Lobster rolls containing no lobster at all. Extra-virgin olive oil that isn’t. Fake foods are in our supermarkets, our restaurants, and our kitchen cabinets. Award-winning food journalist and travel writer Larry Olmsted exposes this pervasive and dangerous fraud perpetrated on unsuspecting Americans.     Real Food/Fake Food brings readers into the unregulated food industry, revealing that this shocking deception extends from high-end foods like olive oil, wine, and Kobe beef to everyday staples such as coffee, honey, juice, and cheese. It’s a massive bait and switch where counterfeiting is rampant and where the consumer ultimately pays the price. But Olmsted does more than show us what foods to avoid. A bona fide gourmand, he travels to the sources of the real stuff, to help us recognize what to look for, eat, and savor: genuine Parmigiano-Reggiano from Italy, fresh-caught grouper from Florida, authentic port from Portugal. Real foods that are grown, raised, produced, and prepared with care by masters of their craft.   Part cautionary tale, part culinary crusade, Real Food/Fake Food is addictively readable, mouth-wateringly enjoyable, and utterly relevant. Larry Olmsted convinces us why real food matters.

    In this well-researched book, Ian Kelly deftly recounts the exploits of this remarkable man." —JACQUES PÉPINAunique feast of biography and Regency cookbook, Cooking for Kings takes readers on a chef's tour of the palaces of Europe in the ultimate age of culinary indulgence.Drawing on the legendary cook's rich memoirs, Ian Kelly traces Antonin Carême's meteoric rise from Paris orphan to international celebrity and provides a dramatic below-stairs perspective on one of the most momentous, and sensuous, periods in European history—First Empire Paris, Georgian England, and the Russia of War and Peace.Carême had an unfailing ability to cook for the right people in the right place at the right time. He knew the favorite dishes of King George IV, the Rothschilds and the Romanovs; he knew Napoleon's fast-food requirements, and why Empress Josephine suffered halitosis.Carême's recipes still grace the tables of restaurants the world over. Now classics of French cuisine, created for, and named after, the kings and queens for whom he worked, they are featured throughout this captivating biography. In the phrase first coined by Carême, "You can try them yourself."

    Collects French recipes for everyday dishes and gourmet meals prepared by Clementine, a Burgundian cook for the Chamberlain family living first in post-World War II France, then in Massachusetts.

    Even when they work long days. Even when their kids' schedules pull them in eighteen different directions. They are not superhuman. They are not from another planet.With simple strategies and common sense, Jenny figured out how to break down dinner—the food, the timing, the anxiety, from prep to cleanup—so that her family could enjoy good food, time to unwind, and simply be together.Using the same straight-up, inspiring voice that readers of her award-winning blog, Dinner: A Love Story, have come to count on, Jenny never judges and never preaches. Every meal she dishes up is a real meal, one that has been cooked and eaten and enjoyed at least a half dozen times by someone in Jenny's house. With inspiration and game plans for any home cook at any level, Dinner: A Love Story is as much for the novice who doesn't know where to start as it is for the gourmand who doesn't know how to start over when she finds herself feeding an intractable toddler or for the person who never thought about home-cooked meals until he or she became a parent. This book is, in fact, for anyone interested in learning how to make a meal to be shared with someone they love, and about how so many good, happy things happen when we do.

    Believing that regional cuisine reveals far more than just our taste for chicken fried steak or 3-way chili, Richman explores the ethnic, economic, and cultural factors that shape the way we eat—and how food, in turn, reflects who we are as a nation. Richman uses his signature wit and casual charm to take youon a tour around the country,explaining such curiosities as why bagels are shaped like circles, why fried chicken is so popular in the South, and how some of the most iconic American food—hot dogs, fries, and soda—are not really American at all. Writing with passion, curiosity, and a desire to share his knowledge, he includes recipes, secret addresses for fun and tasty finds, and tips on how to eat like a local from coast to coast.Part travelogue, part fun fact book, part serious culinary journalism, Richman's America the Edible illuminates the food map in a way nobody has before.

    Selected from her nine books, here are classic essays on the food of Provence and of Paris, on Italian fish markets and Middle Eastern herb gardens. There are nearly 200 recipes: appetizers, soups, eggs, fish, meat, poultry, vegetables, sauces, breads, preserves, and desserts. Whether discussing the pains of rolling puff pastry or the ease of making pizza, railing against the practices of English bakeries or praising the sausage rolls at the H�tel du Midi, David always speaks her own mind. Best of all, she's a contagious enthusiast: she makes you want to rise from your chair to travel, shop, or try your hand at an omelette. "Reading her," writes Julian Barnes, "you have a strong sense of a person whose cardinal principles are truth and pleasure. Perhaps it is not absurd to compare her effect on a certain sector of tired, hungry, impoverished '50s Britain with Kinsey's effect on America."

