History

The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals

A New York Times bestseller that has changed the way readers view the ecology of eating, this revolutionary book by award winner Michael Pollan asks the seemingly simple question: What should we have for dinner? Tracing from source to table each of the food chains that sustain us—whether industrial or organic, alternative or processed—he develops a portrait of the American way of eating. The result is a sweeping, surprising exploration of the hungers that have shaped our evolution, and of the profound implications our food choices have for the health of our species and the future of our planet.

The Silver Spoon

First published in 1950 and revised over time, Italy's bestselling culinary "bible," Il Cucchiaio d'argento, is now available in English. The Silver Spoon boasts over 2,000 recipes and arrives in a handsome (and weighty) photo-illustrated edition complete with two ribbon markers. Its chapters make every menu stop from sauces and antipasti through cheese dishes and sweets, with many standout dishes like Genoese Pesto Minestrone, Eggplant and Ricotta Lasagna, Pork Shoulder with Prunes, and Chocolate and Pear Tart; the book also includes a number of "eccentricities," like sections on patty shells and bean sprouts, surely not an Italian dining staple. Meant to be inclusive, the book also offers a wide range of non-Italian, mostly French formulas, supplemented by a few "exotic" and other non-traditional entries.

Though the recipe range is vast, it must be said that American readers, anxious to cook this authentic fare, will encounter problems. Translating a cookbook from one language to another requires cultural recasting as well as word substitution, and in this the book's editors have been lax. The problems include non-idiomatic usages, for example, calling for "pans" when "pots" is needed; awkward conversions from the metric system, resulting in requirements like eleven ounces of zite; and the inclusion of ingredients like cavolo nero (Tuscan cabbage), tope (a Mediterranean fish), and pancetta copatta (ham-stuffed pancetta) that are unavailable here and for which no alternatives are suggested. In addition, the recipes themselves are often insufficiently specific or detailed--even seasoned bakers will pause before cake recipes that don't specify pan size--and can also lack yields. Space considerations have also meant printing recipes in single, one-column paragraphs, which can make place-finding while cooking difficult, and there are typos and other goofs (one recipe for four specifies six cups of sliced scallions; another requires that a marinade be "stirred frequently for five to twelve hours").

All this said, many cooks--casual and serious alike--as well as cookbook collectors, will want The Silver Spoon. It's an essential document of the Italian table and as such a classic. Indeed, it would be hard to imagine a complete cookbook library without the book--a welcome evocation of a much-beloved repertoire by those who know it best. --Arthur Boehm

First published in 1950 and revised over time, Italy's bestselling culinary "bible," Il Cucchiaio d'argento, is now available in English. The Silver Spoon boasts over 2,000 recipes and arrives in a handsome (and weighty) photo-illustrated edition complete with two ribbon markers. Its chapters make every menu stop from sauces and antipasti through cheese dishes and sweets, with many standout dishes like Genoese Pesto Minestrone, Eggplant and Ricotta Lasagna, Pork Shoulder with Prunes, and Chocolate and Pear Tart; the book also includes a number of "eccentricities," likesections on patty shells and bean sprouts, surely not an Italian dining staple.Meant to be inclusive, the book also offers a wide range of non-Italian, mostly French formulas, supplemented by a few "exotic" and other non-traditional entries.Though the recipe range is vast, it must be said that American readers, anxious to cook this authentic fare, will encounter problems. Translating a cookbook from one language to another requires cultural recasting as well as word substitution, and in this the book's editors have been lax. The problems include non-idiomatic usages, for example, calling for "pans" when "pots" is needed; awkward conversions from the metric system, resulting in requirements like eleven ounces of zite; and the inclusion of ingredients like cavolo nero (Tuscan cabbage), tope (a Mediterranean fish), andpancetta copatta (ham-stuffed pancetta) that are unavailable here and for which no alternatives are suggested. In addition, the recipes themselves are often insufficiently specific or detailed--even seasoned bakers will pause before cake recipes that don't specify pan size--and can also lack yields. Space considerations have also meant printing recipes in single, one-column paragraphs, which can make place-finding while cooking difficult, and there are typos and other goofs (one recipe for four specifies six cups of sliced scallions; another requires that a marinade be "stirred frequently for five to twelve hours").All this said, many cooks--casual and serious alike--as well as cookbook collectors, will want The Silver Spoon. It's an essential document of the Italian table and as such a classic. Indeed, it would be hard to imagine a complete cookbook library without the book--a welcome evocation of a much-beloved repertoire by those who know it best. --Arthur Boehm

My Life in France

Julia Child singlehandedly created a new approach to American cuisine with her cookbook Mastering the Art of French Cooking and her television show The French Chef, but as she reveals in this bestselling memoir, she was not always a master chef.


Indeed, when she first arrived in France in 1948 with her husband, Paul, who was to work for the USIS, she spoke no French and knew nothing about the country itself. But as she dove into French culture, buying food at local markets and taking classes at the Cordon Bleu, her life changed forever with her newfound passion for cooking and teaching. Julia’s unforgettable story – struggles with the head of the Cordon Bleu, rejections from publishers to whom she sent her now-famous cookbook, a wonderful, nearly fifty-year long marriage that took them across the globe – unfolds with the spirit so key to her success as a chef and a writer, brilliantly capturing one of the most endearing American personalities of the last fifty years.

