chezjim

Chinatown would be my first suggestion, though I don't know if that meets the ethical criteria.

There is one simple thing far too few writers do which can make all the above rules intuitively apparent: read every page out loud. I self-publish books and do this, quite literally, for every page, even (most recently) for a 300-page book (and at that, of course, I find missing words, etc., later). Your ear will tell you quickly what you need to change. But trying to "fake" this by reading under your breath or silently to yourself too easily allows you to "cheat". Out loud means out loud (OK, maybe out medium, if you have modulation issues.) As for being a food writer specifically, I suppose I am that, officially enough. Aside from my various self-published projects, I have an academic essay out on the subject and am waiting for the official announcement of another project to which I contributed in some significant ways. But that raises the question of whether people who want to be food writers want to just be columnists (I'm not) or food critics (nope) or want to write (as I do) on food history, for instance. Or would someone like me be called a "food historian" as opposed to some famous writers on food in magazines and newspapers (whose "history", alas, is often pure myth, but is also what far more people are likely to read)? At any rate, good writing is good writing and certainly any writer should learn it (and read it as much as possible - Willa Cather's a great place to go for lessons in style). Your subject should be something you care about, your voice should be freed rather than created and as for outlets and starting points, these days, that's what blogs are for.

That page is indeed about as comprehensive a one as you're likely to find on the book (I found my first copy in the trash on Beacon Hill when I was a young musician; didn't know what it was really, just that it looked French.) I've posted my quibbles with this monumental work to the same page, but to note the most egregious error that has persisted through several editions: the croissant was NOT invented at a siege, neither at Vienna (as is frequently reported) or at Budapest (as the Larousse strangely has it). This was already known in the 19th century, but even if the Larousse's editors missed those (admittedly obscure) texts, you would think they would be aware of Alan Davidson's quibbles in his own reference work. Nope. Even the new edition includes this multiply erroneous version. The other disappointment with the new edition is that they eliminated the plates showing different types of bread without replacing it with a modern version (which is woefully needed in general - finding definitive pictures of the standard French breads is surprisingly hard). Personally, I would have preferred to see them keep the old plates, noting them as historical and add a modern version. But the book's importance - and entertainment value - really is beyond dispute.

While I'd be dubious about finding an exact recipe (it may well have been some confection made for that event by that specific cook), actual sculptures of temples were made as desserts: Temple a la Sultane (1905) A description of a "weedding cake" in the same work describes colonnaded constructions (as I imagine top some wedding cakes today) (not a big wedding guy): Weedding/wedding cake entries