Gastronomy Books - Page 4

The Art of Eating

M. F. K. Fisher, Joan Reardon

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 26 Average rating: 5.0 of 5

Delicious, with a Wee Aftertaste 4 out of 5 stars.
18 of 21 people found this review helpful.

Even in paperback this is a thick and heavy book, which is a compilation of several of MKF Fisher's individual works offering different aspects of her thoughts on food in terms of origin, recipes, culinary preparation, and history. In addition, it divulges her own observations on the whole dining experience that we as humans go through in terms of customs, etiquette, ambience, socializing and so forth. But what makes this book stellar is the eloquent, imaginative, and sometimes even haunting style of Ms. Fisher's writing. She expresses her own thoughts and oftentimes outspoken opinions, mixing them with historical facts, tempting recipes, and home-cooked tales. With such a satisfying horn of plenty within the confines of two book covers, it is easy to understand why she still reigns as the queen of prose inspired by food and dining. I wish I had her ability to master in writing such joi de vivre and enthusiasm for food, eating, and drinking, which after all are such basic elements to our very existence.

The section I enjoyed most of all was "The Gastronomical Me", a biography-cum-travelogue in which she poignantly narrates her experiences by rendering them so lifelike that you can smell the smells and taste the tastes. She includes food episodes of her early years in California while growing up and later attending boarding school; in Dijon, France where the kitchens in restaurants and her apartments beckon you to partake of the offerings; in Switzerland where you visually can grasp the mountains and streams along train-rides she describes through the Alps to Italy; and finally in a small Mexican town, where she surpasses even the writing prowess demonstrated in her previous stories, by telling the most poignant tales.

An interesting sidelight is that this book not only covers food. You gather early on that she is far from a teetotaler since alcoholic drinks and drinking at mealtimes too are frequent topics, from sipping wines and champagnes and glasses of Pernod on ocean liners to mixing water with bourbon, which she keeps in a flask during a long, propeller-driven, airplane flight to Mexico.

The other sections I liked were the beginning (Serve It Forth) and Consider the Oyster. It amazed me that one person could write a whole expose covering around a hundred pages about only the oyster: the various types, methods of preparations, and culinary history. Plus she gives her own personal memories and anecdotes too. You name it, she said it about oysters--recipes included.

I did not care as much for How to Cook a Wolf, as I could not relate to either the off-color humor or to some of the topics she presented. (Sorry, but sweetbreads, halves of calf heads, and brains were not appetizing subjects.) Also, I gave up finishing the book. I started to read "An Alphabet for Gourmets", the last section, but got as far as "D" and couldn't force myself to read through the rest of the alphabet. It seems to me by the time in her life when she wrote this section she had become rather cynical and bitter, to the extent that everything she wrote sounded condescending. This section was such a let-down, a depressant to me after coming off the high of "The Gastronomical Me". Although I exaggerate, she seemed to repeatedly state something to the effect that she preferred to dine alone on crackers and milk rather than face gourmet meals with uncultivated people (with untrained palettes) who were unsavvy as to the proper way food should be eaten in the first place and incapable of appreciating what they shoved in their faces in the second. Anyway, other readers may disagree with me, but this last section lacks the consistency, and more important, the vibrancy and pep of her flowing, off-the-wall style that grows on you in the other sections.

Although I was a little disheartened at the end, her brilliance that shone through in the other sections more than outweighed the few negatives. I can recommend this book to everyone, especially to people who are interested in food as a literary subject in its own right instead of something that we simply cook and eat. Of course, foodies and cooks alike should appreciate it. And though it does have some very good recipes as added bonuses, this should not be considered a cookbook; instead, this book's function is to serve up delicious tidbits for our minds and imaginations to savor and enjoy.

