Essays Books - Page 12

The Amish Cook: Recollections and Recipes from an Old Order Amish Family

Elizabeth Coblentz, Kevin Williams

Amazon Price: $18.45 List Price: $27.95 Usually ships in 24 hours By: Ten Speed Press Amazon Marketplace: 34 new & used starting at $10.94

Buy at Amazon.com

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

Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 16 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Like always, "The Amish Cook" is great! 5 out of 5 stars.
1 of 1 people found this review helpful.

If you are a fan, as I am, of the weekly Amish Cook newspaper column, this is a must-have for you. There are stories and tidbits of the column and daily life, as well as the recipes. If you like "The Amish Cook," stories about Amish life, or Amish recipes, this book has you covered x 3!! Get it! You'll love it!!!

Editorial Review:

The Amish Cook

Recollections and Recipes from an Old Order Amish Family by Elizabeth Coblentz with Kevin Williams

Ten years ago, aspiring newspaper editor Kevin Williams convinced Elizabeth Coblentz, an Old Order Amish wife and mother, to write a weekly cooking column called "The Amish Cook." Each week Elizabeth shares a family recipe and discusses daily life on her Indiana farm, spent with husband, Ben, and their eight children and 32 grandchildren. THE AMISH COOK, a full-color cookbook based on Elizabeth's columns, compiles more than 75 traditional Amish recipes, photographs of the Coblentz farm, practical gardening tips, cherished family tales, and firsthand accounts of traditional Amish events like corn-husking bees and barn raisings. A truly unique collaboration between a simple Amish grandmother and a modern-day newspaperman, THE AMISH COOK is a poignant and authentic look at a disappearing way of life.

Culinary Tourism (Material Worlds)

Amazon Price: $28.00 List Price: $35.00 Usually ships in 24 hours By: University Press of Kentucky Amazon Marketplace: 15 new & used starting at $20.40

Buy at Amazon.com

Browse similar items by category:
Subjects -> Business & Investing -> General
Subjects -> Business & Investing -> Industries & Professions -> Hospitality, Travel & Tourism
Subjects -> Cooking, Food & Wine -> Gastronomy -> Essays

Editorial Review:

The lure of exotic food has motivated many people to travel and the tourism industry thrives on providing the utmost dining experiences—either of new and exotic foods, or of authentic foods from a particular culture or region, or even of familiar foods, comforting, consistent and safe to the traveler. Such exploration can occur in a variety of venues: restaurants, festivals, grocery stores, and cooking classes. While food has always been central to traveling, culinary tourism can happen in less exotic settings, through the procurement, preservation, preparation, presentation, and performance of food.

Culinary Tourism is the first book to consider food as both a destination and a means for tourism. Consuming, or possibly just tasting, exotic foods can be the ultimate goal of a tourist's experience, but food can also serve as a way for tourists to explore other cultures. The book's contributors, widely recognized by food experts, examine the many intersections of food, culture and tourism in public and commercial contexts, in private and domestic settings, and around the world.

Just as movies, books, postcards, and memories take us to other places, food also takes us to other realms of experience, allowing us to enjoy diverse cultures from the comfort of home. Restaurants, cookbooks, televised cooking shows, food magazines, recipe sections in newspapers, and even reality television shows, such as "Survivor" and "Fear Factor," allow us to tour the foodways of other cultures. Culinary Tourism provides a taste of such adventures.

Southern Belly: The Ultimate Food Lover's Companion to the South

John T. Edge

Amazon Price: $10.17 List Price: $14.95 Usually ships in 24 hours By: Algonquin Books Amazon Marketplace: 39 new & used starting at $2.94

Buy at Amazon.com

Browse similar items by category:
Subjects -> Cooking, Food & Wine -> Gastronomy -> Essays
Subjects -> Cooking, Food & Wine -> Regional & International -> U.S. Regional -> South
Subjects -> Travel -> Reference & Tips -> Food & Lodging -> Dining

Editorial Review:

John T. Edge, "the Faulkner of Southern food" (the Miami Herald), reveals a South hidden in plain sight, where restaurants boast family pedigrees and serve supremely local specialties found nowhere else. From backdoor home kitchens to cinder-block cafés, he introduces you to cooks who have been standing tall by the stove since Eisenhower was in office. While revealing the stories behind their food, he shines a bright light on places that have become Southern institutions.

