Portions of this memoir read very much like a Murakami novel—the quiet yet inexplicable obsessions of neurotic protagonists, interwoven with the mythicized stories of unknown figures and minor characters that stop just short of the surreal. Struggling with chronic infidelity and frustrated in his career, a disillusioned American thirty-something looks toward redemption by writing confessional letters to Momofuku Ando, the inventor of instant ramen. If there were ever a less likely book premise, I have yet to hear it. All the more so because The Ramen King and I isn’t a work of fiction but a memoir. Author Andy Raskin appears to live for two things: casual dates and Japanese culture, particularly where food and comics are concerned. At the...
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Your mother made you drink three glasses each day. There’s probably a carton in your fridge right now. And, as Anne Mendelson likes to remind us, it was every mammal's first food. But even though milk is a staple of Americans’ everyday lives, most of us know virtually nothing about it—where it originated, how it’s being produced, or how unique our milk-guzzling tendencies are. In her James Beard-nominated book, Milk: The Surprising History Of Milk Through The Ages, Anne Mendelson sets out to educate us. Sweeping through the human history of dairy and the advent of modern milk production, before diving into recipes for everything from New England clam chowder to Indian panir cheese, Mendelson pens “the culinary guidebook,...
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"Romance is as integral to French cuisine as butter, and any book on the subject would be soulless without it." Au Revoir To All That Food, Wine, and the End of France Author: Michael Steinberger Get It: Hardcover on Amazon Read It: Preview on Slate.com Recommended Read? YesThe sun is setting on the French gastronomic empire, Michael Steinberger contends in Au Revoir To All That: Food, Wine, and the End of France. Speaking ill of the French is tantamount to heresy in many gourmet circles, but Steinberger isn’t cowed. The kitchens of Paris and Avignon are not what they once were, and he wants to know why. With a title that straddles the sentimental and the apocalyptic, Steinberger steers clear...
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Plenty of ink has been spilled about twenty-first century Americans’ bizarre, conflicting views towards food—our simultaneous obsession with eating and weight loss, escalating struggles with anorexia and obesity, cultural love of both triple cheeseburgers and Master Cleanse diets. Such attitudes are usually characterized as distinctly modern phenomena, fueled by post-war advertising and the ever-growing influence of mass media. But in A Short History of the American Stomach, Frederick Kaufman argues otherwise. “The feast and the fast,” he writes, “have always been American twins.” Kaufman claims that elements of today’s food culture—from fad diets to binge eating to the equation of diet with virtue—date back to Puritan times. The United States, in his conception, “was and remains one of the most...
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