Editorial Review:

A collection of essays by one of America's best known food writers, that are often more autobiographical or historical than anecdotal musings on food preparation and consumption. The book includes culinary advice to World War II housewives plagued by food shortages, portraits of family members and friends (with all their idiosyncrasies) and notes on her studies at the University of Dijon, in France. Through each story she weaves her love of food and passion for cooking, and illustrates that our three basic needs as human beings--love, food and security--are so intermingled that it is difficult to think of one without the others. The book won the 1989 James Beard Cookbook Award.

What Einstein Told His Cook: Kitchen Science Explained

Robert L. Wolke

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Total reviews: 47 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

Editorial Review:

Why do recipes call for unsalted butter--and salt? What is a microwave, actually? Are smoked foods raw or cooked? Robert L. Wolke's enlightening and entertaining What Einstein Told His Cook offers answers to these and 127 other questions about everyday kitchen phenomena. Using humor (dubious puns included), Wolke, a bona fide chemistry professor and syndicated Washington Post columnist, has found a way to make his explanations clear and accessible to all: in short, fun. For example, to a query about why cookbooks advise against inserting meat thermometers so that they touch a bone, Wolke says, "I hate warnings without explanations, don't you? Whenever I see an 'open other end' warning on a box, I open the wrong end just to see what will happen. I'm still alive." But he always finally gets down to brass tacks: as most heat transfer in meat is due to its water content, areas around bone remain relatively cool and thus unreliable for gauging overall meat temperature.

Organized into basic categories like "Sweet Talk" (questions involving sugar), "Fire and Ice" (we learn why water boils and freezers burn, among other things), and "Tools and Technology" (the best kind of frying pan, for example), the book also provides illustrative recipes like Black Raspberry Coffee Cake (to demonstrate how metrics work in recipes) and Bob's Mahogany Game Hens (showing what brining can do). With technical illustrations, tips, and more, the book offers abundant evidence that learning the whys and hows of cooking can help us enjoy the culinary process almost as much as its results. --Arthur Boehm

Red, White, and Drunk All Over: A Wine-Soaked Journey from Grape to Glass

Natalie MacLean

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 18 Average rating: 5.0 of 5

Editorial Review:

In this bodice-ripping wine book that got widespread and excellent reviews in hardcover, multiple James Beard and IACP award-winning writer Natalie MacLean’s journey through the international world of wine is the perfect companion for neophytes and wine aficionados alike.

Natalie travels to the ancient vineyards of Burgundy to uncover the secrets of the pinot noir, the “heartbreak grape” from which some of the most coveted wines in the world are made. She visits the labyrinthine cellars of Champagne to examine the myths and the mystique of bubbly. She pulls on sturdy boots to help with the harvest at the vineyards of iconoclastic Californian winemaker Randall Grahm and goes undercover as sommelier for a night in a five-star restaurant with a wine list the thickness of a telephone directory. She looks at the influence of powerful critics, notably Robert Parker and Jancis Robinson, invites readers into her dining room for an informal wine tasting, and compares collecting notes at a bacchanalian dinner with novelist Jay McInerney.

Out of the East: Spices and the Medieval Imagination

Paul Freedman

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Total reviews: 1 Average rating: 5.0 of 5

Editorial Review:

The demand for spices in medieval Europe was extravagant and was reflected in the pursuit of fashion, the formation of taste, and the growth of luxury trade. It inspired geographical and commercial exploration ,as traders pursued such common spices as pepper and cinnamon and rarer aromatic products, including ambergris and musk. Ultimately, the spice quest led to imperial missions that were to change world history.

This engaging book explores the demand for spices: why were they so popular, and why so expensive? Paul Freedman surveys the history, geography, economics, and culinary tastes of the Middle Ages to uncover the surprisingly varied ways that spices were put to use--in elaborate medieval cuisine, in the treatment of disease, for the promotion of well-being, and to perfume important ceremonies of the Church. Spices became symbols of beauty, affluence, taste, and grace, Freedman shows, and their expense and fragrance drove the engines of commerce and conquest at the dawn of the modern era.

