David Kamp
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Subjects -> Cooking, Food & Wine -> Gastronomy -> Essays
Subjects -> Cooking, Food & Wine -> Gastronomy -> History
Subjects -> Cooking, Food & Wine -> Gastronomy -> General
Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 15
Average rating: 4.0 of 5
This is an entertaining book about cooking 5 out of 5 stars.
3 of 4 people found this review helpful.
I don't cook a thing, but I enjoyed reading this entertaining book about cooking. The United States of Arugula is an interesting title for a book, so I decided to give this book a chance and read it. I was pleasantly surprised about how well researched this book is. There were some names I was not famillar with. I enjoyed reading about Marion Cunningham. She updated the Fannie Farmer Cookbook in 1979 with recipes like cippino which is a tomato based fish stew. Little Joes is a dish with ground beef, eggs and spinach. I learned that Craig Claiborne was influential food journalist who reviewed restaurants and published recipes for the New York Times in the 1960s I did not know that Spago started out as a pizza restaurant. I learned that Wolfgang Puck was innovative in making pizza topped with shrimp and other seafood like scallops. I learned that he also opened an Chinese restaurant a few years ago. Kamp gives a lot of biographical information about legendary people like Julia Child and James Beard. I enjoyed reading about how they made a name for themselves in the cooking industry. I also enjoyed reading about Laura Chenel and Alice Waters. These women made a name for themselves by following their passion for cheese and French food respectively. I enjoyed reading about how television have transformed cooks like Emeril Lagasse and Bobby Flay into celebrities. This book is a fun read.
Editorial Review:
The wickedly entertaining, hunger-inducing, behind-the-scenes story of the revolution in American food that has made exotic ingredients, celebrity chefs, rarefied cooking tools, and destination restaurants familiar aspects of our everyday lives.
Amazingly enough, just twenty years ago eating sushi was a daring novelty and many Americans had never even heard of salsa. Today, we don't bat an eye at a construction worker dipping a croissant into robust specialty coffee, city dwellers buying just-picked farmstand produce, or suburbanites stocking up on artisanal cheeses and extra virgin oils at supermarkets. The United States of Arugula is a rollicking, revealing stew of culinary innovation, food politics, and kitchen confidences chronicling how gourmet eating in America went from obscure to pervasive—and became the cultural success story of our era.
