What food-related books are you reading? (2004 - 2015)

[Carrot Top]

One problem I have, however, is from the Dokkodo "The Way To Be Followed Alone":

13. Do not pursue the taste of good food

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True, true. It is better when the taste of good food pursues you.

I rcould not get thru miuch depends on dinner.  Way too dense.  A lovely book about the history of jewish immigrants and theifood businnes they had is called STUFFED:  Adventures of a restaurant family.

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I never got through it either, anina marcus. Finally gave it to a new home.

"Stuffed", huh? Suddenly I'm hungry.

[Jensen]

I finished up Barbara Kingsolver's new book, Animal, Vegetable, Miracle, early this morning. It's a natural sequel to Michael Pollan's The Omnivore's Dilemma, chronicling a year of living as a "locavore" on a small farm in southwest Virginia.

The book was co-authored by Ms. Kingsolver's husband, Stephen Hopp, and her eldest daughter, Camille Kingsolver. Hopp provides short essays on the science and the politics of foodways, while the daughter's contribution consists of reminiscences and recipes.

I really enjoyed it but, if you're a Monsanto fan, you might want to give it a pass.

[Terrasanct]

I read that recently, too. Good book.

I'm currently reading Heat by Bill Buford, which seems appropriate since it's been around or over 100 most of the past two weeks. I'm also looking at/have piled up to read next: FoodBook by James Trager, Perfect Scoop by David Lebovitz, and Baking with Julia. I have Baking from my Home to Yours, also by Dorie Greenspan, on order. After I read the thread here about it, I had to get it.

And I have to finish reading Harry Potter before someone gives away the ending, too. Not much food in the latest book, unfortunately.

[Kent D]

It's summer, and since my daughter's always do the summer reading program down at the library, I get to check out real books for a few weeks. So I always hit the "new books" shelf, and for some inexplicable reason always end up with food-related books. Right now I'm flipping through:

HOW I LEARNED TO COOK: CULINARY EDUCATIONS FROM THE WORLD'S GREATEST CHEFS by WITHERSPOON, KIMBERLY (A lot of quick-read chapters of almost everyone who's anyone in food.)

The improvisational cook

by Schneider, Sally. (Wouldn't you know -- someone stole the name of MY cookbook before I had a chance to write it. All about taking a simple recipe or concept and making into something else and not being tied to structured recipes. It's really how I live my life in the kitchen, even with shelves full of cookbooks.)

Wrestling with gravy : a life, with food /

by Reynolds, Jonathan. (An autobiography of a NYT food writer. I always like food biographies, just picked this one up for the title and cover.)

[hummingbirdkiss]

two right now

Garlic and Sapphires Reichl (I found it on our volunteer table at work for a $1 good score!!! really quick pretty good read)

The Soul of A New Cuisine Samuelsson (gift from my sister and a very lovely coffee table book!)

Edited July 26, 2007 by hummingbirdkiss (log)

[The Naughti Literati]

I was in the bookstore last week and came across a new book called Eating India - had to have it. The writing is BEAUTIFUL and I dare you to get past the introduction without wanting to pick up the phone and order something from your favorite restaurant.

I have many of the books mentioned upthread and read many at the same time! Next on my list is The Nasty Bits.

[prasantrin]

I was reading The Dim Sum Book by Eileen Yin-Fei Lo, which I got from the library, but some a**hole cut out huge sections of the book. I'm so annoyed, but also disgusted. Who the hell does things like that?

[dockhl]

Just finished Soul of a Chef, reading Reach of a Chef, and attempting to find a copy of Making of a Chef.

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multiwagon~

Did you ever find this? Here it is at Amazon.com for as little as $4.70, used with $3.99 s/h.

I just ordered A RETURN TO COOKING, Ripert and Ruhlman. Anybody familiar with it?

Just finished HAPPY IN THE KITCHEN. Loved it.

[TarteTatin]

La Bonne Table by Bemelman.