Kitchen Confidential: Adventures in the Culinary Underbelly

Anthony Bourdain

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Total reviews: 559 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

Editorial Review:

Most diners believe that their sublime sliver of seared foie gras, topped with an ethereal buckwheat blini and a drizzle of piquant huckleberry sauce, was created by a culinary artist of the highest order, a sensitive, highly refined executive chef. The truth is more brutal. More likely, writes Anthony Bourdain in Kitchen Confidential, that elegant three-star concoction is the collaborative effort of a team of "wacked-out moral degenerates, dope fiends, refugees, a thuggish assortment of drunks, sneak thieves, sluts, and psychopaths," in all likelihood pierced or tattooed and incapable of uttering a sentence without an expletive or a foreign phrase. Such is the muscular view of the culinary trenches from one who's been groveling in them, with obvious sadomasochistic pleasure, for more than 20 years. CIA-trained Bourdain, currently the executive chef of the celebrated Les Halles, wrote two culinary mysteries before his first (and infamous) New Yorker essay launched this frank confessional about the lusty and larcenous real lives of cooks and restaurateurs. He is obscenely eloquent, unapologetically opinionated, and a damn fine storyteller--a Jack Kerouac of the kitchen. Those without the stomach for this kind of joyride should note his opening caveat: "There will be horror stories. Heavy drinking, drugs, screwing in the dry-goods area, unappetizing industry-wide practices. Talking about why you probably shouldn't order fish on a Monday, why those who favor well-done get the scrapings from the bottom of the barrel, and why seafood frittata is not a wise brunch selection.... But I'm simply not going to deceive anybody about the life as I've seen it." --Sumi Hahn

Food of the Gods: The Search for the Original Tree of Knowledge A Radical History of Plants, Drugs, and Human Evolution

Terence Mckenna

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 51 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Completely Off the Beam 1 out of 5 stars.
3 of 3 people found this review helpful.

I suppose that McKenna must have been a charismatic individual. He seemed to wander with the crowd of Esalen New Age lecturers and hang out with them. I have read many of his books and discussed them with a number of otherwise judicious individuals who seem to have a good opinion of them.

I, however, do not. I think McKenna missed the target completely. It isn't the first time that some intrepid 'psychonaut' wandered into the wilderness of their own delusions, never to emerge into the clear light of reality again. In many ways, McKenna illustrates a profound lesson in the dangers of the well meaning, the well intended, who undertake to alter their consciousness by brute force--imbibing some concoction or other that must be metabolized and excreted by your own bio-chemistry; plunged into a non-ordinary state before the agents come out the other end.

When Freud descended into the personal unconscious, he carried his theory like a Gorgon's head to turn the Monsters that lived there to stone. Jung described his own theory as a kind of Ariadne's thread into the Labyrinth prowled by Minotaurs. McKenna seems to believe he has discovered a viable alternate reality camping out with these Denizens of the Deep. However, as the Gods seemed to make perfectly clear to him in the bitter end, reality, as the Buddha described, is truly a matrix of suffering, and sickness, of old age and death--not some fanciful nether dimension of elves and fairies and nanospheric dwarves welling up from the collective unconscious.

When the indigenous Americans undertook a vision quest--it was to give meaning to their life--it was to cultivate successful life strategies. It was never intended to detach them from the real world and lose them utterly in the Dreamtime--unable to hunt, fish, or engage an enemy. Fooling around with entheogens is truly dangerous in so many stark and subtle ways that doesn't even begin to be funny. Yes, you may find spiritual healing. Yes you may find personal transformation. But you may also lose your soul, damage your mind, break your compass, and crack your barometer. In other words, you may just end up bat-guano crazy, and act like you have no sense left whatsoever--like some warped and woofed Anti-Zen Master. The only reason anyone would ever subject themselves to those dangers should be to become a better person, a superior person, an Uber Mensch. Divorcing your cognitive framework from the 'real world' and getting lost in grandiose fantasy constructions of your own design is not the pathway to that destination. Ultimately, I regard McKenna as a pathetic figure who serves as a warning to those who would penetrate the heart of Darkness without any knowledge of the dangers that lurk there or strategies to mitigate the hair trigger potential for disaster.