In this fully updated and expanded edition, with recipes throughout, Edge travels from chicken shack to fish camp, from barbecue stand to pie shed. Pop this handy paperback in the glove box to take along on your next road trip. And even if you never get in the car, you'll enjoy the most savory history that the South has to offer.

Feeding a Yen: Savoring Local Specialties, from Kansas City to Cuzco

Calvin Trillin

Amazon Price: $11.16 List Price: $13.95 Usually ships in 24 hours By: Random House Trade Paperbacks Amazon Marketplace: 56 new & used starting at $0.01

Buy at Amazon.com

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

Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 7 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Editorial Review:

Calvin Trillin has never been a champion of the “continental cuisine” palaces he used to refer to as La Maison de la Casa House. What he treasures is the superb local specialty. And he will go anywhere to find one. As it happens, some of his favorite dishes can be found only in their place of origin. Join Trillin on his charming, funny culinary adventures as he samples fried marlin in Barbados and the barbecue of his boyhood in Kansas City. Travel alongside as he hunts for the authentic fish taco, and participates in a “boudin blitzkrieg” in the part of Louisiana where people are accustomed to buying these spicy sausages and polishing them off in the parking lot. (“Cajun boudin not only doesn’t get outside the state, it usually doesn’t even get home.”) In New York, Trillin even tries to use a glorious local specialty, the bagel, to lure his daughters back from California. Feeding a Yen is a delightful reminder of why New York magazine called Calvin Trillin “our funniest food writer.”

Fried: Surviving Two Centuries in Restaurants

Steve Lerach

Amazon Price: $15.61 List Price: $22.95 By: Borealis Books

Buy at Amazon.com

Browse similar items by category:
Subjects -> Biographies & Memoirs -> Arts & Literature -> Authors
Subjects -> Biographies & Memoirs -> General
Subjects -> Biographies & Memoirs -> Memoirs

Editorial Review:

For two hundred years, a rogues' gallery of chefs, line cooks, and dishwashers have slaved away, largely unseen, to serve the dining public. Their pedigrees reach back to the first restaurants during the reign of France's Louis XVI and extend to the Delmonico brothers in New York, Escoffier in Paris, and, in Fried: Surviving Two Centuries in Restaurants, a renegade cook in Minneapolis walking like a duck with a whole, raw salmon on his head. Author and professional chef Steve Lerach first stepped through the swinging kitchen doors when he was in high school, starting as a dishwasher, and he never left. He introduces us to an old potwasher who did time for bootlegging, a stuttering Irish chef who collected funds for the bomb throwers of the IRA, and a gay Vietnam vet who found a measure of acceptance only in restaurants. Lerach humorously and poignantly interweaves restaurant legend and lore with his own experiences, exposing similarities not only of profession but of the diverse characters who work the back of the house. Though funny and simply fun to read, these tales often end in tragedy, as various actors succumb to their excesses. Lerach serves up glimpses of the hard work, camaraderie, and satisfaction that distinguish careers in what may arguably be called the world's second-oldest profession. Steve Lerach worked for over thirty years in the food industry, eventually running twelve kitchens at the University of Minnesota. He now teaches aspiring chefs at the Art Institutes International Minnesota.

