spirits
Subjects -> Cooking, Food & Wine -> Drinks & Beverages -> Wine -> Wine & Winemaking
Subjects -> Cooking, Food & Wine -> Gastronomy -> History

Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 45 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

"I Was There" Book About The Wine World's Tasting Heard 'Round the World 4 out of 5 stars.
5 of 7 people found this review helpful.

After far too many ghastly vintages from 1963 - 1974, and with the quality of backward French winemaking going unchallenged, the victory of New World California wines over their prestigious French counterparts in 1976 was, in hindsight, no surprise. Yet it was as great a shock to the French wine world as the collapse of the Maginot Line was to the French military establishment in May 1940. Unlike Andre Maginot, who never lived to see the tragic consequences of his and France's folly, French wine's top champions faced choosing between unbearable humiliation or dismissing the results as an aberration.

"Time" journalist George Taber, who had the wine scoop of the century and to his credit knew what to do with it, here returns to his moment in the sun, developing the storyline into a full book. He chronicles the persons who were at the tasting and who were most impacted by the results. Taber reveals their ongoing struggle absorbing the unthinkable, whether for the winning Californians, who at the time made up the new wave within their own industry and were given a grand opportunity; or in the case in France, where no such young wine Turks had credibility, and the fall out from the tasting was an unacknowledged PR nightmare. Unable to accept the cultural implications, many French refused to countenance the results - indeed at the actual tasting one desperate taster tried rewriting votes! To this day there exist Europeans who adamantly look down their - often Gallic - noses at wine from outside Europe. Yet increasingly, along with the tired fruit of those aging Bordeaux wines, such chauvinism more and more fades from respectable wine debate. Winemaking has moved a long way from the crude days of Napoleonic Minister of the Interior Chaptal's policy of using the French sugar beet crop for 'improving' the country's wines.

This book's major focus is humans, not the wines; Taber discusses the repercussions of the tasting far more than the actual event, though the curious secondary stories leading up to the tasting receive the sort of attention usually saved for more serious historical moments. The larger themes - of not resting on your laurels, and the facades that can be the reality of institutional image - emerge with an inexorable - and some might say, overdue - inevitability.

Perhaps it was fated these two birthplaces of democracy, France and America, should be the players in this most democratic-driven event: a blind tasting. (Lady Justice - by contrast - keeps one eye open just to avoid such unacceptabe results, and since the tasting any number of European wine advocates have sympathized and even embraced such a fallback.) Not surprising, too, that the more capitalist country and can-do Americans should triumph over the less egalitarian 'old world' of the more rigid and stratified hierachical universe of French wine estates, with their aristocratic trappings.

Complacency and arrogance are poor resources to contest with - and the French wine world got their ears boxed for just such attitudes. Instead of pulling out all the stops and setting bottles of '59 Lafite or perhaps a '61 Latour-a-Pomerol against the California cabs, or demanding the tasting include pinot noir, which conveniently was omitted because California didn't produce quality pinot noir, the French were snookered into permitting others a say in 'setting the table'. Prejudice and ignorance, kissing cousins of the small-minded and snobbish, got their comeuppance, and the French were hoisted by their own petard. Which in plain language means they foolishly set off the equivalent of a wooden wine crate bursting with gunpowder under their own carefully inscribed world of carefully controlled classes and prices. Generally unfamiliar with blind tasting's pecularities, where fruit and alcohol can trump more subtle qualities, the French tasters naively presumed an expertise they did not possess in comparing varietal wines from differing regions. They were blindsided. Almost none of the tasters had any idea which was domestic wine and which California wine. (Oddly enough, when the tasting was retried ten years later in America, the American tasters could not separate the wines by country.)

Recently the tasting was redone. Once again the French showed they haven't learned very much. French chardonnays, which from great vintages and the best sites can age and develop, were dropped. Once again pinot noir was absent. Chateau Haut-Brion refused to participate, but could not stop the tasting from buying examples of its wine in the marketplace. (Those evil entrepeneurs!) The original losing Bordeaux were trotted out again on the ignorant myth, long disproved by modern enology, that somehow wines with no great fruit when young would suddenly find some after twenty years of aging! The better made and fruitier California wines swept to total victory, sweeping the top placements. The more things change, the more they stay the same.

