Essays Books - Page 16

The Alice B. Toklas Cookbook

Alice B. Toklas

List Price: $14.95 By: The Lyons Press Amazon Marketplace: 13 new & used starting at $5.85

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 6 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Exquisite Recipes and Fun to read, too! 5 out of 5 stars.
24 of 25 people found this review helpful.

Ive been cooking with _Joy of Cooking_ for a long time now. _Joy_ makes reference to a chapter in this book, "Murder in the Kitchen," as a sort of primer on how to 'murder' a carp in the kitchen before cooking. I decided, on a whim, to buy the book.

I had no idea that having this new cookbook would be so rewarding!

Alice Toklas has some INCREDIBLE recipes in here (Scheherezade Melon being a favorite!), all of which should be tried and enjoyed.

Furthermore, this book contains recipes you simply wont find in other, newer, cookbooks. My girlfriend really summed this book up by suggesting that the recipes in this book are the recipes you know exist -- but are being passed from grandmother to granddaughter; you simply dont get these unless youre in that circle of people.

This cookbook is your way in to exquisite dishes that were prepared for the likes of Gertrude Stein, Hemmingway, Picasso, and Matisse.

That, and where else are you going to find a recipe for Hashish Fudge?

This book has my whole-hearted, overwhelming approval.

Editorial Review:

Toklas's rich mixture of menus and memories of meals shared with such famous friends as Wilder, Picasso, and Hemingway, originally published in 1954.

Educating Peter: How I Taught a Famous Movie Critic the Difference Between Cabernet and Merlot or How Anybody Can Become an (Almost) Instant Wine Expert

Lettie Teague

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 6 Average rating: 3.5 of 5

Editorial Review:

Lettie Teague knows wine. She has been the wine editor at Food & Wine magazine for almost a decade. The only question she is asked more than "Can you recommend a great wine for under $10?" -- great cheap white: Argiolas Costamolino Vermentino from Sardinia; great cheap red: Alamos Malbec from Argentina -- is "What is the best way to learn about wine?"

After many years of fielding these questions, Lettie was determined to debunk the myth that learning about wine is hard. She decided to find just one wine idiot and teach him a few fundamentals -- how to order off a restaurant wine list without fear, approach a wine merchant with confidence, and perhaps even score a few points off a wine snob.

Enter her neighbor, good friend and complete wine neophyte Peter Travers, Rolling Stone magazine's longtime film critic.

Peter Travers proved the perfect Eliza Doolittle to Lettie's Professor Higgins. As a film critic he made bold pronouncements ("This movie stinks," which could be readily translated to "This Cabernet tastes like Merlot") and exhibited a finely tuned visual sense ("The cinematography could be improved" could easily become "This wine is too white"). But, most important, Peter knew almost nothing about wine.

As Lettie begins their lessons, Peter puts down his ever-present glass of "fatty" Chardonnay and learns that there is a huge world out there full of all kinds of wine. He is taught to swirl his glass to release the wine's aromatic compounds -- or esters -- above the rim and vows, "I'm going to do that for Martin Scorsese next time I see him. I'll volatize my esters for him."

Thus Lettie enlightens her wine-challenged but film-savvy friend about the Facts of Wine: how to hold a glass; the vocabulary of wine; how wine is made; how to read labels; how to tell the difference between grape varieties; how to make sense of vintages; how to glean information about a wine simply by looking at the shape and color of the bottle; and an overview of the great wine regions of the Old World and the New.

Finally, after many fact-filled, hilarious lessons, Lettie takes Peter to the most famous American wine region of all, Napa Valley, where he hobnobs with wine and Hollywood royalty and finally puts his new skills to the test in the real world.

Part buddy movie, part serious wine tutorial, Educating Peter is as much a treat for oenophiles in on the joke as it is for beginners who think Chablis is a brand name of wine.

Eating My Words: An Appetite For Life

Mimi Sheraton

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

Editorial Review:

What's it like to be a food writer? What's it like dining at some of the world's best restaurants, as well as some of the worst? What's it like to share your opinion about food and restaurants with readers around the world?

Mimi Sheraton is one of the most renowned food writers and restaurant reviewers in the country. And perhaps the most frequently asked question is, How did she do it? Her response is simple: "Live my life." Now, in this entertaining and candid memoir, the doyenne of food critics provides a heartfelt and poignant look at the events of her extraordinary life.

A devoted journalist, Mimi's engaging style and meticulous research have made her the standard by which restaurant reviewing and food criticism in the United States is measured. In EATING MY OWN WORDS, she describes how she developed her passion for writing about food and travel. Witty and straightforward, Mimi takes you on an engrossing journey of memorable meals, unforgettable people and outrageous experiences. Travel with Mimi from her childhood growing up in a food-loving Brooklyn family with a very demanding mother ("You call that a chicken?") and a father in the wholesale fruit and vegetable business, through her college years in Manhattan and her rise to fame.