    It can be a gift that enables a traveler to survive, a doorway into the heart of a tribe, or a thread that weaves an indelible tie; it can be awful or ambrosial - and sometimes both at the same time. Celebrate the riches and revelations of food with this 38-course feast of true tales set around the world.

    "Following the instructions in a recipe is like parroting pre-formed sentences from a phrasebook. Forming an understanding of how flavors work together, on the other hand, is like learning the language: it allows you to express yourself freely, to improvise, to cook a dish the way you want to cook it.""The Flavor Thesaurus "is the inquisitive cook's guide to acquiring that understanding--to learning the language of flavor.Breaking the vast universe of ingredients down to 99 essential flavors, Segnit suggests classic and less well-known pairings for each, grouping almost 1,000 entries into flavor families like "Green & Grassy," "Berry & Bush" and "Creamy Fruity." But "The Flavor Thesaurus" is much more than just a reference book, seasoning the mix of culinary science, culture and expert knowledge with the author's own insights and opinions, all presented in her witty, engaging and highly readable style. As appealing to the novice cook as to the experienced professional, "The Flavor Thesaurus "will not only immeasurably improve your cooking--it's the sort of book that might keep you up at night reading.""Cooking is an art, like writing or painting, and great cooks are artists. And although the ultimate source of creativity remains elusive, all painters have their color wheel, all writers their vocabulary. And now, in the form of this beautiful, entertaining and exhaustively researched book, cooks have their own collection of essential knowledge: "The Flavor Thesaurus."

    To discover the true role of black women in the creation of American, and especially southern, cuisine, Toni Tipton-Martin has spent years amassing one of the world’s largest private collections of cookbooks published by African American authors, looking for evidence of their impact on American food, families, and communities and for ways we might use that knowledge to inspire community wellness of every kind.The Jemima Code presents more than 150 black cookbooks that range from a rare 1827 house servant’s manual, the first book published by an African American in the trade, to modern classics by authors such as Edna Lewis and Vertamae Grosvenor. The books are arranged chronologically and illustrated with photos of their covers; many also display selected interior pages, including recipes. Tipton-Martin provides notes on the authors and their contributions and the significance of each book, while her chapter introductions summarize the cultural history reflected in the books that follow. These cookbooks offer firsthand evidence that African Americans cooked creative masterpieces from meager provisions, educated young chefs, operated food businesses, and nourished the African American community through the long struggle for human rights. The Jemima Code transforms America’s most maligned kitchen servant into an inspirational and powerful model of culinary wisdom and cultural authority.

    It takes the kitchen memoir to a rough and reckless place. From his first job scraping trays at a pizzeria at age fifteen, Jason Sheehan worked on the line at all kinds of restaurants: a French colonial and an all-night diner, a crab shack just off the interstate and a fusion restaurant in a former hair salon. Restaurant work, as he describes it in exuberant, sparkling prose, is a way of life in which "your whole universe becomes a small, hot steel box filled with knives and meat and fire." The kitchen crew is a fraternity with its own rites: cigarettes in the walk-in freezer, sex in the basement, the wartime urgency of the dinner rush. Cooking is a series of personal challenges, from the first perfectly done mussel to the satisfaction of surgically sliced foie gras. And the kitchen itself, as he tells it, is a place in which life's mysteries are thawed, sliced, broiled, barbecued, and fried--a place where people from the margins find their community and their calling. With this deeply affecting book, Sheehan (already acclaimed for his reviews) joins the first class of American food writers at a time when books about food have never been better or more popular.

    But behind it all, there is an even more fundamental driver: Food.In Animal, Vegetable, Junk, trusted food authority Mark Bittman offers a panoramic view of how the frenzy for food has driven human history to some of its most catastrophic moments, from slavery and colonialism to famine and genocide—and to our current moment, wherein Big Food exacerbates climate change, plunders our planet, and sickens its people. Even still, Bittman refuses to concede that the battle is lost, pointing to activists, workers, and governments around the world who are choosing well-being over corporate greed and gluttony, and fighting to free society from Big Food’s grip.Sweeping, impassioned, and ultimately full of hope, Animal, Vegetable, Junk reveals not only how food has shaped our past, but also how we can transform it to reclaim our future.

