Essays Books - Page 7

America Eats!: On the Road with the WPA - the Fish Fries, Box Supper Socials, and Chitlin Feasts That Define Real American Food

Pat Willard

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

Editorial Review:

What the Sterns did for road food, Pat Willard does for festive American group eating in this exploration of our national cuisine, with a never-before-published WPA manuscript as her guide.
In America Eats! Pat Willard takes readers on a journey into the regional nooks and crannies of American cuisine where WPA writers—including Eudora Welty, Saul Bellow, Ralph Ellison, and Nelson Algren, among countless others—were dispatched in 1935 to document the roots of our diverse culinary cuisine. With the unpublished WPA manuscript as her guide, Willard visits the sites of American food’s past glory to rediscover the vibrant foundation of America’s traditional cuisine. She visits a booyah cook-off in Minnesota, a political feast in Mississippi, a watermelon festival in Oklahoma, and a sheepherders ball in Idaho, to name a few. Featuring recipes and never-before-seen photos, including those from the WPA by Dorothea Lange, Ben Shahn, and Marion Post Wolcott, America Eats! is a glowing celebration of American food, past and present.

Real Men Cook: More Than 100 Easy Recipes Celebrating Tradition and Family

K. Kofi Moyo

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

Editorial Review:

A delicious, heartwarming collection of soul-stirring stories and soul-satisfying recipes, from real men who do it in the kitchen!

Every Father's Day, men -- from the guy next door to politicians, entrepreneurs, athletes, and artists -- gather together in cities across the country to participate in Real Men Cook for Charity events. It has become the largest Father's Day charity event in the United States, raising over a million dollars for charities such as the Boys & Girls Clubs of America, the YMCA, and Real Men Charities, Inc., for various family and health initiatives.

Now, some of the remarkable Real Men Cook volunteers have come forward to express their love of cooking, family, and community by sharing more than one hundred delectable recipes (some handed down over the generations) and the memories that inspire them to live as Real Men. A unique book with a priceless legacy that will nourish your family in body and spirit.

American Food Writing: An Anthology: With Classic Recipes

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 11 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

Editorial Review:

In a groundbreaking new anthology, celebrated food writer Molly O'Neill gathers the very best from over 250 years of American culinary history. This literary feast includes classic accounts of iconic American foods: Henry David Thoreau on the delights of watermelon; Herman Melville, with a mouth-watering chapter on clam chowder; H. L. Mencken on the hot dog; M.F.K. Fisher in praise of the oyster; Ralph Ellison on the irresistible appeal of baked yam; William Styron on Southern fried chicken. American writers abroad, like A. J. Liebling, Waverly Root, and Craig Claiborne, describe the revelations they found in foreign restaurants; travellers to America, including the legendary French gourmet J. A. Brillat-Savarin, discover such native delicacies as turkey, Virginia barbecue, and pumpkin pie. Great chefs and noted critics discuss their culinary philosophies and offer advice on the finer points of technique; home cooks recount disasters and triumphs. A host of eminent American writers, from Nathaniel Hawthorne, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and Walt Whitman to Thomas Wolfe, Willa Cather, and Langston Hughes, add their distinctive viewpoints to the mix.

American Food Writing celebrates the astonishing variety of American foodways, with accounts from almost every corner of the country and a host of ethnic traditions: Dutch, Cuban, French, Italian, Jewish, Chinese, Irish, Indian, Scandinavian, Native American, African, English, Japanese, and Mexican. A surprising range of subjects and perspectives emerge, as writers address such topics as fast food, hunger, dieting, and the relationship between food and sex. James Villas offers a behind-the-scenes look at gourmet dining through a waiter's eyes; Anthony Bourdain recalls his days at the Culinary Institute of America; Julia Child remembers the humble beginnings of her much-loved television series; Nora Ephron chronicles internecine warfare among members of the "food establishment;" Michael Pollan explores what the label "organic" really means.

Throughout the anthology are more than 50 classic recipes, selected after extensive research from cookbooks both vintage and modern, and certain to instruct, delight, and inspire home chefs.

Mangoes & Curry Leaves: Culinary Travels Through the Great Subcontinent

Jeffrey Alford, Naomi Duguid

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 19 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Excellenet! 5 out of 5 stars.
15 of 16 people found this review helpful.

I just got this book yesterday and I'm already planning my week's meals based on the recipes! :)
I've made Andhra Style Scrambled Eggs so far and they are DELICIOUS, especially served with plain basmati rice, ghee and pickle.
All the recipes in here sound very interesting. The dal recipes(tok dal and mountain dal) look like they'll turn out great.
Being an Indian, I can certify this book contains authentic recipes that people cook and eat everyday at their homes in India. This is what makes this cookbook different from the other so called Indian cookbooks....the other books just offer a westernized Indian selection while this book focuses on home cooking that is prevalent in India.
The previous reviewer perhaps eats Indian only at restaurants where everything is over spiced and the delicate flavor is lost. I just came back from visiting India and I saw that very less spices and masalas are used in rural Indian homes.
I LOVE this book and will always refer to it when I'm in the mood for some different Indian food...although I cook mostly Indian at home, this book offers a lot of different recipes and variations from various local regions....so much so that I'm sure I'll be proficient in Indian cooking in no time!