Best known for her work as the restaurant critic at the NEW YORK TIMES, Mimi relates her experiences from how she landed the job there to why she left eight years later. As a journalist, she has tasted and reported on some of the world's finest cuisine, including three-starred French restaurants, and on some of the most dismal food imaginable, from hospital and public school meals to the often unrecognizable fare served in airplanes and fast food chains.

Forthright and never afraid to be controversial, Mimi talks about the importance of a reviewer's anonymity and the excitement of making a new culinary discovery like the now notorious Rao's, and then sharing it through her writing. She reveals some of her most challenging moments, right down to a masked appearance on French television with several well-known French chefs that ended in a mini-brawl.

Fueled by her passion for food, wine and travel, Mimi Sheraton's memoir is a degustation that is as engaging as it is enlightening. A true reflection of this bon vivant's voracious appetite for life, EATING MY OWN WORDS is an irresistible treat you will savor word by word ... and will feel utterly satisfied.

Consuming Passions: A Food-Obsessed Life

Michael Lee West

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 31 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

My Most-Used Cookbook 5 out of 5 stars.
4 of 4 people found this review helpful.

This book is super, it's full of great stories about wonderful food. I've got a ton of cookbooks and this is the one I use the most. My favorite recipes are the Sweet Potato Souffle, Mashed Potato salad and Egg Salad recipes. I get compliments every time I serve these dishes to people.

I love the stories that accompany these recipes, it's like a lovely piece of history I savor as I eat the yummy food I cooked!

PS I'm a vegetarian and still find this to be a great resource for yummy food. I highly recommend it for anyone who enjoys good food and sentimental, funny stories.

Editorial Review:

Consuming Passions is Michael Lee West's delightfully quirky memoir of an adventurous life centered around food and family—the story of how she went from non-cook to gourmet of words and victuals by watching a multitude of relatives squabble, prepare sumptuous repasts, and carry on honored traditions. Laced with delicious secret recipes passed from generation to generation, West's irresistible chronicle recalls good times and wild times—mothers swinging from chandeliers, elderly aunts brewing up love potions, a South American nymphomaniac stirring up trouble at a Louisiana barbeque joint, and the spooky hauntings of a cabbage-eating ghost—all in the pursuit of good dining. Thoroughly entertaining, alive with West's distinctive humor and sharp, irrepressible insight, here are incomparable American kitchen tales as warm and tasty as freshly baked bread.

Fried: Surviving Two Centuries in Restaurants

Steve Lerach

Amazon Price: $17.21 List Price: $22.95 Usually ships in 24 hours By: Borealis Books Amazon Marketplace: 26 new & used starting at $14.45

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Total reviews: 3 Average rating: 5.0 of 5

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.

A Tale of 12 Kitchens: Family Cooking in Four Countries

Jake Tilson

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 1 Average rating: 5.0 of 5

Editorial Review:

Reading this remarkable cookbook-cum-scrapbook by Jake Tilson is like encountering a wonderful friend you haven't seen in years, and setting off together on a culinary journey through four countries to cook and have myriad happy experiences, and meet scores of fascinating people along the way.

It might be a monk singing an awe-inspiring rendition of "Ave Maria" in a family-run restaurant in Cortona, Italy, or a master pancake flipper at a breakfast haven in New York City. Or a recipe for the divine gnocchi-like spinach dumplings served in Tuscany.

With eighty recipes that are far-ranging and delicious, you'll learn to make black beans the Dominican way, couscous in the Tunisian fashion, and burritos flavored with Mexican beer and a chipotle chile.

And as you cook your way through his book, you'll fall in love with Jake's artistic family and their obsession with cooking and eating. Great characters all and, like many of us, as likely to spend their vacations wandering food markets as museums, then returning home with overweight luggage crammed full of local foods.

Anyone who thinks twice about tossing out a food can with a great label, who treasures stubs and receipts from travel for the experiences they evoke, or who feels nostalgic for kitchens of the past, will find a kindred soul in these pages.

And if you're someone without an urge to collect, or who'd just as soon stay and cook closer to home, you will be every bit as delighted with this dazzling collection of recipes.

Tilson presents his recipes in a remarkably original way. Subtly embedded in his wonderful descriptions, in tales told in his very engaging prose, is the reminder that cooking, sharing and eating meals with family and friends is of utmost importance in our lives.