    Impeccably researched, Hippie Food chronicles how the longhairs, revolutionaries, and back-to-the-landers rejected the square establishment of President Richard Nixon’s America and turned to a more idealistic and wholesome communal way of life and food.From the mystical rock-and-roll cult known as the Source Family and its legendary vegetarian restaurant in Hollywood to the Diggers’ brown bread in the Summer of Love to the rise of the co-op and the origins of the organic food craze, Kauffman reveals how today’s quotidian whole-foods staples—including sprouts, tofu, yogurt, brown rice, and whole-grain bread—were introduced and eventually became part of our diets. From coast to coast, through Oregon, Texas, Tennessee, Minnesota, Michigan, Massachusetts, and Vermont, Kauffman tracks hippie food’s journey from niche oddity to a cuisine that hit every corner of this country.A slick mix of gonzo playfulness, evocative detail, skillful pacing, and elegant writing, Hippie Food is a lively, engaging, and informative read that deepens our understanding of our culture and our lives today.

    As in her previous novels, Mones’s captivating story also brings into focus a changing China -- this time the hidden world of high culinary culture.When Maggie McElroy, a widowed American food writer, learns of a Chinese paternity claim against her late husband’s estate, she has to go immediately to Beijing. She asks her magazine for time off, but her editor counters with an assignment: to profile the rising culinary star Sam Liang.In China Maggie unties the knots of her husband’s past, finding out more than she expected about him and about herself. With Sam as her guide, she is also drawn deep into a world of food rooted in centuries of history and philosophy. To her surprise she begins to be transformed by the cuisine, by Sam’s family -- a querulous but loving pack of cooks and diners -- and most of all by Sam himself. The Last Chinese Chef is the exhilarating story of a woman regaining her soul in the most unexpected of places.

    Parker, Jr., concluded: "Brilliant, witty, comical, and often shamelessly candid and provocative." And "The New York Times "added: "McInerney's wine judgments are sound, his anecdotes witty, and his literary references impeccable. Not many wine books are good reads; this one is." In "A Hedonist in the Cellar, " he gathers more than five years' worth of essays and continues his exploration of what's new, what's enduring, and what's surprising, giving his palate a complete workout and the reader an indispensable, idiosyncratic guide to a world of almost infinite variety. Rieslings from the Finger Lakes, Armagnac from Gascony, powerhouse amarones from Valpolicella, the most fearsome critics in England, chocolate-friendly bottles from all over the globe, new developments in Chile and Argentina--these are only some of the delights now ready to be savored in a collection driven not only by wine itself but also the people who make it and those whose enjoyment is matched by their curiosity. Full of terroir and flavor, svelte personalities, and keen insight into the trade, these are irresistible essays for anyone enthralled by the manifold pleasures of wine.

    Stranded in their off-the-grid summer cottage in the Canadian wilderness with unexpected guests, Alisa Smith and J.B. MacKinnon turned to the land around them. They caught a trout, picked mushrooms, and mulled apples from an abandoned orchard with rose hips in wine. The meal was truly satisfying; every ingredient had a story, a direct line they could trace from the soil to their forks. The experience raised a question: Was it possible to eat this way in their everyday lives?Back in the city, they began to research the origins of the items that stocked the shelves of their local supermarket. They were shocked to discover that a typical ingredient in a North American meal travels roughly the distance between Boulder, Colorado, and New York City before it reaches the plate. Like so many people, Smith and MacKinnon were trying to live more lightly on the planet; meanwhile, their “SUV diet” was producing greenhouse gases and smog at an unparalleled rate. So they decided on an experiment: For one year they would eat only food produced within 100 miles of their Vancouver home.It wouldn’t be easy. Stepping outside the industrial food system, Smith and MacKinnon found themselves relying on World War II–era cookbooks and maverick farmers who refused to play by the rules of a global economy. What began as a struggle slowly transformed into one of the deepest pleasures of their lives. For the first time they felt connected to the people and the places that sustain them.For Smith and MacKinnon, the 100-mile diet became a journey whose destination was, simply, home. From the satisfaction of pulling their own crop of garlic out of the earth to pitched battles over canning tomatoes, Plenty is about eating locally and thinking globally. The authors’ food-focused experiment questions globalization, monoculture, the oil economy, environmental collapse, and the tattering threads of community. Thought-provoking and inspiring, Plenty offers more than a way of eating. In the end, it’s a new way of looking at the world.From the Hardcover edition.