Cooking Narrative

In this extraordinarily intimate portrait of her mother--and herself--Fanny Singer, daughter of food icon and activist Alice Waters, chronicles a unique world of food, wine, and travel; a world filled with colorful characters, mouth-watering traditions, and sumptuous feasts. Across dozens of vignettes with accompanying recipes, she shares the story of her own culinary coming of age and reveals a side of her legendary mother that has never been seen before. A charming, smart translation of Alice Waters's ideals and attitudes about food for a new generation, Always Home is a loving, often funny, unsentimental, and exquisitely written look at a life defined in so many ways by food, as well as the bond between mother and daughter.

The Ark of Taste is a living catalog of our nation's food heritage preserving treasures passed down for generations--some rare, some endangered, all delicious.

Created by Slow Food USA, the Ark shines light on history, identity, and taste through these unique food products, featuring recipes and the stories of how they reach our tables In these pages you'll learn about:

The Ark of Taste is a vital resource for all of us who spend the summer searching for that perfectly ripe peach or heirloom tomato--or who are simply looking for the next good thing to eat.

This is the story of the bean, the staple food cultivated by humans for over 10,000 years.

From the lentil to the soybean, every civilization on the planet has cultivated its own species of bean. The humble bean has always attracted attention - from Pythagoras' notion that the bean hosted a human soul to St. Jerome's indictment against bean-eating in convents (because they "tickle the genitals"), to current research into the deadly toxins contained in the most commonly eaten beans.

Over time, the bean has been both scorned as "poor man's meat" and praised as health-giving, even patriotic. Attitudes to this most basic of foodstuffs have always revealed a great deal about a society. Featuring a new preface from author Ken Albala, Beans: A History takes the reader on a fascinating journey across cuisines and cultures.

"Excellent....Taken as a whole, the volume moves beyond food's sensory pleasures to investigate it as a cultural vessel, a symbol of inequality, and more. It's a standout addition to the series." --Publisher's Weekly (starred review)

A collection of the year's top food writing, selected by prolific food writer and author of How to Cook Everything Mark Bittman.

"In almost any culture, at any time, you can find food writing," writes guest editor Mark Bittman in his introduction. "Food means growing and hardship, and health and medicine, and work and holiday. In its abundance it is a gift and a joy, and in its absence a curse and a tragedy. If a culture has writing, that culture has food writing." The stories in this year's Best American Food Writing are brilliant, eye-opening windows into the heart of our country's culture. From the link between salt and sex, to Syrian refugees transforming ancient Turkish food traditions, to the FDA's crusade on alternative non-dairy milk options, to Black farmers in Arkansas seeking justice, the scope of these essays spans nearly every aspect of our society. This anthology offers an entertaining and poignant look at how food shapes our lives and how food writing shapes our culture.

THE BEST AMERICAN FOOD WRITING 2023 INCLUDES JAYA SAXENA - LIGAYA MISHAN - MARION NESTLE TOM PHILPOTT - WESLEY BROWN - ALICIA KENNEDY CAROLINE HATCHETT - AMY LOEFFLER and others

In 1949, a young Chinese housewife arrived in Taiwan and transformed herself from a novice to a natural in the kitchen. She launched a career as a cookbook author and television cooking instructor that would last four decades. Years later, in America, flipping through her mother's copies of Fu Pei-mei's Chinese cookbooks, historian Michelle T. King discovered more than the recipes to meals of her childhood. She found, in Fu's story and in her food, a vivid portal to another time, when a generation of middle-class, female home cooks navigated the tremendous postwar transformations taking place across the world.

In Chop Fry Watch Learn, King weaves together stories from her own family and contemporary oral history to present a remarkable argument for how understanding the story of Fu's life enables us to see Chinese food as both an inheritance of tradition and a truly modern creation, influenced by the historical phenomena of the postwar era. These include a dramatic increase in the number of women working outside the home, a new proliferation of mass media, the arrival of innovative kitchen tools, and the shifting diplomatic fortunes of China and Taiwan. King reveals how and why, for audiences in Taiwan and around the world, Fu became the ultimate culinary touchstone: the figure against whom all other cooking authorities were measured.