The Devil in the Kitchen: Sex, Pain, Madness, and the Making of a Great Chef

Marco Pierre White

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Total reviews: 8 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

Marco Hates You 2 out of 5 stars.
5 of 5 people found this review helpful.

Marco Pierre White is the original rock and roll chef and the first person I'm aware of to consistently go into the dining room and tell people to shove off.

When I was on an ACF Jr. Culinary Olympic Team in the late 90s, this was not a fact we overlooked, and for it White was instantly a hero of ours. I grabbed up all his cookbooks; the best of which was the tough to find White Heat. Through it, we discovered strange foods like caul fat, that we, as young cooks, had never seen, had, or even heard of.

Needless to say, when I saw he was writing a biography, my interest was peaked.

There's a funny story in the book that sums it up for me. A Michelin 3 star chef dined at White's restaurant, and afterwards, came into the kitchen to say everything was great except the fish -- which was salty. White told the cook who prepared it to tell the chef to "F off".

White seems to tell everyone to "F" Off, and as interesting as this book was to me, a fan, I'm sad to say, overall, it is pretty poor. White has a tremendous ego, and comes off sounding like a real jerk that ruins every meaningful relationship he's ever been apart of both personally and in business.

Editorial Review:

Amazon Significant Seven, May 2007: Marco Pierre White made history as the most decorated chef in the UK and still holds the honor as the youngest chef ever to win three Michelin stars. Billed as a "brooding Byron" of the kitchen, MPW brought a punk-rock sensibility to his craft, shattering centuries-old rules of fine-dining tradition (and bruising many egos in the process) in his pursuit for perfection. He remains a searing influence on a generation of chefs who survived tours-of-duty in his kitchen brigade and those inspired by White Heat, his modern-classic cookbook (and now high-priced collector's item). In his absorbing culinary memoir, The Devil in the Kitchen, MPW offers intimate insights into his storied career presenting a larger-than-life portrait of a living legend and a culinary genius. --Brad Thomas Parsons

Alice Waters and Chez Panisse

Thomas McNamee

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 22 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Editorial Review:

You can't tell the story of Chez Panisse, Berkeley's famed restaurant, without relating that of its diminutive founder, proprietor, and sometime chef, Alice Waters. This is what Thomas McNamee does most handily in his Alice Waters and Chez Panisse, a chronicle that begins with the seat-of-the-pants opening night of the "counterculture" venture in 1971, and ends 35 years later with Waters's restaurant an American institution--one credited with birthing California Cuisine, a style devoted to simplicity, freshness and seasonality. The book also limns, with tasty gossip, the ever-evolving Chez Panisse family, including the cook-artisans uniquely responsible for dish creation; follows the attempts, mostly failed, to put the restaurant on sound financial footing; shows how dishes and menus get made; and of course pursues Waters as she broadens her commitment to "virtuous agriculture" by establishing ventures like The Edible Schoolyard and The Yale Sustainable Food Project.

The success of Chez Panisse--Gourmet magazine named it the best American restaurant in 2002--has everything to do with Waters, yet she remains an elusive protagonist. Sophisticated yet naive, professional and amateur, hard-driving but emotionally blurry, she invites reader interest but doesn't always satisfy it, as least as presented here. If McNamee cannot quite bring her to life, and if his tale lacks an insider's full conversance with his subject, he still engages readers in the considerable drama of people finding their way--blunderingly, with talented intent--to something new. With menus, narrated recipes, and photographs throughout, the book is vital reading for anyone interested in food, period. --Arthur Boehm

Mediterranean Summer: A Season on France's Cote d'Azur and Italy's Costa Bella

David Shalleck, Erol Munuz

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Total reviews: 19 Average rating: 5.0 of 5

Editorial Review:

