General Books - Page 2

Molecular Gastronomy: Exploring the Science of Flavor (Arts and Traditions of the Table: Perspectives on Culinary History)

Hervé This

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 22 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

Editorial Review:

Hervé This (pronounced "Teess") is an internationally renowned chemist, a popular French television personality, a bestselling cookbook author, a longtime collaborator with the famed French chef Pierre Gagnaire, and the only person to hold a doctorate in molecular gastronomy, a cutting-edge field he pioneered. Bringing the instruments and experimental techniques of the laboratory into the kitchen, This uses recent research in the chemistry, physics, and biology of food to challenge traditional ideas about cooking and eating. What he discovers will entertain, instruct, and intrigue cooks, gourmets, and scientists alike.

Molecular Gastronomy, This's first work to appear in English, is filled with practical tips, provocative suggestions, and penetrating insights. This begins by reexamining and debunking a variety of time-honored rules and dictums about cooking and presents new and improved ways of preparing a variety of dishes from quiches and quenelles to steak and hard-boiled eggs. He goes on to discuss the physiology of flavor and explores how the brain perceives tastes, how chewing affects food, and how the tongue reacts to various stimuli. Examining the molecular properties of bread, ham, foie gras, and champagne, the book analyzes what happens as they are baked, cured, cooked, and chilled.

Looking to the future, This imagines new cooking methods and proposes novel dishes. A chocolate mousse without eggs? A flourless chocolate cake baked in the microwave? Molecular Gastronomy explains how to make them. This also shows us how to cook perfect French fries, why a soufflé rises and falls, how long to cool champagne, when to season a steak, the right way to cook pasta, how the shape of a wine glass affects the taste of wine, why chocolate turns white, and how salt modifies tastes.

1001 Foods You Must Taste Before You Die

Universe

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

Editorial Review:

From single press extra-virgin olive oils and artisanal cheeses to more exotic fare such as zebra jerky, this compilation is a cornucopia of culinary delicacies from every cuisine around the globe. Featuring luscious photographs and descriptions of must-eat foods from sweet to savory, this culinary gazetteer of the world offers expert guidance on how to really eat like a local when in Rome or how to find the most authentic Peking duck when visiting Beijing. Any foodie will delight at the fact-filled descriptions and marginalia and sidebars bursting with culinary history and trivia. Whether looking for the "must-taste treats" to seek out on your next vacation or inspiration for a romantic dinner for two, this compendium is sure to be a source of gourmet inspiration, certain to expand even an experienced epicure’s mental grocery list. The book is divided into sections based on food type (meats, dairy products, fruits, vegetables, sweets and confections, etc). Included are classics as well as delicacies little known outside their home turf. Each entry features authoritative yet opinionated descriptions as well as anecdotes about the producers or the region ensuring that this book will have wide appeal to connoisseurs and novices alike.

No Reservations: Around the World on an Empty Stomach

Anthony Bourdain

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 18 Average rating: 3.5 of 5

Only a picture book 2 out of 5 stars.
2 of 2 people found this review helpful.

I should have perused this in more detail at the bookstore, but alas I got too excited to see another book by Mr. Bourdain. I finally looked at it this weekend and much to my disdain it is primarily pictures. Nice pictures, but only pictures nonetheless. There is some minor text but not enough. I was hoping to find out more back stories about what happened, biting commentary (related to the episode not FoddTV "chefs")maybe lists of places from the show, recommendations of restaurants to eat at, etc.

I am a huge fan of Anthony Bourdain and of No Reservations, this book just didn't cut it for me.

Editorial Review:

An illustrated, behind-the-scenes travel journal of Anthony Bourdain’s global adventures.
 
More than just a companion to the hugely popular show, No Reservations is Bourdain’s fully illustrated journal of his far-flung travels. The book traces his trips from New Zealand to New Jersey and everywhere in between, mixing beautiful, never-before-seen photos and mementos with Bourdain’s outrageous commentary on what really happens when you give a bad-boy chef an open ticket to the world. Want to know where to get good fatty crab in Rangoon? How to order your reindeer medium rare? How to tell a Frenchman that his baguette is invading your personal space? This is your book. For any Bourdain fan, this is an indispensable opportunity to hit the road with the man himself.

