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Cooking Narrative
"This book demonstrates just how amazing Eric's life has been both inside and outside of the kitchen. It makes total sense now to see him become one of the greatest chefs in the world today. This is a portrait of a chef as a young man."--David Chang
All tequilas are mezcals; all mezcals are made from agaves; and every bottle of mezcal is the remarkable result of collaborations among agave entrepreneurs, botanists, distillers, beverage distributors, bartenders, and more. How these groups come together in this "spirits world" is the subject of this fascinating new book by the acclaimed ethnobotanist Gary Paul Nabhan and the pioneering restauranteur David Suro Pinera. Join them as they delight in the diversity of the distillate agave spirits, as they endeavor to track down the more distant kin in the family of agaves, and as, along the way, they reveal the stunning innovations that have been transforming the industry around tequilas and mezcals in recent decades.
The result of the authors' fieldwork and on-the-ground interviews with mezcaleros in eight Mexican states, Agave Spirits shows how traditional methods of mezcal production are inspiring a new generation of individuals, including women, both in and beyond the industry. And as they reach back into a rich, centuries-long history, Nabhan and Suro Pinera make clear that understanding the story behind a bottle of mezcal, more than any other drink, will not only reveal what lies ahead for the tradition--including its ability to adapt in the face of the climate crisis--but will also enrich the drinking experience for readers.
Essential reading for mezcal connoisseurs and amateurs interested in unlocking the past of a delightful distillate, Agave Spirits tells the tale of the most flavorful and memorable spirits humankind has ever sipped and savored.
Featuring twelve illustrations by René Alejandro Hernández Tapia and indices that list common and scientific names for agave species, as well as the names of plants, animals, and domesticated agaves used in the production of distillates.
Like many miniencyclopedias, this one is studded with often intriguing facts.--Kirkus
New York Post Required Reading and an Entertainment Weekly Top 3 Must-Read!
From the chief historian at HISTORY(R) comes a rich chronicle of the evolution of American cuisine and culture, from before Columbus's arrival to today.
Did you know that the first graham crackers were designed to reduce sexual desire? Or that Americans have tried fad diets for almost two hundred years? Why do we say things like buck for a dollar and living high on the hog? How have economics, technology, and social movements changed our tastes? Uncover these and other fascinating aspects of American food traditions in The American Plate.
Dr. Libby H. O'Connell takes readers on a mouth-watering journey through America's culinary evolution into the vibrant array of foods we savor today. In 100 tantalizing bites, ranging from blueberries and bagels to peanut butter, hard cider, and Cracker Jack, O'Connell reveals the astonishing ways that cultures and individuals have shaped our national diet and continue to influence how we cook and eat.
Peppered throughout with recipes, photos, and tidbits on dozens of foods, from the surprising origins of Hershey Bars to the strange delicacies our ancestors enjoyed, such as roast turtle and grilled beaver tail. Inspiring and intensely satisfying, The American Plate shows how we can use the tastes of our shared past to transform our future.
These foods reflect our country's diversity. By championing them, we keep them in production and on our plates, while promoting a more equitable alternative to industrial agriculture. 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.
In the early 1970s, in the midst of a body of work linking cuisine, cooking, women, labor, imperialism, and even photography, Martha Rosler wrote The Art of Cooking, a mock dialogue between Julia Child, the pioneer television chef schooling Americans in how to produce haute cuisine at home, and then New York Times restaurant critic Craig Claiborne. Here published in full for the first time, The Art of Cooking consists in large part of quotations from books on cuisine and cooking from various eras redirected toward a discussion of the role of taste in art.
In its focus on the figure of the housewifely woman cooking for TV, The Art of Cooking brings to mind Rosler's celebrated video Semiotics of the Kitchen (1975). But like her 1977 video Losing: A Conversation with the Parents, this conversation is an absurdist reimagining of the confrontation between male and female discursive strategies and subject positions, centering on and departing from cultural uses of food. It is also a further chapter in her challenge to (Kantian-derived) Modernist notions of separation and her interrogation of hierarchies of taste and value, especially in relation to art--a sequence that included Monumental Garage Sale of 1973. In each case, feminism and performance are fused with conceptual art strategies and neo-avantgardist aims of bridging the boundaries between art and everyday life.
