She had never before considered making her own peanut butter and pita bread, let alone curing her own prosciutto or raising turkeys. And though it sounded logical that "doing it yourself" would cost less, she had her doubts. So Reese began a series of kitchen-related experiments, taking into account the competing demands of everyday contemporary American family life as she answers some timely questions: When is homemade better? Cheaper? Are backyard eggs a more ethical choice than store-bought? Will grinding and stuffing your own sausage ruin your week? Is it possible to make an edible maraschino cherry? Some of Reese's discoveries will surprise you: Although you should make your hot dog buns, guacamole, and yogurt, you should probably buy your hamburger buns, potato chips, and rice pudding. Tired? Buy your mayonnaise. Inspired? Make it. With its fresh voice and delightful humor, Make the Bread, Buy the Butter gives 120 recipes with eminently practical yet deliciously fun "Make or buy" recommendations. Reese is relentlessly entertaining as she relates her food and animal husbandry adventures, which amuse and perplex as well as nourish and sustain her family. Her tales include living with a backyard full of cheerful chickens, muttering ducks, and adorable baby goats; countertops laden with lacto-fermenting pickles; and closets full of mellowing cheeses. Here's the full picture of what is involved in a truly homemade life -- with the good news that you shouldn't try to make everything yourself -- and how to get the most out of your time in the kitchen.

    Marcella, whose name conjures up a splendid world of food for the devoted millions who love her books and attend her cooking classes, is back again with her finest book yet, Marcella Cucina. Filled with the passion and personality of its author, it is a book not only of fine food and its careful preparation but of personal reminiscences and penetrating commentary about the sensual pleasure of food and its place in our lives.In vivid introductory essays and seductive headnotes, the narrative of an extraordinary culinary life unfolds. With each memory of a trip, a meal or a flavor, we are treated to the perspective of a great cook and teacher--one who believes that the finest Italian cooking is found in the home. In Marcella Cucina, she focuses on regional cooking, turning her sharp eye to every area of Italy and offering a rich array of flavors and textures from cities and villages alike. Best of all, Marcella cooks at your side with easy-to-follow instructions and lavish full-color photographs that teach you her techniques--from preparing homemade pasta to cleaning artichokes--and allow you flawlessly to re-create her magic in your own kitchen.

    In the UK, White's brilliant cooking and high-wattage antics have made him a legend: the first British chef (and the youngest chef anywhere) to win three Michelin stars, a chain-smoking, pot-throwing, multiply married culinary genius whose fierce devotion to food and restaurants has been the only constant in a life of tabloid-ready turmoil. In The Devil in the Kitchen, he tells the story of his life in food, spanning his apprenticeship with Albert and Michel Roux, his wild years in the bacchanal of 1980s Chelsea, his ferocious pursuit of the highest Michelin rating, and his "retirement career" as a hugely successful restaurateur. With cameos from the likes of Michael Caine, Madonna, and Damien Hirst, The Devil in the Kitchen leaves no dish unserved, relating the backroom antics, the blood feuds, and the passion for great food that have driven London's greatest restaurants for decades.

    One year later, a struggling writer named Edgar Allan Poe decided to take on the case-and sent his fictional detective, C. Auguste Dupin, to solve the baffling murder of Mary Rogers in "The Mystery of Marie Rog�t."

    Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, Tennessee Williams, John Berryman, John Cheever, and Raymond Carver. All six of these writers were alcoholics, and the subject of drinking surfaces in some of their finest work, from Cat on a Hot Tin Roof to A Moveable Feast. Often they did their drinking together—Hemingway and Fitzgerald ricocheting through the cafés of 1920s Paris; Carver and Cheever speeding to the liquor store in Iowa in the icy winter of 1973.Olivia Laing grew up in an alcoholic family herself. One spring, wanting to make sense of this ferocious, entangling disease, she took a journey across America that plunged her into the heart of these overlapping lives. As she travels from Cheever's New York to Williams' New Orleans, from Hemingway's Key West to Carver's Port Angeles, she pieces together a topographical map of alcoholism, from the horrors of addiction to the miraculous possibilities of recovery. Beautiful, captivating and original, The Trip to Echo Spring strips away the myth of the alcoholic writer to reveal the terrible price creativity can exert.

    Big Business waged an all-out campaign to win the allegiance of American housewives, but most women were suspicious of the new foods—and the make-believe cooking they entailed. With sharp insight and good humor, Laura Shapiro shows how the ensuing battle helped shape the way we eat today, and how the clash in the kitchen reverberated elsewhere in the house as women struggled with marriage, work, and domesticity. This unconventional history overturns our notions about the ’50s and offers new thinking on some of its fascinating figures, including Poppy Cannon, Shirley Jackson, Julia Child, and Betty Friedan.