The Tenth Muse: My Life in Food

Judith Jones

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 20 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

Editorial Review:

From the legendary editor who helped shape modern cookbook publishing-one of the food world's most admired figures-comes this evocative and inspiring memoir.

Living in Paris after World War II, Jones broke free of bland American food and reveled in everyday French culinary delights. On returning to the States she published Julia Child's Mastering the Art of French Cooking. The rest is publishing and gastronomic history. A new world now opened up to Jones as she discovered, with her husband Evan, the delights of American food, publishing some of the premier culinary luminaries of the twentieth century: from Julia Child, James Beard, and M.F.K. Fisher to Claudia Roden, Edna Lewis, and Lidia Bastianich. Here also are fifty of Jones's favorite recipes collected over a lifetime of cooking-each with its own story and special tips. The Tenth Muse is an absolutely charming memoir by a woman who was present at the creation of the American food revolution and played a pivotal role in shaping it.

The Man Who Ate Everything

Jeffrey Steingarten

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Total reviews: 66 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Editorial Review:

Winner of the Julia Child Book Award

A James Beard Book Award Finalist

When Jeffrey Steingarten was appointed food critic for Vogue, he systematically set out to overcome his distaste for such things as kimchi, lard, Greek cuisine, and blue food. He succeeded at all but the last: Steingarten is "fairly sure that God meant the color blue mainly for food that has gone bad." In this impassioned, mouth-watering, and outrageously funny book, Steingarten devotes the same Zen-like discipline and gluttonous curiosity to practically everything that anyone anywhere has ever called "dinner."

Follow Steingarten as he jets off to sample choucroute in Alsace, hand-massaged beef in Japan, and the mother of all ice creams in Sicily. Sweat with him as he tries to re-create the perfect sourdough, bottle his own mineral water, and drop excess poundage at a luxury spa. Join him as he mounts a heroic--and hilarious--defense of salt, sugar, and fat (though he has some nice things to say about Olestra). Stuffed with offbeat erudition and recipes so good they ought to be illegal, The Man Who Ate Everything is a gift for anyone who loves food.  

Everything but the Squeal: Eating the Whole Hog in Northern Spain

John Barlow

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Editorial Review:

John Barlow, self-confessed glutton, found himself in a tricky situation: living in one of the most meat-loving places on earth, married to a vegetarian.  The Barlows live in Galicia, the misty-green northwest corner of Spain, and home to a population that reveres and consumes every part of the pig. This gets Barlow thinking about the nature of our relationship with food—what’s delicious, what’s nasty, and what sort of obligation we have to the animals we eat. Over the course of one glorious, bilious year, Barlow vows to eat everything but the squeal.  In his travels, Barlow takes part in the thousand-year-old antthrowing festival of Laza. He makes pig-bladder puddings for carnival. He washes down lots of pork with lots of wine.

In the tradition of Calvin Trillin and Anthony Bourdain, Everything but the Squeal is an adventure in extreme eating, a hilariously quirky travel book, and a perceptive look at how what we eat makes us who we are.

Soul of a Chef

Michael Ruhlman

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 65 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Editorial Review:

A fascinating behind-the-scenes look at the restaurant world and the men and women who live to create perfection.

In 1997, journalist and cook Michael Ruhlman observed incognito the certified Master Chef examination at the Culinary Institute of America, one of the most grueling competitions in the gastronomic world. In his critically acclaimed The Making of a Chef, which Peter Kamisky of The New York Times hailed as "well-reported and heartfelt," Ruhlman offered a vivid and unique portrait of this extraordinary world.

The Soul of a Chef combines Ruhlman's masterful storytelling with his immense love of food to reveal the men and women whose main goal is to serve food of perfection. Through working and talking with three of the most talented young chefs in the business, Ruhlman takes the reader on a journey past the dark heart of the profession toward the soul of a chef--a journey that takes him into the kitchens of the finest restaurants from the Napa Valley to the Hudson Valley. Here he reveals the collective experience of these men as they all strive to achieve their own level of perfection.

The Soul of a Chef is a satisfying and fascinating immersion into the hearts and minds of those who undertake the grueling, but richly rewarding pledge to serve only the best. It is a must for gastronomes, prospective chefs, and all lovers of great food.