Written when cooking and cuisine were first being marketed as a social good and a cultural necessity to educated housewives and well-heeled diners alike, The Art of Cooking reflects the rapid rise in sales of cookbooks lavishly illustrated with newly perfected color printing. These blockbusters touted regional and national cuisines to provide a freshly affluent middle class with an aspirational cosmopolitanism often expressed only as a kind of armchair tourism. In the current moment of renewed food fixations and fetishisms, and the widening cult of celebrity chefs, while culinary selections are threatening to displace most other aesthetic choices, The Art of Cooking provides a sideways glance at the rhetorics brought to bear on these adventures in production, consumption, and daily life.
A collection of the year's top food writing, selected by guest editor Sohla El-Waylly and series editor Silvia Killingsworth.
Culinary creator, writer and community advocate, Sohla El-Waylly selects the best twenty articles published in 2021 that celebrate the many innovative, comforting, mouthwatering, and culturally rich culinary offerings of our country.
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.
ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR: NPR, Fortune, Parade, The New York Public Library, Garden & Gun In 2004, Momofuku Noodle Bar opened in a tiny, stark space in Manhattan's East Village. Its young chef-owner, David Chang, worked the line, serving ramen and pork buns to a mix of fellow restaurant cooks and confused diners whose idea of ramen was instant noodles in Styrofoam cups. It would have been impossible to know it at the time--and certainly Chang would have bet against himself--but he, who had failed at almost every endeavor in his life, was about to become one of the most influential chefs of his generation, driven by the question, "What if the underground could become the mainstream?" Chang grew up the youngest son of a deeply religious Korean American family in Virginia. Graduating college aimless and depressed, he fled the States for Japan, hoping to find some sense of belonging. While teaching English in a backwater town, he experienced the highs of his first full-blown manic episode, and began to think that the cooking and sharing of food could give him both purpose and agency in his life. Full of grace, candor, grit, and humor, Eat a Peach chronicles Chang's switchback path. He lays bare his mistakes and wonders about his extraordinary luck as he recounts the improbable series of events that led him to the top of his profession. He wrestles with his lifelong feelings of otherness and inadequacy, explores the mental illness that almost killed him, and finds hope in the shared value of deliciousness. Along the way, Chang gives us a penetrating look at restaurant life, in which he balances his deep love for the kitchen with unflinching honesty about the industry's history of brutishness and its uncertain future.
The plant-led follow-up to The Flavor Thesaurus, "a rich and witty and erudite collection" (Epicurious), featuring 92 essential ingredients and hundreds of flavor combinations.
"After all the combinations you think you know, the ones you've never even considered will blow your mind ... Eggplants take you to chocolate, which takes you to miso, which takes you to seaweed, which takes you to a recipe in another book or a restaurant dish you have to hunt down straight away. The curiosity is infectious, the possibilities inspiring on this ingredient-led voyage."--Yotam Ottolenghi in The New York Times Magazine, on how he uses More Flavors for recipe development "[Segnit is] a flavor genius . . . creative, imaginative, and fun."--Mark BittmanWith her debut cookbook, The Flavor Thesaurus, Niki Segnit taught readers that no matter whether an ingredient is "grassy" like dill, cucumber, or peas, or "floral fruity" like figs, roses, or blueberries, flavors can be created in wildly imaginative ways. Now, she again draws from her "phenomenal body of work" (Yotam Ottolenghi) to produce a new treasury of pairings--this time with plant-led ingredients. More Flavors explores the character and tasting notes of chickpea, fennel, pomegranate, kale, lentil, miso, mustard, rye, pine nut, pistachio, poppy seed, sesame, turmeric, and wild rice--as well as favorites like almond, avocado, garlic, lemon, and parsley from the original--then expertly teaches readers how to pair them with ingredients that complement. With her celebrated blend of science, history, expertise, anecdotes, and signature sense of humor, Niki Segnit's More Flavors is a modern classic of food writing, and a brilliantly useful, engaging reference book for every cook's kitchen.