Julia Child was born in Pasadena, California. She was graduated from Smith College and worked for the OSS during World War II in Ceylon and China, where she met Paul Child. After they married they lived in Paris, where she studied at the Cordon Bleu and taught cooking with Simone Beck and Louisette Bertholle, with whom she wrote the first volume of Mastering the Art of French Cooking (1961). In 1963, Boston’s WGBH launched The French Chef television series, which made her a national celebrity, earning her the Peabody Award in 1965 and an Emmy in 1966. Several public television shows and numerous cookbooks followed. She died in 2004.


From the Hardcover edition.

Renewing America's Food Traditions: Saving and Savoring the Continent's Most Endangered Foods

Renewing America's Food Traditions is a beautifully illustrated dramatic call to recognize, celebrate, and conserve the great diversity of foods that gives North America its distinctive culinary identity that reflects our multicultural heritage. It offers us rich natural and cultural histories as well as recipes and folk traditions associated with the rarest food plants and animals in North America. In doing so, it reminds us that what we choose to eat can either conserve or deplete the cornucopia of our continent.

While offering a eulogy to a once-common game food that has gone extinct--the passenger pigeon--the book doesn't dwell on tragic losses. Instead, it highlights the success stories of food recovery, habitat restoration, and market revitalization that chefs, farmers, ranchers, fishermen, and foresters have recently achieved. Through such "food parables," editor Gary Paul Nabhan and his colleagues build a persuasive argument for eater-based conservation.

In addition, this book offers the first-ever list of foods at risk in America (more than a thousand), shows how all of us can personally support and participate in such recoveries, and lists food festivals held across the continent to honor and enjoy some of the country's most iconic foods, from crab cakes to maple syrup and filé gumbo. Organized by "food nations" named for the ecological and cultural keystone foods of each region--Salmon Nation, Bison Nation, Chile Pepper Nation, among others--this book offers an altogether fresh perspective on the culinary traditions of North America.

The Hamburger: A History (Icons of America)

Molecular Gastronomy: Exploring the Science of Flavor (Arts and Traditions of the Table: Perspectives on Culinary History)

Hervé This (pronounced "Teess") is an internationally renowned chemist, a popular French television personality, a bestselling cookbook author, a longtime collaborator with the famed French chef Pierre Gagnaire, and the only person to hold a doctorate in molecular gastronomy, a cutting-edge field he pioneered. Bringing the instruments and experimental techniques of the laboratory into the kitchen, This uses recent research in the chemistry, physics, and biology of food to challenge traditional ideas about cooking and eating. What he discovers will entertain, instruct, and intrigue cooks, gourmets, and scientists alike.

Molecular Gastronomy, This's first work to appear in English, is filled with practical tips, provocative suggestions, and penetrating insights. This begins by reexamining and debunking a variety of time-honored rules and dictums about cooking and presents new and improved ways of preparing a variety of dishes from quiches and quenelles to steak and hard-boiled eggs. He goes on to discuss the physiology of flavor and explores how the brain perceives tastes, how chewing affects food, and how the tongue reacts to various stimuli. Examining the molecular properties of bread, ham, foie gras, and champagne, the book analyzes what happens as they are baked, cured, cooked, and chilled.

Looking to the future, This imagines new cooking methods and proposes novel dishes. A chocolate mousse without eggs? A flourless chocolate cake baked in the microwave? Molecular Gastronomy explains how to make them. This also shows us how to cook perfect French fries, why a soufflé rises and falls, how long to cool champagne, when to season a steak, the right way to cook pasta, how the shape of a wine glass affects the taste of wine, why chocolate turns white, and how salt modifies tastes.

Food: The History of Taste (California Studies in Food and Culture)

This richly illustrated book is the first to apply the discoveries of the new generation of food historians to the pleasures of dining and the culinary accomplishments of diverse civilizations, past and present. Editor Paul Freedman has gathered essays by French, German, Belgian, American, and British historians to present a comprehensive, chronological history of taste from prehistory to the present day. The authors explore the early repertoire of sweet tastes; the distinctive contributions made by classical antiquity and China; the subtle, sophisticated, and varied group of food customs created by the Islamic civilizations of Iberia, the Arabian desert, Persia, and Byzantium; the magnificent cuisine of the Middle Ages, influenced by Rome and adapted from Islamic Spain, Africa, and the Middle East; the decisive break with highly spiced food traditions after the Renaissance and the new focus on primary ingredients and products from the New World; French cuisine's rise to dominance in Europe and America; the evolution of modern restaurant dining, modern agriculture, and technological developments; and today's tastes, which employ few rules and exhibit a glorious eclecticism. The result is the enthralling story not only of what sustains us but also of what makes us feel alive.
Copub: Thames & Hudson