The Bagel: A Cultural History

Maria Balinska

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Editorial Review:

If smoked salmon and cream cheese bring only one thing to mind, you can count yourself among the world's millions of bagel mavens. But few people are aware of the bagel's provenance, let alone its adventuresome history. This charming book tells the remarkable story of the bagel's journey from the tables of seventeenth-century Poland to the freezers of middle America today, a story of often surprising connections between a cheap market-day snack and centuries of Polish, Jewish, and American history.Research in international archives and numerous personal interviews uncover the bagel's links with the defeat of the Turks by Polish King Jan Sobieski in 1683, the Yiddish cultural revival of the late nineteenth century, and Jewish migration across the Atlantic to America. There the story moves from the bakeries of New York's Lower East Side to the Bagel Bakers' Local 388 Union of the 1960s, and the attentions of the mob. For all its modest size, the bagel has managed to bridge cultural gaps, rescue kings from obscurity, charge the emotions, and challenge received wisdom. Maria Balinska weaves together a rich, quirky, and evocative history of East European Jewry and the unassuming ring-shaped roll the world has taken to its heart.

Alice Waters and Chez Panisse

Thomas McNamee

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 23 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Interesting life, but author failed 3 out of 5 stars.
2 of 2 people found this review helpful.

I enjoyed reading this because of the subject's devotion to fresh, local, sustainable food, but was disappointed in the writing. The book is mainly a compilation of quotes from Alice Waters and her friends and people she's worked with - there's no synthesis provided by the author, no insight. It seems on the surface to be giving an honest portrait of the woman and her restaurant, but I just felt that there was a lot left unrevealed and unanalyzed. Instead of giving a clear-eyed assessment, this book fit into the mold of every project Alice has embarked on: She handpicked her biographer and gave him full access to sources so that it feels like a community effort, but she also made sure the book only carried the tone she desired - the tone she envisioned it should have - and was too impatient to provide or allow any introspection.

Editorial Review:

The first authorized biography of “the mother of American cooking” (The New York Times)

This adventurous book charts the origins of the local “market cooking” culture that we all savor today. When Francophile Alice Waters opened Chez Panisse in Berkeley in 1971, few Americans were familiar with goat cheese, cappuccino, or mesclun. But it wasn’t long before Waters and her motley coterie of dreamers inspired a new culinary standard incorporating ethics, politics, and the conviction that the best-grown food is also the tastiest. Based on unprecedented access to Waters and her inner circle, this is a truly delicious rags-to-riches saga.

Japanese Cooking: A Simple Art

Shizuo Tsuji, Yoshiki Tsuji

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Total reviews: 40 Average rating: 5.0 of 5

Editorial Review:

When it was first published, Japanese Cooking: A Simple Art changed the way the culinary world viewed Japanese cooking, moving it from obscure ethnic food to haute cuisine.

Twenty-five years later, much has changed. Japanese food is a favorite of diners around the world. Not only is sushi as much a part of the Western culinary scene as burgers, bagels, and burritos, but some Japanese chefs have become household names. Japanese flavors, ingredients, and textures have been fused into dishes from a wide variety of other cuisines. What hasn't changed over the years, however, are the foundations of Japanese cooking. When he originally wrote Japanese Cooking: A Simple Art, Shizuo Tsuji, a scholar who trained under famous European chefs, was so careful and precise in his descriptions of the cuisine and its vital philosophies, and so thoughtful in his choice of dishes and recipes, that his words--and the dishes they help produce--are as fresh today as when they were first written.
The 25th Anniversary edition celebrates Tsuji's classic work. Building on M.F.K.Fisher's eloquent introduction, the volume now includes a thought-provoking new Foreword by Gourmet Editor-in-Chief Ruth Reichl and a new preface by the author's son and Tsuji Culinary Institute Director Yoshiki Tsuji. Beautifully illustrated with eight pages of new color photos and over 500 drawings, and containing 230 traditional recipes as well as detailed explanations of ingredients, kitchen utensils, techniques and cultural aspects of Japanese cuisine, this edition continues the Tsuji legacy of bringing the Japanese kitchen within the reach of Western cooks.