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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
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.
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.
From National Book Award-nominee Iliana Regan, a new memoir of her life and heritage as a forager, spanning her ancestry in Eastern Europe, her childhood in rural Indiana, and her new life set in the remote forests of Michigan's Upper Peninsula. Fieldwork explores how Regan's complex gender identity informs her acclaimed work as a chef and her profound experience of the natural world.
Not long after Iliana Regan's celebrated debut, Burn the Place, became the first food-related title in four decades to become a National Book Award nominee in 2019, her career as a Michelin star-winning chef took a sharp turn north. Long based in Chicago, she and her new wife, Anna, decided to create a culinary destination, the Milkweed Inn, located in Michigan's remote Upper Peninsula, where much of the food served to their guests would be foraged by Regan herself in the surrounding forest and nearby river. Part fresh challenge, part escape, Regan's move to the forest was also a return to her rural roots, in an effort to deepen the intimate connection to nature and the land that she'd long expressed as a chef, but experienced most intensely growing up.
On her family's farm in rural Indiana, Regan was the beloved youngest in a family with three much older sisters. From a very early age, her relationship with her mother and father was shaped by her childhood identification as a boy. Her father treated her like the son he never had, and together they foraged for mushrooms, berries, herbs, and other wild food in the surrounding countryside--especially her grandfather's nearby farm, where they also fished in its pond and young Iliana explored the accumulated family treasures stored in its dusty barn. Her father would share stories of his own grandmother, Busia, who'd helped run a family inn while growing up in eastern Europe, from which she imported her own wild legends of her native forests, before settling in Gary, Indiana, and opening Jennie's Café, a restaurant that fed generations of local steelworkers. He also shared with Iliana a steady supply of sharp knives and--as she got older--guns.
Iliana's mother had family stories as well--not only of her own years marrying young, raising headstrong girls, and cooking at Jennie's, but also of her father, Wayne, who spent much of his boyhood hunting with the men of his family in the frozen reaches of rural Canada. The stories from this side of Regan's family are darker, riven with alcoholism and domestic strife too often expressed in the harm, physical and otherwise, perpetrated by men--harm men do to women and families, and harm men do to the entire landscapes they occupy.
As Regan explores the ancient landscape of Michigan's boreal forest, her stories of the land, its creatures, and its dazzling profusion of plant and vegetable life are interspersed with her and Anna's efforts to make a home and a business of an inn that's suddenly, as of their first full season there in 2020, empty of guests due to the COVID-19 pandemic. She discovers where the wild blueberry bushes bear tiny fruit, where to gather wood sorrel, and where and when the land's different mushroom species appear--even as surrounding parcels of land are suddenly and violently decimated by logging crews that obliterate plant life and drive away the area's birds. Along the way she struggles not only with the threat of COVID, but also with her personal and familial legacies of addiction, violence, fear, and obsession--all while she tries to conceive a child that she and her immune-compromised wife hope to raise in their new home.
With Burn the Place, Regan announced herself as a writer whose extravagant, unconventional talents matched her abilities as a lauded chef. In Fieldwork, she digs even deeper to express the meaning and beauty we seek in the landscapes, and stories, that reveal the forces which inform, shape, and nurture our lives.
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.
From his first apprenticeship in France to his Michelin-starred restaurant empire, Jean-Georges Vongerichten's cuisine is inspired by the freshest ingredients, the simplest techniques, and the drive to make the ordinary perfect. It all started at home.
Jean-Georges was born in Alsace in eastern France to a family in the coal business. He spent his childhood watching, mesmerized, as his mother produced elaborate lunches each day at 12:30 p.m. sharp and exquisite dinners at exactly 7:30 p.m. Served rich goose stew and tender roasted local vegetables, Vongerichten's palate was forever transformed, and such were the origins of his culinary genius.
JGV is an invitation into the kitchen with a master chef. With humor and heart, Jean-Georges looks back on success and failure, sharing stories of cooking with legendary chefs Paul Bocuse and Louis Outhier, traveling in search of new and revelatory flavors, and building menus of his own in New York City, London, Singapore, Sao Paolo, and back in France. Every story is full of wisdom, conveyed with the magnanimity and precision that has made this chef a household name.
Anchoring this remarkable memoir are twelve recipes that have defined Jean-Georges's career: an egg caviar still on his menu forty years after his mentor taught him the simple preparation; shrimp satay with a wine-oyster reduction from his landmark Lafayette restaurant; a pea guacamole that had President Obama tweeting; and more.
Enlivened with his hand-drawn sketches and intimate photographs, JGV is a book for young chefs, as well as anyone who has ever stood at a stove and wondered what might be.
"Twitty makes the case that Blackness and Judaism coexist in beautiful harmony, and this is manifested in the foods and traditions from both cultures that Black Jews incorporate into their daily lives...Twitty wishes to start a conversation where people celebrate their differences and embrace commonalities. By drawing on personal narratives, his own and others', and exploring different cultures, Twitty's book offers important insight into the journeys of Black Jews."--Library Journal
"A fascinating, cross-cultural smorgasbord grounded in the deep emotional role food plays in two influential American communities."--Booklist
The James Beard award-winning author of the acclaimed The Cooking Gene explores the cultural crossroads of Jewish and African diaspora cuisine and issues of memory, identity, and food.
In Koshersoul, Michael W. Twitty considers the marriage of two of the most distinctive culinary cultures in the world today: the foods and traditions of the African Atlantic and the global Jewish diaspora. To Twitty, the creation of African-Jewish cooking is a conversation of migrations and a dialogue of diasporas offering a rich background for inventive recipes and the people who create them.
The question that most intrigues him is not just who makes the food, but how the food makes the people. Jews of Color are not outliers, Twitty contends, but significant and meaningful cultural creators in both Black and Jewish civilizations. Koshersoul also explores how food has shaped the journeys of numerous cooks, including Twitty's own passage to and within Judaism.
As intimate, thought-provoking, and profound as The Cooking Gene, this remarkable book teases the senses as it offers sustenance for the soul.
Koshersoul includes 48-50 recipes.