Great stories-- about the old days of the food service industry...

(Not only is he a good food/service writer, but he did the children books and drawings of "Madeline").

Also found Michel Guerard, Cuisine Minceur at a flea market. Old fashioned, not well written (due to translation?), but interesting.

[The Naughti Literati]

Just finished Soul of a Chef, reading Reach of a Chef, and attempting to find a copy of Making of a Chef.

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multiwagon~

Did you ever find this? Here it is at Amazon.com for as little as $4.70, used with $3.99 s/h.

I just ordered A RETURN TO COOKING, Ripert and Ruhlman. Anybody familiar with it?

Just finished HAPPY IN THE KITCHEN. Loved it.

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I have A Return to Cooking! It's such a beautiful book, you will love it.

[dockhl]

Good. It seemed like something that should go alongside The French Laundry, Bouchon and Happy in the Kitchen

Also just got David Rosengarten's It's All American Food, which is funny, wonderful compilation of lots of American immigrant variations on recipes. Fascinating.

[The Naughti Literati]

My Bombay Kitchen, by Niloufer Ichaporia King.  Just the origins of her Parsi people makes my whole country's existence feel callow and raw about the elbows. Oh, wait, we are callow and.......(American sigh).

I am becoming something of a Indian Grocery lurker, tho; always just one ounce or two of ajwain seeds away from being thwoked on the head by the elderly storekeeper's broom.  She scares me.

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Hahah...are you familiar with the fiction of Rohinton Mistry (A Fine Balance, Family Matters)? He and Thrity Umrigar (Bombay Time, The Skin Between Us) are two of my favorite writers and their stories are always about Parsi families in Bombay. One of the characters in one of Mistry's novels is always fiending for his wife's chicken dhansak, which she makes on Sundays. You'd probably enjoy Eating India, which I posted about the other day, as well.

Today I started Fork It Over by Alan Richman and a friend lent me Orwell's Down and Out In Paris and London, which I will start this weekend - I read so many books at the same time!

Edited August 3, 2007 by The Naughti Literati (log)

[mikeycook]

Also found Michel Guerard, Cuisine Minceur at a flea market. Old fashioned, not well written (due to translation?), but interesting.

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Agree that Cuisine Minceur is not the best written book. Hard to believe looking at it, over 30 years later, that it was so influential (the quintessential cookbook on Nouvelle Cuisine philosophy) and that Guerard was such an important figure in French cooking.

Just bought Bouchon for myself. Avoided it for a long time due to size, but found it at a good price, unopened, and couldn't resist.

Edited August 3, 2007 by mikeycook (log)

[Carrot Top]

Right now I'm reading "New Sudden Fiction" - an anthology (2007) of short short stories (2500 words).

Two stories so far have had food oriented subject lines, though in an indirect way.

Yann Martel's "We Ate the Children Last" tells of what happens when pig's stomachs have been successfully able to be implanted into humans as replacement parts . . . first due to medical reasons then afterwards because the people that received them preferred to eat trash rather than fresh food so it was quite a cost-effective thing to do.

Frederick Adolph Paola's "The Wine Doctor" is about a traditional doctor practicing medicine in Fascist Italy of the 1930's and his relationship with the man who is known locally as the wine doctor who practices the prescription of various sorts of wines (based on their composition down to the soil, the weather, the grape etc.) to ailing people in the same town.

Both stories are fantastic. In both senses of the word.

[srhcb]

My Sister sent me Jim Harrison's The Raw & the Cooked, which I can't beleive I hadn't read yet!

She and I have a tradition of leaving "markers" in books we send each other. I use little Post-It flags and she folds the corner down on pages to mark passages of interest. We don't specify exactly which part of the page we mean to note, leaving that up to each other's detective powers.

SB (Sent his Sister, in exchange, Jung Chang's The Wild Swans, which she's considering using as her fall Book Club selection.)