When Jeanne Nolan, a teenager in search of a less materialistic, more authentic existence, left Chicago in 1987 to join a communal farm, she had no idea that her decades-long journey would lead her to the heart of a movement that is currently changing our nation's relationship to food. Now a leader in the sustainable food movement, Nolan shares her story in From the Ground Up, helping us understand the benefits of organic gardening--for the environment, our health, our wallets, our families, and our communities. The great news, as Nolan shows us, is that it has never been easier to grow the vegetables we eat, whether on our rooftops, in our backyards, in our school yards, or on our fire escapes. From the Ground Up chronicles Nolan's journey as she returned seventeen years later, disillusioned with communal life, to her parents' suburban home on the North Shore as a single mother with few marketable skills. Her mother suggested she plant a vegetable garden in their yard, and it grew so abundantly that she established a small business planting organic gardens in suburban yards. She was then asked to create an organic farm for children at Chicago's Lincoln Park Zoo, and she soon began installing gardens around the city--on a restaurant's rooftop, in school yards, and for nonprofit organizations. Not only did she realize that practically anyone anywhere could grow vegetables on a small scale but she learned a greater lesson as well: rather than turn her back on mainstream society, she could make a difference in the world. The answer she was searching for was no further than her own backyard. In this moving and inspiring account, which combines her fascinating personal journey with the knowledge she gained along the way, Nolan helps us understand the importance of planting and eating organically--both for our health and for the environment--and provides practical tips for growing our food. With the message that we can create utopias in our very own backyards and rooftops, From the Ground Up can inspire each of us to reassess our relationship to the food we eat. Praise for From the Ground Up "One of the most intelligent, surprising and impressive garden memoirs I've read in a long time . . . radiant with hope and love."--The New York Times Book Review "The joy of From the Ground Up is not Nolan's own happy ending but rather the illuminating way she applies her vision to practical problems. . . . The hardest memoir to write is the one that is honest but not self-obsessed; Nolan accomplishes this with clarity and poise."--Jane Smiley, Harper's "[A] rare and improbable thing: a gripping gardening memoir . . . [Nolan's] voice is an honest and reassuring one."--Chicago Reader "[A] refreshing narrative . . . From the Ground Up triumphs the backyard micro-garden as it imparts lessons from Nolan's life about family. . . . The book is a good read for foodies and lovers of a good story alike, and an inspiration to garden wherever you can find space."--Fredericksburg Free Lance-Star "From the Ground Up resonates powerfully with me, as a gardener, and inspires me to 'double dig' my garden bed. But even readers who keep their fingernails clean will benefit from this beautiful story and powerful message."--Sophia Siskel, president and CEO of the Chicago Botanic Garden
- How our reverence for high quality animal protein has distorted our understanding of cholesterol, saturated fat, unsaturated fat, environmental carcinogens, and more
- Why mainstream food and nutrient recommendations and public policy favor corporate interests over that of personal and planetary health
- How we can ensure that public nutrition literacy can prevent and treat personal illness more effectively and economically The Future of Nutrition offers a fascinating deep-dive behind the curtain of the field of nutrition--with implications both for our health and for the practice of science itself.
"Insightful tour de force... Farrell's writing is as informative as it is intoxicating" -- Publishers Weekly
Shanna Farrell loves a good drink. As a bartender, she not only poured spirits, but learned their stories--who made them and how. Living in San Francisco, surrounded by farm-to-table restaurants and high-end bars, she wondered why the eco-consciousness devoted to food didn't extend to drinks.
Paperback Fiction
Hardcover Non-Fiction
Hardcover Fiction