We Are What We Eat: Ethnic Food and the Making of Americans

Donna R. Gabaccia

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Total reviews: 3 Average rating: 3.0 of 5

Editorial Review:

Ghulam Bombaywala sells bagels in Houston. Demetrios dishes up pizza in Connecticut. The Wangs serve tacos in Los Angeles. How ethnicity has influenced American eating habits--and thus, the make-up and direction of the American cultural mainstream--is the story told in We Are What We Eat. It is a complex tale of ethnic mingling and borrowing, of entrepreneurship and connoisseurship, of food as a social and political symbol and weapon--and a thoroughly entertaining history of our culinary tradition of multiculturalism.

The story of successive generations of Americans experimenting with their new neighbors' foods highlights the marketplace as an important arena for defining and expressing ethnic identities and relationships. We Are What We Eat follows the fortunes of dozens of enterprising immigrant cooks and grocers, street hawkers and restaurateurs who have cultivated and changed the tastes of native-born Americans from the seventeenth century to the present. It also tells of the mass corporate production of foods like spaghetti, bagels, corn chips, and salsa, obliterating their ethnic identities. The book draws a surprisingly peaceful picture of American ethnic relations, in which "Americanized" foods like Spaghetti-Os happily coexist with painstakingly pure ethnic dishes and creative hybrids.

Donna Gabaccia invites us to consider: If we are what we eat, who are we? Americans' multi-ethnic eating is a constant reminder of how widespread, and mutually enjoyable, ethnic interaction has sometimes been in the United States. Amid our wrangling over immigration and tribal differences, it reveals that on a basic level, in the way we sustain life and seek pleasure, we are all multicultural.

A Taste of Ancient Rome

Ilaria Gozzini Giacosa

List Price: $35.00 By: University Of Chicago Press Amazon Marketplace: 15 new & used starting at $11.68

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 8 Average rating: 5.0 of 5

Delicious recipes and a fascinating look at ancient Rome 5 out of 5 stars.
22 of 25 people found this review helpful.

I bought "A Taste of Ancient Rome" more out of historical interest than out of any real desire to prepare foods in the Roman style. One day, though, I ended up being given six frozen mallard ducks, and one of the recipes in this book, Duck with Turnips, caught my eye. I tried it, and it was absolutely amazing. Since that day I've prepared over half of the recipes in this book, and I've found most of them to be delicious, easy to prepare, and economical.

One of the more enjoyable facets of international cooking is seeing how cooks from different cultures meld flavours in a way most of us in North America would never think of. The recipes in this book contain many combinations that would seem to us to be insane. Duck with turnips? Cream of wheat or spelt with a ham bone? Cantaloupe with garlic and pepper? Tuna steak with dates? These blends sounds very bizarre, but they all work, and work well.

The writer has included a few recipes which couldn't be prepared in our time (such as the recipe calling for parrot!) simply to show the decadence of first-century Rome. But what surprised me the most about the other recipes is how many of them are absolutely accessible to the modern chef. One reason for this is the fact that the ingredients unfamiliar to us can for the most part be easily substituted with ingredients we have on hand. Apparently, even some Romans (Pliny the Elder, for instance) hated garum and substituted salt, so it's not inauthentic for us to do so. Another reason is simply that we still eat many of the foods the Romans did. Although they didn't have pasta, tomatoes, potatoes, soy, corn, or any of the other foods borrowed from the Far East or the New World, they did have most of the meats, fruits, nuts, and vegetables we eat on a daily basis.

That said, this book is not for everybody. There seems to be a subset of North Americans who eat nothing but conventional, middle-of-the-road food and who have no interest in anything the least bit unusual or new. If you shop for all your groceries at Wal-Mart, if you turn down any food that isn't aggressively conservative as being weird, foreign, or disgusting, and if TGIFridays or Appleby's is your idea of a really good restaurant, you probably won't enjoy this book. However, if you are able to go beyond your food comfort level and especially if you're interested in how people ate 2,000 years ago, A Taste of Ancient Rome might be for you.

Editorial Review:

From appetizers to desserts, the rustic to the refined, here are more than two hundred recipes from ancient Rome tested and updated for today's tastes. With its intriguing sweet-sour flavor combinations, its lavish use of fresh herbs and fragrant spices, and its base in whole grains and fruits and vegetables, the cuisine of Rome will be a revelation to serious cooks ready to create new dishes in the spirit of an ancient culture.

How I Learned to Cook: Culinary Educations from the World's Greatest Chefs

Kimberly Witherspoon, Peter Meehan

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

Good read with a few bumps along the road! 3 out of 5 stars.
3 of 4 people found this review helpful.

