This work brings the Philippine Islands to life through the stories behind the dishes and their traditional cooking techniques.

    No longer is the choice simply red or white, or wines from California, France, or Italy. The typical shopper today has access to wines from those regions plus South Africa, Chile, Argentina, New Zealand, and Australia. If that isn’t confusing enough, Asian, Creole, and Latin American dishes might find their way onto the same table. Perfect Pairings, by well-known Master Sommelier and respected restaurant industry veteran Evan Goldstein, provides straightforward, practical advice for how to pair wine with each meal. The quintessential resource for matching wine and food, Perfect Pairings acts as a guide to wine, wine terminology, and wine-growing regions as well as a cooking guide: this versatile coffee table book includes 58 companion recipes developed by celebrated chef Joyce Goldstein that showcase each type of wine.Perfect Pairings combines in-depth explorations of twelve grape varietals, sparkling wines, and dessert wines with guidance about foods that enhance the wide range of styles for each varietal. Whether the Chardonnay is earthy and flinty, or rich, buttery, and oak-infused; whether the Pinot Noir fruity and tropical, or aged and mature, Goldstein explains how to match it with dishes that will make the wine sing. His clear, educational, and entertaining approach towards intimidating gastronomical questions provides information for all readers, professional and amateur chefs alike. * 16 full-color photos * Six seasonal and special occasion menus * Tips for enhancing food and wine experiences, both at home and in restaurants * Glossary of wine terminology * Overview of the world’s primary wine-growing regions * Recommendations of more than five hundred wines, ranging in price from everyday to splurge

    This sumptuously illustrated volume features-in seasonal format-the style of cooking that began as tea ceremony accompaniment and developed into the highest form of Japanese cuisine.Kaiseki celebrates the natural ingredients of each season with a spectacular presentation. After a front section explaining the history and components of kaiseki cuisine, Yoshihiro Murata, the third generation owner/chef of Kyoto's famed Kikunoi restaurant, introduces the establishment's menu. With candidness and insight, he shares his thoughts on ingredients, preparation methods and the philosophy behind his dishes. He explains how the cuisine has changed over the years-and continues to do so. He even explains how some dishes evolved as he searched for the proper combination of ingredients. Approximately twenty dishes from each season, chosen by chef Murata, have been lovingly and carefully photographed to convey the experience of being a guest at the Kikunoi restaurant. The book also features a glossary of kaiseki terms and exact recipes from the Kikunoi kitchen.

    It has provided food and a source of income for their families, shaped a distinctive culture, and helped women define and exert themselves in racist and hostile environments. Psyche A. Williams-Forson examines the complexity of black women's legacies using food as a form of cultural work. While acknowledging the negative interpretations of black culture associated with chicken imagery, Williams-Forson focuses her analysis on the ways black women have forged their own self-definitions and relationships to the "gospel bird."Exploring material ranging from personal interviews to the comedy of Chris Rock, from commercial advertisements to the art of Kara Walker, and from cookbooks to literature, Williams-Forson considers how black women arrive at degrees of self-definition and self-reliance using certain foods. She demonstrates how they defy conventional representations of blackness in relationship to these foods and exercise influence through food preparation and distribution. Understanding these phenomena clarifies how present interpretations of blacks and chicken are rooted in a past that is fraught with both racism and agency. The traditions and practices of feminism, Williams-Forson argues, are inherent in the foods women prepare and serve.

    Packed with inspiring information from the best way to make a tomato sauce and a tiramisu to more unusual dishes such as nettle risotto and chestnut mousse, each chapter is devoted to a different ingredient. As well as explaining the basics and introducing more surprising recipes, Anna includes special additional chapters describing traditional regional and historical menus. So whether you want to eat tagliatelle with ham and peas or rabbit with rosemary and tomato, a Roman Late Supper or a Renaissance Dinner, you will find what you need here.