Michael Broadbent's Vintage Wine

Michael Broadbent

Amazon Price: $37.80 List Price: $60.00 Usually ships in 24 hours By: Harcourt Amazon Marketplace: 35 new & used starting at $3.09

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 -> Drinks & Beverages -> Wine -> Collecting

Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 7 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Editorial Review:

Unquestionably unique, demonstrably delightful, Michael Broadbent's Vintage Wine is the culmination of one of the most extraordinary careers in the world of wine. Michael Broadbent quite possibly knows more about fine, old wines than anyone else alive, and he writes about them with unparalleled expertise.
Hired by Christie's in 1966 to revive their wine auctions, Broadbent threw himself into his work, searching out great collections of the world's finest wine--and keeping meticulous tasting notes. Here are evocations of Chateau d'Yquem from 1784--one of Thomas Jefferson's favorites--and hundreds of vintages and thousands of wines right up to the present.
Years of "cellars visited and pillaged, involving the checking and packing of dust- and grime-laden bottles in distinctly dank and chilly conditions," jet-set auctions around the world, legendary tastings and society events, have all helped to create an unrivalled store of vinous anecdotes as well as an unsurpassed wine-tasting history.


EXCERPT

From a tasting of 1784 Chateau Yquem:
"The most renowned vintage of the late 18th century and well-documented thanks mainly to the original copies of the letters and orders of Thomas Jefferson. . . . Jefferson did not trust wine merchants and insisted on bottling at the chateau. . . . The wine has a warm mahogany-amber colour with a pronounced yellow-green rim. Initially, the nose, unsurprisingly, was creakingly old but after fifteen minutes settled down to reveal a remarkably rich, tangy, honeyed scent."

Don't Try This at Home: Culinary Catastrophes from the World's Greatest Chefs

Amazon Price: $11.96 List Price: $14.95 Usually ships in 24 hours By: Bloomsbury USA Amazon Marketplace: 49 new & used starting at $1.99

Buy at Amazon.com

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

Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 25 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

This just makes the rest of us feel better... 5 out of 5 stars.
4 of 6 people found this review helpful.

This is a must have for home cooks, would-be chefs, and people who just love the kitchen. In this humorous collection of stories, many chefs that have no reached the pinnacle of their careers share tales and snippets of life that include moments they were less than perfect. How many of us have ruined a dish by putting too much salt in the pot, or burned a turkey (or served one raw)? Turns out those sins are mild compared to some of the things these gods of food have done.

So many of the stories are just funny, you'll find yourself laughing out loud.

Sometimes when you watch cooking shows, or eat at a 5 star restaurant, it's easy to be intimidated by Chefs that seem to have perfected this craft. But this book will remind you that they have their off days as well, and that the gods of cuisine are just as human as the rest of us.

Highly recommended for everyone. Even if you don't cook, or aren't a foodie, this book is just funny.

Editorial Review:

Finally in paperback, the hugely popular anthology in which forty of the world’s greatest chefs, including Anthony Bourdain, Daniel Boulud, and Ferrán Adrià, reveal their worst kitchen disasters.

From Gabrielle Hamilton on hiring a blind line cook to Michel Richard on rescuing a wrecked cake to Eric Ripert on being the clumsiest waiter in the room, these behind-the-scenes accounts are as wildly entertaining as they are revealing. A delicious reminder that even the chefs we most admire aren’t always perfect, Don't Try This at Home is a hilarious must-have for anyone who’s ever burned dinner.

Feed the Hungry: A Memoir with Recipes

Nani Power

Amazon Price: $15.64 List Price: $23.00 Usually ships in 24 hours By: Free Press Amazon Marketplace: 44 new & used starting at $2.87

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: 1 Average rating: 5.0 of 5

Editorial Review:

An author whose fiction has been praised by Mary Gaitskill ("Passionate, intelligent, and piercingly beautiful...an altogether striking debut") and Darcy Steinke ("Nani Power...shows that sensuality pervades all of life and is too powerful to be contained in the bedroom alone"), Nani Power turns her incredible storytelling talents to memoir, crafting a sublime work of nonfiction centered around a life of travel, eclectic dining, and dealing with her decidedly eccentric Southern bohemian family.