History was at work here. Yet this sort of challenge was not new for the California winemakers; for many decades avant-garde California wine makers, ambitious to compete with the very best, had been holding such tastings at home, measuring their Chardonnays against Puligny-Montrachets, Chassagne-Montrachets and Meursaults; while judging their best Cabernets against Pauillacs, St.Juliens, and Margaux. In the early seventies the influential English wine writer Harry Waugh, with an impeccable understanding of European wine, published a series of highly impressed tasting notes on these new esoteric California wines he had tasted in travels to California. A small handful of California's newest enologists were experimenting with a variety of new processes, especially in maintaining a wine's fruit. Now obscured, but then still potent icons for young winemakers, were extraordinary wines made by a few legendary wine-makers, such as Andre Tchelistcheff and the extraordinary Martin Ray. (You can read about Ray's colorful career in: Vineyards in the Sky: The Life of Legendary Vintner Martin Ray Those of us who tasted the best wines made by Tcheslistcheff and Ray were perfectly aware of just how good the best California wines could be.

Thus the potential for great wine in California was largely proven long before the '76 tasting - what needed to change was a scaling up so that more great wine could be produced, and this in fact was already well under way. By the the time the French were sitting around dishing the Paris Tasting results California was already bottling the watershed Cabernet vintage of 1974.

Talent's book makes stimulating reading for more than just wine snobs - what's in play here are larger issues, common throughout all levels of society.

Editorial Review:

The Paris Tasting of 1976 will forever be remembered as the landmark event that transformed the wine industry. At this legendary contest -- a blind tasting -- a panel of top French wine experts shocked the industry by choosing unknown California wines over France's best.

George M. Taber, the only reporter present, recounts this seminal contest and its far-reaching effects, focusing on three gifted unknowns behind the winning wines: a college lecturer, a real estate lawyer, and a Yugoslavian immigrant. With unique access to the main players and a contagious passion for his subject, Taber renders this historic event and its tremendous aftershocks -- repositioning the industry and sparking a golden age for viticulture across the globe. With an eclectic cast of characters and magnificent settings, Judgment of Paris is an illuminating tale and a story of the entrepreneurial spirit of the new world conquering the old.

The Nasty Bits: Collected Varietal Cuts, Usable Trim, Scraps, and Bones

Anthony Bourdain

Amazon Price: $10.17 List Price: $14.95 Usually ships in 24 hours By: Bloomsbury USA Amazon Marketplace: 51 new & used starting at $5.60

Buy at Amazon.com

Browse similar items by category:
Subjects -> Cooking, Food & Wine -> Gastronomy -> Essays
Subjects -> Cooking, Food & Wine -> General

Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 72 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

Short Bits from Bourdain 3 out of 5 stars.
0 of 0 people found this review helpful.

I found this book somewhat enjoyable as a self-professed fan of the author. It is a collection of thoughts left out of Kitchen Confidential (or repeats of those thoughts at times) and experiences of his since hitting the road making travel shows.

It is no Kitchen Confidential, but an easy read and more great insights from Mr. Bourdain. Having seen most of his shows some of this is reduntant, but still quite enjoyable.

Editorial Review:

In the multiweek New York Times bestseller The Nasty Bits, bestselling chef and No Reservations host Anthony Bourdain serves up a well-seasoned hellbroth of candid, often outrageous stories from his worldwide misadventures. Whether surviving a lethal hot pot in Chengdu, splurging on New York’s priciest sushi, or singing the praises of Ecuadorian line cooks and Hell’s Kitchen dives, Bourdain is as provocative, engaging, and opinionated as ever. The Nasty Bits is an irresistible tasting menu of food writing at its outrageous best—served up Bourdain style.

My Life in France

Julia Child, Alex Prud'Homme

Amazon Price: $10.17 List Price: $14.95 Usually ships in 24 hours By: Anchor Amazon Marketplace: 73 new & used starting at $4.90

Buy at Amazon.com

Browse similar items by category:
Subjects -> Biographies & Memoirs -> General
Subjects -> Biographies & Memoirs -> Specific Groups -> Women
Subjects -> Biographies & Memoirs -> Memoirs

Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 114 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Editorial Review:

Julia Child singlehandedly created a new approach to American cuisine with her cookbook Mastering the Art of French Cooking and her television show The French Chef, but as she reveals in this bestselling memoir, she was not always a master chef.


Indeed, when she first arrived in France in 1948 with her husband, Paul, who was to work for the USIS, she spoke no French and knew nothing about the country itself. But as she dove into French culture, buying food at local markets and taking classes at the Cordon Bleu, her life changed forever with her newfound passion for cooking and teaching. Julia’s unforgettable story – struggles with the head of the Cordon Bleu, rejections from publishers to whom she sent her now-famous cookbook, a wonderful, nearly fifty-year long marriage that took them across the globe – unfolds with the spirit so key to her success as a chef and a writer, brilliantly capturing one of the most endearing American personalities of the last fifty years.