[azurite]

Today I started Fork It Over by Alan Richman and a friend lent me Orwell's Down and Out In Paris and London, which I will start this weekend - I read so many books at the same time!

"Down & Out in Paris & London" is a very good book. I listened to it--as book tape--before I read it and it reads out loud well.

Most recent food related short story I read was in a collection of short stories titled, "Manhattan Noir." The story featured a woman, whose husband has left her for a younger woman, who falls asleep thinking of ways to kill her soon-to-be-ex. She meets him at his favorite restaurant, ostensibly to sign the divorce settlement papers but also to employ murder method #9 ("Nuts to You") she adds peanut oil to her lip gloss, gives her ex one last long kiss--and removes his epi-pen from his pocket as she embraces him. Then she says good bye, catches a taxi for JFK and a new life.

So inventive.

azurite

[rconnelly]

Just finished "The Seasoning of a Chef" by Doug & Michael Psaltis. Have "My Year of Meats" ready to go....plus about three other chef related titles.

Non-food book "Water for Elephants".

[KensethFan]

Kitchen Confidential - Anthony Bourdain - very entertaining and informative. Hard to put this one down!!!

[The Naughti Literati]

Azurite - thanks and that IS a crazy food story!

If I had to pick a favorite short story collection that deals with a lot of food, it would definitely be Jhumpa Lahiri's Interpreter of Maladies. Mrs. Sen's is my favorite of the nine in that book because it is all about the character longing for the Benagli food she misses from her Calcutta home. While her husband is teaching at the university, she spends her day babysitting and chopping vegetables for dinner and FIENDS for fish to the point of tears, but she cannot drive and is too afraid to really learn. The story culminates when she decides to brave the roads because she MUST have this fish and she gets in an accident before she barely leaves the apartment complex, 11 year old boy in tow. LOL

While searching in hopes of finding the story on a site, I came across this excellent paper on Food Metaphor in Jhumpa Lahiri's "Interpreter of Maladies"! Definitely worth a look if you're a big fan of her work.

Now I'm reading The Namesake again while reading Eating India and because both authors are Bengali, the two books complement each other in the most exquisite way. *sigh*

Edited August 8, 2007 by The Naughti Literati (log)

[Carrot Top]

Finally I am reading Diana Abu-Jaber's "The Language of Baklava". I've wanted to read this for quite some time but every time I attempted it the dive in did not work, though I could not figure out why.

It's a memoir driven by food, with some recipes. The recipes are simple, as are many family recipes that last through time and movement. I like that sense of feel in a recipe.

But of course it is the emotive power of food that she is writing of here, and it is very good, this story. I did not want to stop reading last night and can not wait to start again.

Her voice is gentle - it flows like the murmur of a warm river, it is consoling in a non-pushy sort of way. A quiet story told in a circle of friends of times past and of who we are.

I think it was this gentleness that stopped me from being able to dive in before this when trying to read the book, for the other books read previous to it were smack-down action adventure loud and vibrant. The transition to this other feel had to be made. Not that her voice is any less intense. It is.

..........................................

I read the most fantastic description of a food in Terry Pratchett's "Witches Abroad" recently. Dwarf Bread is a food that dwarves make. It is their iconic food, it is the food that means the most to them. When they have to travel from home, it is Dwarf Bread that they dream of and long for.

It is inedible, however, by the tongue and mouth. It can only be tasted in the mind, for it is a dense heavy impenetrable rock of a loaf. It lasts forever and is meant to last forever. You put it before you and stare at it, and in this way it feeds you however it does. It is an idea of bread. And it is so intensely longed for by dwarves far from home.

[srhcb]

Diana Abu-Jaber's "The Language of Baklava"

The recipes are simple, as are many family recipes that last through time and movement. I like that sense of feel in a recipe.

I found some of the recipes from this book on Mellisa Block's review for NPR's All Things Considered.

I loved the imaginative recipe titles, such as "Subsistence Tabbouleh - for when everything is falling apart", and "Poetic Baklava - for when you need to serenade someone".