UPDATE: These are all the recipes I've tried from their book so far
1) Scrambled Eggs (5 stars)
2) Cachoombar (3 stars)
3) Cauliflower Dum (3 stars)
4) Tamarind Pulao (3 stars)
5) Bangla Dal with a hit of lime (4 stars)
6) Tilapia Green Fish Curry (5 stars)
7) Karnataka Chana (2 stars)
8) Hot Cucumber Salad (2 stars)
9) Fish Bolle Curry (3 stars)
10) Chappatis (3 stars)
11) Prawn White Curry (4 stars)
12) Eggs with curry leaves (4 stars)

Editorial Review:

For this companion volume to the award-winning Hot Sour Salty Sweet, Jeffrey Alford and Naomi Duguid travel west from Southeast Asia to that vast landmass the colonial British called the Indian Subcontinent. It includes not just India, but extends north to Pakistan, Bangladesh, and Nepal and as far south as Sri Lanka, the island nation so devastated by the recent tsunami. For people who love food and cooking, this vast region is a source of infinite variety and eye-opening flavors.

Home cooks discover the Tibetan-influenced food of Nepal, the Southeast Asian tastes of Sri Lanka, the central Asian grilled meats and clay-oven breads of the northwest frontier, the vegetarian cooking of the Hindus of southern India and of the Jain people of Gujarat. It was just twenty years ago that cooks began to understand the relationships between the multifaceted cuisines of the Mediterranean; now we can begin to do the same with the foods of the Subcontinent.

Gumbo Tales: Finding My Place at the New Orleans Table

Sara Roahen

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 15 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Editorial Review:

Celebrating New Orleans' food culture, one specialty at a time.

A cocktail is more than a segue to dinner when it's a Sazerac, an anise-laced drink of rye whiskey and bitters indigenous to New Orleans. For Wisconsin native Sara Roahen, a Sazerac is also a fine accompaniment to raw oysters, a looking glass into the cocktail culture of her own family—and one more way to gain a foothold in her beloved adopted city.

Roahen's stories of personal discovery introduce readers to New Orleans' well-known signatures—gumbo, po-boys, red beans and rice—and its lesser-known gems: the pho of its Vietnamese immigrants, the braciolone of its Sicilians, and the ya-ka-mein of its street culture. By eating and cooking her way through a place as unique and unexpected as its infamous turducken, Roahen finds a home. And then Katrina. With humor, poignancy, and hope, she conjures up a city that reveled in its food traditions before the storm—and in many ways has been saved by them since.

Honey from a Weed (The Cook's Classic Library)

Patience Gray

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

A rare treasure 5 out of 5 stars.
21 of 21 people found this review helpful.

This is a wonderful book, a true and rare treasure, full of hunger and appetite, joy and toil. Books like this are sometimes called "a labor of love", which is somewhat of a cliche, but this book is brimfull of all the labor and love that goes into gathering, harvesting, preserving and cooking food grown for its own sake. Here, food is not a commodity to be bought and sold but a mainstay of life, a vital ingredient for happiness, a celebration of simple and good - but hard - life. The book would be valuable enough if that was all but there are also so many delightful recipes, so many wonderful anecdotes and descriptions, so much interesting autobiographical material. I've seen someone compare Honey from a Weed to Frances Mayers tedious Tuscanny books but don't let that mislead you; this is a very different book, written with immense sensitivity and hard-earned knowledge of the land the author has cultivated and the people she lived with and learned from.

Editorial Review:

Honey from a Weed is a Mediterranean odyssey. Patience Gray, who has lived and traveled widely in the region's countryside for over twenty-five years, brings to life its people, their culture, and most of all their rustic cooking, with sumptuous prose and reverence.

The Kitchen Diaries: A Year in the Kitchen with Nigel Slater

Nigel Slater

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

Editorial Review:

“Right food, right place, right time. It is my belief—and the point of this book—that this is the best recipe of all. A crab sandwich by the sea on a June afternoon; a slice of roast goose with apple sauce and roast potatoes on Christmas Day; hot sausages and a chunk of roast pumpkin on a frost-sparkling night in November. These are meals whose success relies not on the expertise of the cook but on the more basic premise that this is the food of the moment--something eaten at a time when it is most appropriate, when the ingredients are at their peak of perfection, when the food, the cook and the time of year are at one with each other.”
—Nigel Slater, The Kitchen Diaries

Nigel Slater writes about food in a way that stimulates the imagination, the heart, and the palate all at once. The Kitchen Diaries brings an especially personal ingredient to the mix, letting us glimpse his pantry, tour local farmers’ markets with him, and savor even the simplest meals at his table.