This book provides short autobiographical sketches by some of the most well known and award winning chefs of our time. It allows the reader to peek into some of the formative experiences that drew them into the culinary world. A great book for a teenager pondering on career choices and decision making. The inner motivation to go after what you want, the ability to recognize ones own boundaries, the willingness to suffer now to reach a future goal, and other such character building lessons come through clearly.

The one thing I found distasteful was the inexplicable need for some of these world class chefs to frequently spew out verbal filth. I just don't understand this. Reading such chapters (thank goodness there are only a few!), I almost think that these chefs believe that the way to prove their superiority is by splashing the pages with trashy words. After reading their chapters I actually have less interest in knowing more about them or their cooking.

Editorial Review:

From the editors of the internationally critically acclaimed Don't Try This At Home,  stories by forty of the world's great chefs about how they learned their craft -- not in the confines of culinary school, but in the  inspiring and sometimes death-defying moments of trial-and-error that can happen anytime, anywhere.  Hilarious, touching, and always surprising, they cover everything from early adversity to career-making triumphs. How I Learned to Cook is an irresistible treat for cooks (and foodies) of all abilities, and includes stories by such culinary giants as Ferran Adria, Mario Batali, Anthony Bourdain, Gabrielle Hamilton, Suzanne Goin, Eric Ripert, and more... 

Last Chance to Eat: The Fate of Taste in a Fast Food World

Gina Mallet

Amazon Price: $25.95 List Price: $25.95 Usually ships in 24 hours By: W. W. Norton & Company Amazon Marketplace: 50 new & used starting at $0.54

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 13 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Left, Right, and Center-Cut 3 out of 5 stars.
5 of 6 people found this review helpful.

Attempting to get a book published under the banner "people don't eat right"--even with great gobs of anecdotal evidence--would probably elicit little enthusiasm from potential publishers. Who wants to be scolded, especially about all those Big Macs you're tucking away? Ah, but wrap this theme around a weighty political or social commentary theme--say, people don't even know what food *tastes* like anymore and evil forces are conspiring to keep it that way--and you might have something to sink your teeth into. Consciously or not, Gina Mallet is in a scolding mood in "Last Chance to Eat" and while I appreciated her broadsides against food hypocrisy the barely-concealed "you people don't know what's good for you" tone was often hard to, well, stomach.

This perspective sours, for me, an otherwise superb extended essay on good, basic food and why we love it. The author is at her lamenting best when skewering nonsensical food regulation; the bit on a chapter dedicated to eggs (`The Imperiled Egg') displays in naked terms how the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and other bureaucratic dimwits drove the egg market to the point of extinction--for absolutely no scientific reason. This expose comes after a long paean to eggs in history, how gourmands from Escoffier to Julie Child have feted them, how wonderfully nutritious they are (eaten *properly*, of course), and segueing into their ill-deserved bad rap. Ms. Mallet's equally loving descriptions of beef, fish, cheese, and produce clearly show her love of The Real Deal; it's when she starts tut-tutting what's happened to the apparently glorious near-past of cuisine that she loses me.

Simply put, Mallet's gripes against her imagined food villains--the FDA excepted--hold little water (primary source references and research--not to mention footnotes--are nowhere to be found) and undercut the backside of her argument: that good food and "taste" are imperiled in our fast food/agri-business-dominated culinary wasteland. That a huge food conglomerate may strive to extend irrational bans on unpasteurized cheese, for example, might be no surprise. But to rely on "my friend Guy" as an authority (hey, he lives in *Paris*!) on the evils of big food business doesn't pump me with confidence. (For good measure we find Guy's politics are hardly confined to the food business: the cheese chapter culminates with a bizarre non-sequitor that importing can't be more diverse because according to him "this is all about trade." I've heard plenty of unsupported anti-trade arguments but this reaches a new low.)

The author uses a family narrative context--interspersed with interesting recipes--to present her arguments. This works reasonably well, though the uniqueness of her youthful experiences (daughter of a director of luxury hotels!) makes cozying up to her culinary perspective a bit difficult at times. Harder to swallow is the relentless "Philistine America steamrolling Noble France" subtext that I hope will even bore the French before too much longer.

Given how politically charged all our lives have become--from what we drive to what toilet paper we use--I appreciated Gina Mallet's attempt to stake out the high ground on food. (I like to think it's mine too.) When she stays optimistic--relating family stories, history, and her clear love of good food--I found her book very enjoyable and even inspiring. It's most of her pessimistic side--especially some very ill-informed economic rants--that drag down an otherwise intriguing effort.

Editorial Review:

Drawing on enough culinary experiences to fill several lifetimes, Mallet's irreverent memoir combines recollections of meals and their milieus with recipes and tasting tips.