Consumption is the real American pastime. Through the prism of food, we all see our pasts differently. Like the finest food writers, Power brings readers directly into her world through the evocative depiction of the experience of eating. From her childhood on a rambling farm in Virginia -- during which she witnessed a saga of fighting, disowning, silencing, and other regrettable acts -- to her peripatetic and international adult life, Power's reflections are surprising, enthralling, and entertaining. She has a deep understanding of the cuisines of Peru and Mexico, Iran and India; her stints as a sandwich seller in Rio, a waitress in the East Village, a funeral caterer in the Deep South, and on a food junket to Japan all seem familiar as she relates each experience to us through its cuisine. A wealth of detailed recipes throughout the book offer a chance to recreate Power's memories in perpetuity.

Lyrical and uplifting, unflinching and brave, Feed the Hungry is a supple, evocative memoir of food, travel, Americana, and family history, written with all the creativity, tenderness, grit, and verve we have come to expect from this uncommonly gifted writer.

Among Friends

M. F. K. Fisher

Amazon Price: $11.25 List Price: $15.00 Usually ships in 24 hours By: Shoemaker & Hoard Amazon Marketplace: 43 new & used starting at $2.00

Buy at Amazon.com

Browse similar items by category:
Subjects -> Biographies & Memoirs -> Arts & Literature -> Authors
Subjects -> Biographies & Memoirs -> General
Subjects -> Biographies & Memoirs -> Family & Childhood

Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 4 Average rating: 3.5 of 5

Editorial Review:

Originally published in 1970, Among Friends provides a fascinating glimpse into the background and development of one of our most delightful and best-loved writers, Mary Frances Kennedy Fisher — the woman who elevated food writing to a literary art. In Among Friends M. F. K. Fisher begins her recollections in Albion, Michigan, but they soon lead her to Whittier, California, where her family moved in 1912, when she was four. The “Friends” of the title range from the hobos who could count on food at the family’s back door to the businessmen who advertised in Father’s paper—but above all they are the Quakers who were the prominent group in Whittier. Mary Frances Kennedy found them unusual friends indeed: in the more than forty years that she lived in Whittier she was never invited inside a Friend’s house. Her portraits of her father, Rex—her mentor, himself the editor of the local newspaper—her mother, Edith, and the other members of her family are memorable and moving.

Talking with My Mouth Full: Crab Cakes, Bundt Cakes, and Other Kitchen Stories

Bonny Wolf

Amazon Price: $11.16 List Price: $13.95 Usually ships in 24 hours By: St. Martin's Griffin Amazon Marketplace: 30 new & used starting at $3.05

Buy at Amazon.com

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

Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 9 Average rating: 5.0 of 5

Editorial Review:

“As reassuring as a big bowl of buttery mashed potatoes…a delicious read.”

—Library Journal

What and how do American families really eat? Bonny Wolf writes about the great regional and family food traditions in this country—birthday cake and dinner party food, hearty American breakfasts and Fourth of July picnic dishes. In Talking with My Mouth Full, she writes stories about food, and also about the people who eat it.

Many of the delightful national treasures Wolf writes about—bundt cake, barbecue, roast chicken, fair food—are timeless. Each chapter, whether it’s about true regional specialties like Minnesota’s wild rice, Texas’ Blue Bell ice cream or Maryland’s famous crab cakes or about family favorites like noodle pudding or Irish raisin soda bread, ends with a perfectly chosen group of recipes, tantalizing and time-tested.

In the tradition of Laurie Colwin’s Home Cooking, Talking with My Mouth Full is a book you will turn to over and over for wonderful food writing and recipes for comfort food, a great nosh, or the ideal covered dish to take to a potluck supper.

“Charming, lighthearted…refreshingly accessible.”—Publishers Weekly
“Savory collection of essays.”—Washington Post
“Delightful.”—Austin Chronicle