Recording twelve months in his culinary life, Slater shares seasonal dishes and the intriguing elements behind them. As someone who celebrates each visit to the cheese shop or butcher, he enthusiastically conveys the brilliant array of choices and encourages his view of food shopping as an adventure rather than a chore. A rainy day in February calls for a hearty stew; summertime finds him feasting on a lunch as simple as baked tomatoes with grated Parmesan. If an exotic mood strikes him, slow-roasted duck with star anise and ginger is in order. In The Kitchen Diaries, Nigel interweaves his meditations on how food should be enjoyed and prepared with his delicious recipes. No matter the season, The Kitchen Diaries offers a year-round invitation to cook and dine with the world’s most irresistible lover of food. BACKCOVER: Praise for Nigel Slater

“His writing could not be more palate-cleansing… his acidic riffs put you in mind of Nick Hornby, Martin Amis and Philip Larkin all at the same time.”
—The New York Times

“Nigel is a genius.”
—Jamie Oliver, author of Jamie’s Kitchen, The Naked Chef, and Happy Days with the Naked Chef

“unpretentious, delicious”
—Nigella Lawson, author of How to Be a Domestic Goddess

“The recipes sound uniformly delicious, rustic and tasty...but they’re also straight forward: easy to follow, easy to cook.”
—Independent on Sunday

“joyous”
—Guardian Weekend

“Slater wants his food, above all, to be uplifting. As a cookbook, The Kitchen Diaries succeeds brilliantly.”
—William Leith, Observer (London)

“it's a collection of scrumptious recipes, somehow written in such a way as to make your mouth genuinely water.”
—Rebecca Seal, Observer (London)

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.

You Are Where You Eat: Stories and Recipes from the Neighborhoods of New Orleans

Elsa Hahne

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Editorial Review:

Eating and cooking well are not just industries but ways of life for all New Orleans. Writer and photographer Elsa Hahne has visited the kitchens of thirty-three of New Orleans's home cooks and raconteurs and has served up an expansive smorgasbord inspired by this vibrant city's love affair with food.

Almost every cultural group that has made its mark on New Orleans is represented in these pages: Creole, African American, Native American, Isleño, German, Cajun, Italian, Irish, Greek, Hungarian, Croatian, Cuban, Honduran, Mexican, Indian, Filipino, Chinese, Vietnamese, and more.

With thirty-three first-person accounts and over one hundred black-and-white and full-color photographs, You Are Where You Eat proves that the local population remains as passionate about cooking after the hurricanes of 2005 as at any time before. Among the eighty-five recipes are such classic New Orleans dishes as red beans and rice, catfish court bouillon, crawfish bisque, filé gumbo, grillades, and daube glacé, but also more recent arrivals to local tables: yakamein, pork tamales, crawfish samosas, and Vietnamese spring rolls.

Elsa Hahne is the creator of the touring exhibit You Are WHERE You Eat--Stories and Recipes from the Crescent City, which was supported by the Louisiana Division of the Arts and the Louisiana Endowment for the Humanities. Her work has appeared in numerous international magazines and newspapers.

An Omelette and a Glass of Wine (The Cook's Classic Library)

Elizabeth David

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 8 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Like trying to enjoy glorious food with someone choking you. 2 out of 5 stars.
21 of 57 people found this review helpful.

I'm a total foodie and it's painful getting through this book. Instead of simply enjoying the pleasures of food and all the differences, Elizabeth David is defensive at every turn. She speaks of her experiences so delicately, and describes all around the food, so that you just want to plunge through the page, past the fences and loftiness she's encircled the food with. Granted, she was writing in that stifling time period for those stifled Brits who apparently knew nothing beyond pork pies. I know she must have thoroughly enjoyed her food adventures, but in her telling of them, she removes herself from the object of her passion. This book is a very frustrating read. I got so sick and tired of all the defensiveness. I wish she would have just allowed herself to write freely about her pleasures and enjoyment, rather than feel so much pressure from her invisible audience (she was a journalist) that she edited herself (even in the pieces that she re-wrote for this book) before anyone could complain. And although it's interesting to know the food prices in another time period, the constant iteration of cost and expensive versus not expensive places to dine became a nuisance. Of course, you do get glimpses into the world of food that she's been to and some good recipes, but if you think you're going to curl up in bed with her book and envelope yourself in literary foodie heaven, think again. You might just want to re-read your M.F.K. Fisher and Alice B. Toklas.

Editorial Review:

Contains delightful explorations of food and cooking, among which are the collection's namesake essay and many other gems; with black-and-white photographs and illustrations.