“Saturday was dawning warm, with only a gentle wind under a light blue sky as we got under way. . . . With the motor cut out, I could hear the whispered splash of the sea against the hull as we knifed through the Mediterranean. The calming noise, along with the gentle rocking, lulled me into a Zen calm as I went about preparing the crew’s lunch. . . . By keeping just a couple of miles offshore, we had some beautiful sights to our starboard side: the harbor towns of La Napoule and quaint Théoule-sur-Mer, . . . the sensational coastline of the Corniche de l’Estérel. . . . All of this I could see through the porthole in the galley. . . . Italy was only a week away.”
La Dolce Vita at sea. . .

An alluring, evocative summer voyage on the Mediterranean and into the enchanting seaside towns of France’s Cote d’Azur and Italy’s Costa Bella by a young American chef aboard an Italian billionaire couple’s spectacular yacht.

Having begun his cooking career in some of New York’s and San Francisco’s best restaurants, David Shalleck undertakes a European culinary adventure, a quest to discover what it really means to be a chef through a series of demanding internships in Provence and throughout Italy. After four years, as he debates whether it is finally time to return stateside and pursue something more permanent, he stumbles on a rare opportunity: to become the chef on board Serenity, the classic sailing yacht owned by one of Italy’s most prominent couples. They present Shalleck with the ultimate challenge: to prepare all the meals for them and their guests for the summer, with no repeats, comprised exclusively of local ingredients that reflect the flavors of each port, presented flawlessly to the couple’s uncompromising taste— all from the confines of the yacht’s galley while at sea.

Serenity’s five-month journey starts on the French Riviera, continues along Italy’s western coast to Amalfi, crosses the Tyrrhenian Sea to Sardinia, up to Corsica, and back to St. Tropez for the season-ending regatta. Shalleck captures the glittery Riviera social scene, the distinctive sights and sounds of the unique ports along the way, the work hard/play hard life of being a crew member, and the challenges of producing world-class cuisine for the stylish and demanding owners and their guests. An intimate view of the most exclusive of worlds, Mediterranean Summer offers readers a new perspective on breathtaking places, a memorable portrait of old world elegance and life at sea, as well recipes and tips to recreate the delectable food.

Japanese Cooking: A Simple Art

Shizuo Tsuji, Yoshiki Tsuji

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 37 Average rating: 5.0 of 5

Editorial Review:

Japanese food was virtually unknown in many Western cities in the 1980s, when Shizuo Tsujii wrote Japanese Cooking: A Simple Art. M.F.K. Fisher's introduction eloquently sets the stage for Tsujii's classic work. It may be the most thought-provoking piece ever written about Japanese food for non-Asians, pointing out how food and even the physical act of eating differ from what they are in Japan. Tsujii's writing is clear and educational. He talks specifically to a Western, non-Asian audience, demonstrating far more awareness of our culinary preferences and prejudices than most Westerners have for his. Following the preface (which should not be skipped), an arrangement of color photos of key ingredients and dishes sets the scene. Next, part 1 provides a thorough explanation of techniques for Japanese cooking and instructions for making all the basic elements of dishes. These "lessons" cover cutting vegetables, steaming, grilling, and deep frying the Japanese way, and even how to make sushi. Recipes cover Basic Vinegar Salad Dressings, Sushi Rice, and Teriyaki. To prepare Vinegared Octopus, a complete series of drawings clearly demonstrates each step.

Part 2 consists solely of recipes. Gather together fresh ginger, soy sauce, the sweet wine mirin , sake, and rice vinegar and you can make many of them. Beginners might start with Deep Fried Chicken Patties, Steak Teriyaki, Tortoise Shell Tofu, simply bathed in a tasty sauce, and Asparagus Rice, a light and colorful dish. Because of its combination of background information, comprehensive recipes, and excellent instructions, Japanese Cooking: A Simple Art will always remain an important book for learning about this simple yet complex cuisine. --Dana Jacobi