Everyday Drinking: The Distilled Kingsley Amis

Kingsley Amis

Amazon Price: $13.59 List Price: $19.99 Usually ships in 24 hours By: Bloomsbury USA Amazon Marketplace: 41 new & used starting at $11.95

Buy at Amazon.com

Browse similar items by category:
Subjects -> Cooking, Food & Wine -> Drinks & Beverages -> Spirits
Subjects -> Cooking, Food & Wine -> Gastronomy -> Essays
Subjects -> Cooking, Food & Wine -> General

Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 11 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Cheerio to All the Boozemen in the World! 5 out of 5 stars.
0 of 0 people found this review helpful.

First, I have never laughed so hard. This book is so funny. Amis has a turn-of-phrase that is incredible. It is also filled with arcana and nuance on the world of booze. I may even try some of his recipes. I truly enjoy the "different" read and books not boring. This is definitely in that category. You don't have to be a drunk to enjoy this book on "drink" and all the social niceties associated with it.

Highly recommended!

Editorial Review:

A gift for anyone who loves good liquor and high-proof prose: a collection of hilarious and deeply informed writings about drink from one of the all-time authorities.
Kingsley Amis was one of the great masters of comic prose, and no subject was dearer to him than the art and practice of imbibing. This new volume brings together the best of his three out-of-print works on the subject. Along with a series of well-tested recipes (including a cocktail called the Lucky Jim) the book includes Amis’s musings on The Hangover, The Boozing Man’s Diet, What to Drink with What, and (presumably as a matter of speculation) How Not to Get Drunk—all leavened with fun quizzes on the making and drinking of alcohol all over the world. Mixing practical know-how and hilarious opinionation, this is a delightful cocktail of wry humor and distilled knowledge, served by one of our great gimlet wits.

Kitchen Table Wisdom 10th Anniversary

Rachel Naomi Remen

Amazon Price: $10.88 List Price: $16.00 Usually ships in 24 hours By: Riverhead Trade Amazon Marketplace: 72 new & used starting at $4.83

Buy at Amazon.com

Browse similar items by category:
Subjects -> Biographies & Memoirs -> General
Subjects -> Biographies & Memoirs -> Memoirs
Subjects -> Cooking, Food & Wine -> Gastronomy -> Essays

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

Must Reading 5 out of 5 stars.
4 of 4 people found this review helpful.

Kitchen Table Wisdom: Stories That Heal
I was given a copy of this book by a colleague many years ago. I only recently read it for the first time, and I now realize what a wonderful gift I received. I know I will reread this book and refer to it many times. The subtitle explains it: "Stories That Heal." I cannot imagine that anyone reading this book thoughtfully would not be deeply rewarded for the time spent. I very rarely have read something that I would recommend to EVERYBODY, but this is one book I WILL recommend to everybody. Epiphany, anyone? File under "Guide for Living Well."

Editorial Review:

Praised by everyone from Bernie Siegel to Daniel Goleman to Larry Dossey, Rachel Remen has a unique perspective on healing rooted in her background as a physician, a professor of medicine, a therapist, and a long-term survivor of chronic illness. In a deeply moving and down-to-earth collection of true stories, this prominent physician shows us life in all its power and mystery and reminds us that the things we cannot measure may be the things that ultimately sustain and enrich our lives.

Slow Food Nation: Why Our Food Should Be Good, Clean, And Fair

Carlo Petrini

Amazon Price: $15.30 List Price: $22.50 Usually ships in 24 hours By: Rizzoli Ex Libris Amazon Marketplace: 22 new & used starting at $13.42

Buy at Amazon.com

Browse similar items by category:
Subjects -> Cooking, Food & Wine -> Gastronomy -> General
Subjects -> Cooking, Food & Wine -> General
Subjects -> Health, Mind & Body -> Diets & Weight Loss -> Diets -> General

Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 3 Average rating: 5.0 of 5

Editorial Review:

By now most of us are aware of the threats looming in the food world. The best-selling Fast Food Nation and other recent books have alerted us to such dangers as genetically modified organisms, food-borne diseases, and industrial farming. Now it is time for answers, and Slow Food Nation steps up to the challenge. Here the charismatic leader of the Slow Food movement, Carlo Petrini, outlines many different routes by which we may take back control of our food. The three central principles of the Slow Food plan are these: food must be sustainably produced in ways that are sensitive to the environment, those who produce the food must be fairly treated, and the food must be healthful and delicious. In his travels around the world as ambassador for Slow Food, Petrini has witnessed firsthand the many ways that native peoples are feeding themselves without making use of the harmful methods of the industrial complex. He relates the wisdom to be gleaned from local cultures in such varied places as Mongolia, Chiapas, Sri Lanka, and Puglia. Amidst our crisis, it is critical that Americans look for insight from other cultures around the world and begin to build a new and better way of eating in our communities here.