    And guiding us through our culinary revolution have been four of the world's finest food experts: Julia Child, Craig Claiborne, James Beard, and M. F. K. Fisher. In Masters of American Cookery, Betty Fussell demonstrates vividly how each of these chefs has made a unique and invaluable contribution to the American way of cooking and eating. In more than two hundred recipes—in chapters on appetizers, soups, salads, sauces, meats, poultry, fish, breads, cheeses and wines, and desserts—Fussell shares the artistry of these culinary masters. She also traces the evolution of each dish and provides insightful, often witty asides about the origins of the recipes. In the tradition of Waverley Root and M. F. K. Fisher herself, Fussell has combined elements of history, memoir, and the cookbook to create a food lover’s delight. As entertaining as it is instructive, Masters of American Cookery belongs on the bookshelf of anyone who cares about good food. Fussell provides a preface for this Bison Books edition.

    This book contains the circumnavigators’ first picnic in the Philippines, efforts to stem hunger in a pioneering Spanish colony, carabao-horn spoons to maintain quiet during meals of nuns loyal to a vow of silence, banquets and balls of the well-heeled and the noble, devil’s ice, Christ’s food, seditious plottings at the King’s bakery in Intramuros, the mythical pygmy Dinahon who introduced the kalan and the palayok, the early lumpia, the origins of carinderia, and much more.

    Based on an unusually complete cache of letters, recipes, personal artifacts, and eyewitness testimony, Koerner describes in loving detail the domestic life of a nineteenth-century Hungarian Jewish woman, with special emphasis on the meals she served her family. Based on Riza’s letters, part one offers an imaginative sketch of growing up in a religious middle-class family in the 1860s and 70s in an industrial town in western Hungary. Part one also describes Riza’s reactions to the dilemmas posed by the early signs of Jewish assimilation. In part two, the heart of the book, Riza has married, moved to a smaller town near the Austrian border, and become the central figure of a large household. Koerner recreates a typical day in the life of Riza and her family, peppering his narrative with recipes of the food she served for breakfast, mid-morning snack, lunch, afternoon coffee-and-cake, and the much more modest evening meal. Riza’s family was religious, and Koerner also describes the special foods (pike in sour aspic, cholent, apple-matzo kugel, and much more) she served to celebrate the Sabbath and the six major Jewish holidays. Short introductions to the recipes describe the evolution of the dishes through the centuries, their role in Jewish culture, and how cultural influences and religious traditions shaped Riza's cooking. More than 125 evocative pen-and-ink illustrations bring Riza’s story and her food to life. A Taste of the Past offers an enchanting look at Jewish daily life in western Hungary in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, a time when middle-class Jews were increasingly assimilated into mainstream Hungarian life and culture. Such small-town Jewish life had completely disappeared due to the Holocaust. Koerner’s book revives this lost world and invites the reader to be a guest in Riza’s house to watch her caring for her family, shopping, cooking, and preparing for the holidays. By offering easy-to-follow updated versions of her recipes, the book also allows readers to savor Riza's dishes and desserts in their own kitchens, thus completing this experience of a visit to the past.

    McNeil brings together scholars in the fields of archaeology, history, art history, linguistics, epigraphy, botany, chemistry, and cultural anthropology to explore the domestication, preparation, representation, and significance of cacao in ancient and modern communities of the Americas, with a concentration on its use in Mesoamerica.            Cacao was used by many cultures in the pre-Columbian Americas as an important part of rituals associated with birth, coming of age, marriage, and death, and was strongly linked with concepts of power and rulership. While Europeans have for hundreds of years claimed that they introduced “chocolate” as a sauce for foods, evidence from ancient royal tombs indicates cacao was used in a range of foods as well as beverages in ancient times. In addition, the volume’s authors present information that supports a greater importance for cacao in pre-Columbian South America, where ancient vessels depicting cacao pods have recently been identified.             From the botanical structure and chemical makeup of Theobroma cacao and methods of identifying it in the archaeological record, to the importance of cacao during the Classic period in Mesoamerica, to the impact of European arrival on the production and use of cacao, to contemporary uses in the Americas, this volume provides a richly informed account of the history and cultural significance of chocolate.