    Highly recommended.” —Library Journal (STARRED REVIEW)Go on a fun, flavorful tour through the world of craft brews with one of the most unique and fascinating voices in beer today. It's a great time to be a beer drinker, but also the most confusing, thanks to the dizzying array of available draft beers. Expert Joshua Bernstein comes to the rescue with The Complete Beer Course, demystifying the sudsy stuff and breaking down the elements that make a beer's flavor spin into distinctively different and delicious directions. Structured around a series of easy-to-follow classes, his course hops from lagers and pilsners to hazy wheat beers, Belgian-style abbey and Trappist ales, aromatic pale ales and bitter IPAs, roasty stouts, barrel-aged brews, belly-warming barley wines, and mouth-puckering sour ales. There is even a class on international beer styles and another on pairing beer with food and starting your own beer cellar. Through suggested, targeted tastings, you'll learn when to drink down-and when to dump those suds down a drain.

    As Todhunter describes it, Taillevent’s highly orchestrated kitchen is “less an atelier than a gun deck on a ship of war, a place of shouts and fire.”On the other side of the kitchen’s double doors, in the warm light of the nineteenth-century dining room, the American couple surrenders to the sensual pleasure of a beautifully wrought and meticulously served dinner—from the amuse-bouche (a warm cheese puff to “amuse the mouth”) and the crème de cresson soup, with its sunken treasure of lobster tomalley, to the crowning glory of the fantaisie. In the spirit of A.J. Liebling’s Between Meals, Todhunter layers mouthwatering descriptions of French dishes and their preparation with reflections on his American childhood (when food, like sex and money, was not to be discussed at the table), dips into culinary history and philosophy, and entertains with asides on everything from olive oil and chestnuts to the science of viniculture and the chemistry of chocolate. Between courses, Todhunter brings us back to the sanctum of the kitchen itself, where he has probing conversations with chef de cuisine Philippe Legendre and pastry chef Gilles Bajolle, both major figures in the French culinary pantheon, and their assistants. Through these great chefs and their impeccably trained brigade we gain a unique glimpse into the heart of French cuisine and the love of fine food. Is cooking more an art, a craft, or a science? Are great chefs born or made? Why are there so few women chefs in France? What is the greatest danger for a chef at the top of his game? How is a new dish developed? What is the future of haute cuisine in France and in the world at large? When we cook for others, for love or for money, what do we give of ourselves?As richly satisfying as the five-hour meal it describes, A Meal Observed is a delightful paean to the French and French cuisine, and to the universal love of the table. Bon appétit!

    As a young woman, Madeleine got her training by working in a family restaurant in Touraine and in the kitchens of France'¬?s most respected regional cooks, who nourished her appetite for the tradition, rigor, and personal nature of cooking. Her exuberant and colorful memoir of that time-originally published over 25 years ago-tells of collecting mussels at the shore, churning butter from the milk of village cows, gathering mushrooms in nearby woods, and then transforming them into glorious food under the tutelage of her informal mentors. Over 250 recipes for the simple dishes she learned at their sides illustrate her evocative reminiscences of a bygone era in rural France. Part travelogue, part social history, part instruction manual, this classic is required reading for anyone who wants to know more about the life, times, and tastes of a woman who has helped shape American cooking.

    Rosenthal set out to learn everything he could about wine. Today, he is one of the most successful importers of traditionally made wines produced by small family-owned estates in France and Italy. Rosenthal has immersed himself in the culture of Old World wine production, working closely with his growers for two and sometimes three generations. He is one of the leading exponents of the concept of “terroir”—the notion that a particular vineyard site imparts distinct qualities of bouquet, flavor, and color to a wine. In Reflections of a Wine Merchant, Rosenthal brings us into the cellars, vineyards, and homes of these vignerons, and his delightful stories about his encounters, relationships, and explorations—and what he has learned along the way—give us an unequaled perspective on winemaking tradition and what threatens it today. Rosenthal was featured in the documentary film Mondovino and is one of the more outspoken figures against globalization, homogenization, and the “critic-ization” of the wine business. He was also a major subject in Lawrence Osborne’s The Accidental Connoisseur. His is an important voice in defense of the individual and the artisanal, and their contribution to our quality of life.