But my favorite recipe was, for personal reasons, the model of simplicity and appropriate name:

Comforting Grilled Velveeta Sandwiches

· 2 tablespoons butter

· 4 slices Wonder bread (or other soft white bread)

· 2 thick slabs of Velveeta (this doesn't work as nicely with cheddar, trust me)

Melt the butter in frying pan. Place the cheese sandwiches in the hot butter. Cover and fry until golden on one side, then turn and fry on the other side. The cheese should be oozing and hot. Cut the sandwiches on the diagonal.

Serves 2.

SB (can't imagine cutting this recipe in half to serve 1? )

[Carrot Top]

SB (can't imagine cutting this recipe in half to serve 1? )

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Nope. You would just have to settle down and eat it all if you were one.

You would like this book, SB. Particularly one part in the chapter "Raising an Arab Father in America" where the story is told of a day at an uncle's farm where a baby lamb appears in the barn to the delight of the children and to be the center of the story that follows.

This was the way it was supposed to happen: Four of the brothers would hold the lamb still, and with one powerful, swift stroke, Crazy-Uncle Frankie would cut its throat.

P.S. I'm not inferring that you are bloodthirsty just that you would like the story as it plays out.

Edited August 15, 2007 by Carrot Top (log)

[srhcb]

My Sister sent me Jim Harrison's The Raw & the Cooked, which I can't beieve I hadn't read yet!

She and I have a tradition of leaving "markers" in books we send each other.  I use little Post-It flags and she folds the corner down on pages to mark passages of interest.  We don't specify exactly which part of the page we mean to note, leaving that up to each other's detective powers.

SB (Sent his Sister, in exchange, Jung Chang's The Wild Swans, which she's considering using as her fall Book Club selection.)

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I really didn't care for this book.

Too much gratuitous politics I guess.

I've nothing in particular against politics, but I'm glad that neither The New Republic nor National Review print gratuitous recipes.

Why would a food writer do this?

SB (now gratuitous sex, on the other hand ....

[Carrot Top]

Too much gratuitous politics I guess.

I've nothing in particular against politics, but I'm glad that neither The New Republic nor National Review print gratuitous recipes.

Why would a food writer do this?

SB (now gratuitous sex, on the other hand .... 

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A food writer would do this thinking that other things in the world are more important than what he or she writes about as a main subject.

Politics is so often considered a weighty subject, and a way to make the world work right.

Food is so often relegated to be thought of as a lightweight subject, not a way to make the world work right. It only obtains an aura of weightiness for the generic reader when it is linked to business (big bucks) (haute cuisine and celebrity chefs) or economics (food supply and agribusiness).

Personally I don't understand this. Food has brought more people to the table together than politics ever did in any long-lasting way. Likely brought more people to bed together too.

[srhcb]

Too much gratuitous politics I guess.

I've nothing in particular against politics, but I'm glad that neither The New Republic nor National Review print gratuitous recipes.

Why would a food writer do this?

SB (now gratuitous sex, on the other hand .... 

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A food writer would do this thinking that other things in the world are more important than what he or she writes about as a main subject.

Politics is so often considered a weighty subject, and a way to make the world work right.

Food is so often relegated to be thought of as a lightweight subject, not a way to make the world work right. It only obtains an aura of weightiness for the generic reader when it is linked to business (big bucks) (haute cuisine and celebrity chefs) or economics (food supply and agribusiness).

I suspect you're right.

Not that there can't be some good food/political analogies, but the injection of political thetoric, especially partisan, usually comes across as a self conscious attempt at urbanity.

Personally I don't understand this. Food has brought more people to the table together than politics ever did in any long-lasting way.

Once again, I agree. I've been involved in many political campaigns, from City Council to US Senate, and honestly can't recall any memorable meals or food related stories from the whole lot.

(Food) Likely brought more people to bed together (than politics) too. 

While politics is said to make strange bedfellows, food just makes messy ones!