    These true tales by noted writers cover everything from learning how to make coconut bread in an outdoor kitchen in Polynesia, to teaching Japanese housewives how to make salsa, to training under one of the world's top chefs, to trying mightily to impress one’s in-laws by preparing snails. A wealth of recipes and a resource and reference section for finding cooking schools, classes, and culinary vacations are included.

    Ann Hagen stears away from drawing heavily on recipes as a means of revealing the types of foods, food choices and preferences in this period, to focus on the growing and harvesting of domestic and wild foods, preserving, food preparation and eating. Cereals, vegetables, herbs, fruit and nuts, cattle, sheep, goats and pigs, poultry and eggs, wild animals and birds, honey, fish and molluscs, are just some of the food types discussed. Within each section Ann Hagen delves deeper to consider such subjects as the methods of harvesting and processing food, hunting and animal husbandry, attitudes towards particular types of food, accessibility to foods, diet, food shortages, diseases and what foods were considered everyday and which were reserved for special occasions. Food as payment for rents or services rendered, markets, measures, fasting and feasting, are also discussed in detail. Moving on to drink, Ann Hagen examines the types of drinks available, the context in which they were consumed - domestic, religious and in the alehouse - and the prevalence of drunkenness. In her conclusion, she draws together the evidence to reveal changes in food production and preferences from the early 5th to 11th century, drawing largely on sources from Anglo-Saxon England and the Celtic West of Britain. The role of women, the importance of bread, the social status of feasting, nutrition and changes in diet, and table manners, are just some of the many subjects covered. An excellent study and great value for money.

    It has one of the longest germination periods of any known species, and only two environments in the world have offered the ideal growing conditions for wild ginseng. The first was the forests of northern China, which disappeared over a millennium ago, and the sole remaining habitat is the Appalachian Mountain region of eastern North America, an area now threatened by logging and mining. Chinese legend says that ginseng is the child of lightning. The two elemental forces of water and fire fight in an eternal struggle, pouring down rain and snow and blasting the earth with lightning. If that lightning happens to strike a spring of water, the water disappears and in its place grows a ginseng plant -- the fusion of yin and yang, water and fire, darkness and light, and the life force that moves the universe. American ginseng has become perhaps the most treasured of all herbal medicines, promising good health and longevity to those who consume it. Fortunes have been made and lost on the plant, which was America's first export to China -- before our nation even existed. The strange, twisted, man-shaped root today commands as much as two thousand dollars a pound in the hot, noisy ginseng markets of Hong Kong, and a wealthy collector might pay as much as $10,000 for a single, perfect specimen. Ginseng Dreams: The Secret World of America's Most Valuable Plant unfolds ginseng's past and its future through the stories of seven people whose lives have become inextricably bound to it: a huckster, a field researcher, a farmer, a ginseng "missionary," a criminal investigator, a broker, and a cancer researcher. Each of these individuals brings a different perspective to the elusive root -- and each is consumed by a different dream. Kristin Johannsen threads her way though remote woodlands in the Appalachians to observe the fragile plants slowly putting out leaves as part of a three-year growing cycle, during which time the ginseng is vulnerable to both poachers and growing suburban sprawl. She contrasts this with the huge commercial growing fields of Marathon County, Wisconsin, where among potato fields and paper mills, ninety percent of the country's ginseng is produced. Johannsen explores the brisk black market trade in the panacean root and the efforts to save the wild species and its native habitat, and she ends her story in the laboratory, where researchers are investigating ginseng's anti-cancer properties. An absorbing journey into the many worlds of this mysterious and potent plant, Ginseng Dreams tells the extraordinary story of America's little-known natural treasure and the spell it casts on those who seek it.