And Fu's legacy continues. Her cookbooks have become beloved emblems of cultural memory, passed from parent to child, wherever diasporic Chinese have landed. Informed by the voices of fans across generations, King illuminates the story of Chinese food from the inside: at home, around the family dinner table. The result is a revelatory work, a rich banquet of past and present tastes that will resonate deeply for all of us looking for our histories in the kitchen.

Some of the most significant moments in American history have occurred over meals, as U.S. presidents broke bread with friends or foes: Thomas Jefferson's nation-building receptions in the new capital, Washington, D.C.; Ulysses S. Grant's state dinner for the king of Hawaii; Teddy Roosevelt's groundbreaking supper with Booker T. Washington; Richard Nixon's practiced use of chopsticks to pry open China; Jimmy Carter's cakes and pies that fueled a détente between Israel and Egypt at Camp David.

Here Alex Prud'homme invites readers into the White House kitchen to reveal the sometimes curious tastes of twenty-six of America's most influential presidents and the ways their choices affected food policy around the world. And the White House menu grew over time--from simple eggs and black coffee for Abraham Lincoln during the Civil War to jelly beans and enchiladas for Ronald Reagan and arugula for Barack Obama. What our leaders say about food touches on everything from our nation's shifting diet and local politics to global trade, war, class, gender, race, and so much more.

Prud'homme also details overlooked figures, like George Washington's enslaved chef, Hercules Posey, whose meals burnished the president's reputation before the cook narrowly escaped to freedom, and pioneering First Ladies, such as Dolley Madison and Jackie Kennedy. As he weaves these stories together, Prud'homme shows that food is not just fuel when it is served to the most powerful people in the world. It is a tool of communication, a lever of power and persuasion, and a symbol of the nation.

Included are ten authentic recipes for favorite presidential dishes, such as: *Martha Washington's Preserved Cherries, *Abraham Lincoln's Gingerbread Men, *William H. Taft's Billy Bi Mussel Soup, *Franklin D. Roosevelt's Reverse Martini, *Lady Bird Johnson's Pedernales River Chili

"A thorough, lively work of on-the-ground reportage. ... Friedman shares a remarkable story." --Wall Street Journal

Acclaimed "chef writer" Andrew Friedman introduces readers to all the people and processes that come together in a single restaurant dish, creating an entertaining, vivid snapshot of the contemporary restaurant community, modern farming industry, and food-supply chain.

On a typical evening, in a contemporary American restaurant, a table orders their dinner from a server. It's an exchange that happens dozens, or hundreds, of times a night--the core transaction that keeps the place churning. In this book, acclaimed chef writer Andrew Friedman slows down time to focus on a single dish at Chicago's Wherewithall restaurant, following its production and provenances via real-time kitchen and in-the-field reportage, from the moment the order is placed to when the finished dish is delivered to the table.

As various components of this one dish are prepared by the kitchen team, Friedman introduces readers to the players responsible for producing it, from the chefs who conceived the dish and manage the kitchen, to the line cooks and sous chefs who carry out the actual cooking, and the dishwashers who keep pace with the dining room.

Readers will also meet the producers, farmers, and ranchers, who supply the restaurant, as Friedman visits each stop in the supply chain and profiles the key characters whose expertise and effort play essential roles in making the dish possible--they will walk rows of crops that line Midwestern farms, feel the chill of the cooler where beef dry-ages, harvest grapes at a Michigan winery, ride along with a delivery-truck driver, and hear the immigration sagas prevalent amongst often unseen and unheralded farm and restaurant workers.

The Dish is a rollicking ride inside every aspect of a restaurant dish. Both a fascinating window onto our food systems, and a celebration of the unsung heroes of restaurants and the collaborative nature of professional kitchen work, The Dish will ensure that readers never look at any restaurant meal the same way again.

"Masterful. ... Friedman excels at bringing the dining room to boisterous life with vivid, telling details. ... This will sate gastronomes and casual foodies alike." -- Publishers Weekly (starred review)