Alice Waters and Chez Panisse

You can't tell the story of Chez Panisse, Berkeley's famed restaurant, without relating that of its diminutive founder, proprietor, and sometime chef, Alice Waters. This is what Thomas McNamee does most handily in his Alice Waters and Chez Panisse, a chronicle that begins with the seat-of-the-pants opening night of the "counterculture" venture in 1971, and ends 35 years later with Waters's restaurant an American institution--one credited with birthing California Cuisine, a style devoted to simplicity, freshness and seasonality. The book also limns, with tasty gossip, the ever-evolving Chez Panisse family, including the cook-artisans uniquely responsible for dish creation; follows the attempts, mostly failed, to put the restaurant on sound financial footing; shows how dishes and menus get made; and of course pursues Waters as she broadens her commitment to "virtuous agriculture" by establishing ventures like The Edible Schoolyard and The Yale Sustainable Food Project.

The success of Chez Panisse--Gourmet magazine named it the best American restaurant in 2002--has everything to do with Waters, yet she remains an elusive protagonist. Sophisticated yet naive, professional and amateur, hard-driving but emotionally blurry, she invites reader interest but doesn't always satisfy it, as least as presented here. If McNamee cannot quite bring her to life, and if his tale lacks an insider's full conversance with his subject, he still engages readers in the considerable drama of people finding their way--blunderingly, with talented intent--to something new. With menus, narrated recipes, and photographs throughout, the book is vital reading for anyone interested in food, period. --Arthur Boehm

The first authorized biography of “the mother of American cooking” (The New York Times)

This adventurous book charts the origins of the local “market cooking” culture that we all savor today. When Francophile Alice Waters opened Chez Panisse in Berkeley in 1971, few Americans were familiar with goat cheese, cappuccino, or mesclun. But it wasn’t long before Waters and her motley coterie of dreamers inspired a new culinary standard incorporating ethics, politics, and the conviction that the best-grown food is also the tastiest. Based on unprecedented access to Waters and her inner circle, this is a truly delicious rags-to-riches saga.

What Einstein Told His Cook: Kitchen Science Explained

Why do recipes call for unsalted butter--and salt? What is a microwave, actually? Are smoked foods raw or cooked? Robert L. Wolke's enlightening and entertaining What Einstein Told His Cook offers answers to these and 127 other questions about everyday kitchen phenomena. Using humor (dubious puns included), Wolke, a bona fide chemistry professor and syndicated Washington Post columnist, has found a way to make his explanations clear and accessible to all: in short, fun. For example, to a query about why cookbooks advise against inserting meat thermometers so that they touch a bone, Wolke says, "I hate warnings without explanations, don't you? Whenever I see an 'open other end' warning on a box, I open the wrong end just to see what will happen. I'm still alive." But he always finally gets down to brass tacks: as most heat transfer in meat is due to its water content, areas around bone remain relatively cool and thus unreliable for gauging overall meat temperature.

Organized into basic categories like "Sweet Talk" (questions involving sugar), "Fire and Ice" (we learn why water boils and freezers burn, among other things), and "Tools and Technology" (the best kind of frying pan, for example), the book also provides illustrative recipes like Black Raspberry Coffee Cake (to demonstrate how metrics work in recipes) and Bob's Mahogany Game Hens (showing what brining can do). With technical illustrations, tips, and more, the book offers abundant evidence that learning the whys and hows of cooking can help us enjoy the culinary process almost as much as its results. --Arthur Boehm

Einstein's cook was lucky. But you, too, can have a scientist in your kitchen: Robert L. Wolke. Does the alcohol really boil off when we cook with wine? Are smoked foods raw or cooked? Are green potatoes poisonous? With the reliability that only a scientist can provide, Robert L. Wolke provides plain-talk explanations of kitchen mysteries with a liberal seasoning of wit. A professor of chemistry and a lifelong gastronome, he has answered hundreds of questions about food and cooking in his syndicated Washington Post column, "Food 101." Organized into basic categories for easy reference, What Einstein Told His Cook contains more than 130 lucid explanations of kitchen phenomena involving starches and sugars, salts, fats, meats and fish, heat and cold, cooking equipment, and more. Along the way, Wolke debunks some widely held myths about foods and cooking. Whether kept in the kitchen or on the reference shelf, What Einstein Told His Cook will be a friendly scientist at your elbow. 20 illustrations.

The Story of Tea: A Cultural History and Drinking Guide

Whether it's a delicate green tea from China or a bracing Assam black, a seemingly mild-mannered cup of tea represents a turbulent history of intrigue and conquest, tradition and revolution, East and West. In this sweeping tour through the history, culture, and lore of this 2,000-year-old beverage, veteran tea professionals Mary Lou Heiss and Robert J. Heiss provide an in-depth resource for tea lovers, covering all aspects of production and consumption--from the terroir in which a tea bush is cultivated to the time-honored rituals of brewing and drinking. At once passionate and carefully researched, this weighty tome will infuse readers with a deep appreciation for the illustrious, invigorating, and elusive leaf.