Tender at the Bone: Growing Up at the Table

Ruth Reichl

Amazon Price: $10.85 List Price: $15.95 Usually ships in 24 hours By: Broadway Amazon Marketplace: 237 new & used starting at $0.01

Buy at Amazon.com

Browse similar items by category:
Subjects -> Biographies & Memoirs -> General
Subjects -> Cooking, Food & Wine -> Baking -> General
Subjects -> Cooking, Food & Wine -> Gastronomy -> Essays

Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 109 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Editorial Review:

New York Times restaurant critic Ruth Reichl shares lessons learned at the hands (and kitchen counters) of family members and friends throughout her life, from growing up with her taste-blind mother to the comfort of cream puffs while away at boarding school on "Mars" (Montreal seemed just as far away) to her most memorable meal, taken on a mountainside in Greece.

Her stories shine with the voices and recipes of those she has encountered on the way, such as her Aunt Birdie's maid and companion, Alice, who first taught Reichl both the power of cooking and how to make perfect apple dumplings; the family's mysterious patrician housekeeper, Mrs. Peavey, who always remembered to make extra pastry for the beef Wellington; Serafina, the college roommate with whom Reichl explored a time of protest and political and personal discovery; and, finally, cookbook author Marion Cunningham, who, after tales of her midlife struggles and transformation, gave Reichl the strength to overcome her own anxieties.

Reichl's wry and gentle humor pervades the book, and makes readers feel as if they're right at the table, laughing at one great story after another (and delighting in a gourmet meal at the same time, of course). Reichl's narrative of a life lived and remembered through the palate will stay with the reader long after the last page is turned.

Ham Biscuits, Hostess Gowns, and Other Southern Specialties: An Entertaining Life (with Recipes)

Julia Reed

Amazon Price: $16.29 List Price: $23.95 Usually ships in 24 hours By: St. Martin's Press Amazon Marketplace: 37 new & used starting at $13.40

Buy at Amazon.com

Browse similar items by category:
Subjects -> Cooking, Food & Wine -> Gastronomy -> Essays
Subjects -> Cooking, Food & Wine -> General
Subjects -> Cooking, Food & Wine -> Regional & International -> U.S. Regional -> General

Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 4 Average rating: 5.0 of 5

Editorial Review:

Julia Reed spends a lot of time thinking about ham biscuits. And cornbread and casseroles and the surprisingly modern ease of donning a hostess gown for one’s own party. In Ham Biscuits, Hostess Gowns and Other Southern Specialties Julia Reed collects her thoughts on good cooking and the lessons of gracious entertaining that pass from one woman to another, and takes the reader on a lively and very personal tour of the culinary—and social—South. In essays on everything from pork chops to the perfect picnic Julia Reed revels in the simple good qualities that make the Southern table the best possible place to pull up a chair. She expounds on: the Southerner’s relentless penchant for using gelatin; why most things taste better with homemade mayonnaise; the necessity of a holiday milk punch (and, possibly, a Santa hat); how best to “cook for compliments” (at least one squash casserole and Lee Bailey’s barbequed veal are key). She provides recipes for some of the region’s best-loved dishes (cheese straws, red velvet cake, breakfast shrimp), along with her own variations on the classics, including Fried Oysters Rockefeller Salad and Creole Crab Soup. She also elaborates on worthwhile information every hostess would do well to learn: the icebreaking qualities of a Ramos gin fizz and a hot crabmeat canapé, for example; the “wow factor” intrinsic in a platter of devilled eggs or a giant silver punchbowl filled with scoops of homemade ice cream. There is guidance on everything from the best possible way to “eat” your luck on New Year’s Day to composing a menu in honor of someone you love. Grace and hilarity under gastronomic pressure suffuse these essays, along with remembrances of her gastronomic heroes including Richard Olney, Mary Cantwell, and M.F.K. Fisher. Ham Biscuits, Hostess Gowns and Other Southern Specialties is another great book about the South from Julia Reed, a writer who makes her experiences in—and out of—the kitchen a joy to read.