    Liebling recalls his Parisian apprenticeship in the fine art of eating in this charming memoir.No writer has written more enthusiastically about food than A. J. Liebling. Between Meals: An Appetite for Paris, the great New Yorker writer's last book, is a wholly appealing account of his éducation sentimentale in French cuisine during 1926 and 1927, when American expatriates like Ernest Hemingway and Gertrude Stein made café life the stuff of legends. A native New Yorker who had gone abroad to study, Liebling shunned his coursework and applied himself instead to the fine art of eating – or “feeding,” as he called it. The neighborhood restaurants of the Left Bank became his homes away from home, the fragrant wines his constant companions, the rich French dishes a test of his formidable appetite. is a classic account of the pleasures of good eating, and a matchless evocation of a now-vanished Paris.

    But you're not just anyone. You are a coffee aficionado, a determined, fearless seeker of the best java. And this is the guide for you.                       How to Make Coffee provides an in-depth look at the art and science behind the bean. Learn the anatomy of coffee; the chemistry of caffeine; the best way to roast, grind, and brew the beans to their peak flavor; and what gadgets you really need (versus what gadgets are for mere coffee dilettantes). With illustrated, step-by-step instructions, How to Make Coffee is for the person who doesn't want to settle for anything less than the perfect cup.

    elBulli is also the object of culinary pilgrimage—millions clamor every year for a reservation at one of its tables. Yet few people know that, behind each of the thirtyor more courses that make up a meal at elBulli, a small army of stagiaires—apprentice chefs—labor at the precise, exhausting work of executing Adrià’s astonishing vision. In The Sorcerer’s Apprentices: A Season in the Kitchen at Ferran Adrià’s elBulli, Lisa Abend explores the remarkable system that Adrià uses to run his restaurant and, in the process, train the next generation of culinary stars. Granted more access to Adrià and the elBulli kitchen than any other writer in the restaurant’s history, Abend follows thirty-five young men and women as they struggle to master the cutting-edge techniques, grueling hours, furious creativity, and interpersonal tensions that come with working at this celebrated institution. Her lively narrative captures a great cast, including a young Korean cook who camps on the doorstep of elBulli until he is allowed to work in the kitchen; an ambitious chef from one of Switzerland’s top restaurants struggling to create his own artistic vision of cuisine; and an American couple whose relationship may not withstand the unique pressures of the restaurant. What emerges is an irresistible tale of aspiring young talents caught, for good or ill, in the opportunity of a lifetime.Taken together, their stories form a portrait of the international team that helps make a meal at elBulli so memorable. They also reveal a Ferran Adrià few ever see, one who is not only a genius chef and artist but also a boss, teacher, taskmaster, businessman, and sometimes- flawed human being. Today, food has become the focus of unprecedented attention, and The Sorcerer’s Apprentices also explores the strange evolution—in less than two decades—of a once-maligned profession into a source of celebrity.

    The first-ever cocktail book from America's Test Kitchen brings our objective, kitchen-tested and -perfected approach to the craft of making cocktails. You always want your cocktail to be something special--whether you're in the mood for a simple Negroni, a properly muddled Caipirinha, or a big batch of Margaritas or Bloody Marys with friends. After rigorous recipe testing, we're able to reveal not only the ideal ingredient proportions and best mixing technique for each drink, but also how to make homemade tonic for your Gin and Tonic, and homemade sweet vermouth and cocktail cherries for your Manhattan. And you can't simply quadruple any Margarita recipe and have it turn out right for your group of guests--to serve a crowd, the proportions must change. You can always elevate that big-batch Margarita, though, with our Citrus Rim Salt or Sriracha Rim Salt. How to Cocktail offers 150 recipes that range from classic cocktails to new America's Test Kitchen originals. Our two DIY chapters offer streamlined recipes for making superior versions of cocktail cherries, cocktail onions, flavored syrups, rim salts and sugars, bitters, vermouths, liqueurs, and more. And the final chapter includes a dozen of our test cooks' favorite cocktail-hour snacks. All along the way, we solve practical challenges for the home cook, including how to make an array of cocktails without having to buy lots of expensive bottles, how to use a Boston shaker, what kinds of ice are best and how to make them, and much more.

    Unable to find le chou kale anywhere upon moving to the City of Light with her new husband, and despite not really speaking French, Kristen Beddard launched a crusade to single-handedly bring kale to the country of croissants and cheese. Infused with Kristen's recipes and some from French chefs, big and small (including Michelin star chef Alain Passard) Bonjour Kale is a humorous, heartfelt memoir of how Kristen, kale, and France collide.