Entries tagged with 'books'
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For all our collective obsession with food, dining, and the so-called joy of cooking, there's very little said about what happens to all that matter once we swallow it. Thus Danielle Svetcov's The Un-Constipated Gourmet: Secrets to a Moveable Feast, a cookbook with an eye towards promoting, er, gastrointestinal regularity. With lengthy discussions about different cultures' approaches to digestive health and a "Go Meter" rating each recipe, this isn't a book that dances around its unappetizing subject. "The result is part culinary history, part mouthwatering cookbook, and part inquiry into nothing less than our bodies themselves," writes Chris Colin in the San Francisco Chronicle. Surely, Hemingway is rolling over in his grave....
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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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The illustrations in Deborah Madison's new book were done by her husband, Patrick McFarlin, whose icebreaker question was the catalyst for the work. Photograph from Gibbs Smith Blog The Los Angeles Times reviews Deborah Madison's new book: What We Eat When We Eat Alone (Gibbs Smith, $25) is not a book of recipes for smaller portions of the dishes people eat every day. It's full of stories about the way people approach food when they are alone, whether they shop or poke around the fridge; whether they cook or simply assemble what they find; whether they eat odd dishes no one else would touch or take the time for an appealing full meal. Some people make a humble meal...
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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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"The thing to think about, most importantly, is to match the weight of your wine with the weight of your food." This week we chat with Matt Skinner, an Australian wine writer and enthusiast, most recently the author of Heard It Through The Grapevine: The Things You Should Know to Enjoy Wine. Name: Matt Skinner Location: Melbourne, Australia Occupation: Wine writer, consultant, and educator How did you become involved in the wine industry at such a young age? I didn’t know at age 17 what I wanted to do with my life. I got a job in a bottle shop, like a liquor store, in Australia. They specialized in selling cases of beer and boxes of wine, nothing glamorous. We...
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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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Photograph by Rachel Been Michael Groover can probably be summed up in three important facts: he's a tugboat pilot in Savannah, he looks like Santa, and he's married to Paula Deen. The last one means he, naturally, has a lot to say about waking up to the smell of ham hocks in the deep fryer with his spouse joyfully cackling in the background. Seriously, it must be a trip being married to Paula Deen. In this long interview with the couple on AOL Food, we find out that while Paula is busy launching a line of nuts and seafood, her husband is authoring a book called, My Delicious Life with Paula Deen. Sadly there's no cover image on Amazon...
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The menus at craft-cocktail bars across the country are peppered with venerable classics that, until a few years ago, remained largely forgotten. The Corpse Reviver #2; the Blood and Sand; the Pink Lady—these and many other drinks from the late 19th and early 20th centuries languished in dust-covered obscurity until cocktail historians—yes, there are such things—dug them out of old bartending manuals and polished them off for a new generation of curious tipplers. One of the most influential people in terms of reintroducing these concoctions to 21st-century drinkers is Ted Haigh, known in the mixological world as Dr. Cocktail. Back when his book, Vintage Spirits and Forgotten Cocktails, was first published in 2004, it was notable enough news to spark...
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To fish the cake: to patch things up (Spanish) I'm Not Hanging Noodles on Your Ears and Other Intriguing Idioms From Around the World by Jag Ballah is a collection of idioms with their meanings accompanied by illustrations by New Yorker cartoonist Julia Suits. We have a few food-related idioms to share from this book, which comes out on June 16. More illustrations after the jump....
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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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