In 1848, the East India Company engaged him to make a clandestine trip into the interior of China - territory forbidden to foreigners - to steal the closely guarded secrets of tea. For centuries, China had been the world's sole tea manufacturer. Britain purchased this fuel for its Empire by trading opium to the Chinese - a poisonous relationship Britain fought two destructive wars to sustain. The East India Company had profited lavishly as the middleman, but now it was sinking, having lost its monopoly to trade tea. Its salvation, it thought, was to establish its own plantations in the Himalayas of British India. There were just two problems: India had no tea plants worth growing, and the company wouldn't have known what to do with them if it had. Hence Robert Fortune's daring trip. The Chinese interior was off-limits and virtually unknown to the West, but that's where the finest tea was grown - the richest oolongs, soochongs and pekoes. And the Emperor aimed to keep it that way.

    In The Emperors of Chocolate, Joël Glenn Brenner--the first person to ever gain access to the highly secretive companies of Hershey and Mars--spins a unique story that takes us inside a world as mysterious as Willy Wonka's Chocolate Factory. Packed with flavorful stories and outrageous characters that give the true scoop on this real-life candyland, The Emperors of Chocolate is a delectable read for business buffs and chocoholics alike. Start reading and you'll soon be hungry for more.

    From the humble Roman times of stale bread soaked in diluted wine, to the drive-through McMuffin boom of the 1970s, Breakfast takes the reader on a lively adventure through time, uncovering the real stories behind our favorite breakfast foods. Breakfast is not just the meal that gets us going in the morning, but a driving force in history— forever altering the lives of peasants and kings alike, inspiring great works of art, and even changing the way we build our homes.Full of wry humor and captivating anecdotes, Breakfast is a treat for students of history, gastronomes, and anyone who's ever wondered where their waffles came from.

    Like fashions and fads, food—even bad food—has a history, and Lovegren's Fashionable Food is quite literally a cookbook of the American past.Well researched and delightfully illustrated, this collection of faddish recipes from the 1920s to the 1990s is a decade-by-decade tour of a hungry American century. From the Three P's Salad—that's peas, pickles, and peanuts—of the post-World War I era to the Fruit Cocktail and Spam Buffet Party loaf—all the rage in the ultra-modern 1950s, when cooking from a can epitomized culinary sophistication—Fashionable Food details the origins of these curious delicacies. In two chapters devoted to "exotic foods of the East," for example, Lovegren explores the long American love affair with Chinese food and the social status conferred upon anyone chic enough to eat pu-pu platters from Polynesia. Throughout, Lovegren supplements recipes—some mouth-watering, some appalling—from classic cookbooks and family magazines, with humorous anecdotes that chronicle how society and kitchen technology influenced the way we lived and how we ate.Equal parts American and culinary history, Fashionable Food examines our collective past from the kitchen counter. Even if it's been a while since you last had Tang Pie and your fondue set is collecting dust in the back of the cupboard, Fashionable Food will inspire, entertain, and inform.

    Part culinary history, part cultural commentary, Vanilla tells the remarkable story of the world's most popular flavor and scent. The Spanish considered vanilla the ultimate aphrodisiac, the Totonac Indians called it the fruit of the gods, and the Aztecs taxed the Mayans in vanilla beans, using the beans as currency. Today, vanilla is in our coffee, our perfume, tea, home products, body lotion, and just about anything imaginable. Patricia Rain explores the incredibly diverse effect of vanilla on the worlds of food, medicine, psychology, and even politics. She intertwines the fields of cultural anthropology, botany, folklore, and economics, tracing the marvelous path of vanilla throughout world history. Vanilla shows how the impact and marketing of this ubiquitous little bean over the last eight hundred years saved the indigenous peoples of Mexico and Tahiti, put Madagascar on the map, drove the success of the great Parisian perfume houses and Europe's confection industry, and spurred trade routes across the Indian Ocean. Rain examines the rich history of vanilla with exacting detail and discusses its current role in our lives and the modern retail world, where the "vanilla boom" has caused the prices of many common consumer items to skyrocket. Filled with fascinating insights, quirky characters, trivia, and even recipes, this beautifully written book is perfect for vanilla lovers, history buffs, and anyone interested in a real-life captivating story.

    Beloved by Gwyneth Paltrow ("This might be my favorite thing ever") and named Saveur's Best New Food blog of 2013—with half a million Facebook fans and counting—Thug Kitchen wants to show everyone how to take charge of their plates and cook up some real f*cking food.Yeah, plenty of blogs and cookbooks preach about how to eat more kale, why ginger fights inflammation, and how to cook with microgreens and nettles. But they are dull or pretentious as hell—and most people can't afford the hype.Thug Kitchen lives in the real world. In their first cookbook, they're throwing down more than 100 recipes for their best-loved meals, snacks, and sides for beginning cooks to home chefs. (Roasted Beer and Lime Cauliflower Tacos? Pumpkin Chili? Grilled Peach Salsa? Believe that sh*t.) Plus they're going to arm you with all the info and techniques you need to shop on a budget and go and kick a bunch of ass on your own.This book is an invitation to everyone who wants to do better to elevate their kitchen game. No more ketchup and pizza counting as vegetables. No more drive-thru lines. No more avoiding the produce corner of the supermarket. Sh*t is about to get real.

    My Big Fat Greek Wedding, the upcoming epic Troy, the 2004 Summer Olympics returning to Athens--and now, yet another reason to embrace all things Greek: The Olive and the Caper, Susanna Hoffman's 700-plus-page serendipity of recipes and adventure.In Corfu, Ms. Hoffman and a taverna owner cook shrimp fresh from the trap--and for us she offers the boldly-flavored Shrimp with Fennel, Green Olives, Red Onion, and White Wine. She gathers wild greens and herbs with neighbors, inspiring Big Beans with Thyme and Parsley, and Field Greens and Ouzo Pie. She learns the secret to chewy country bread from the baker on Santorini and translates it for American kitchens. Including 325 recipes developed in collaboration with Victoria Wise (her co-author on The Well-Filled Tortilla Cookbook, with over 258,000 copies in print), The Olive and the Caper celebrates all things Greek: Chicken Neo-Avgolemeno. Fall-off-the-bone Lamb Shanks seasoned with garlic, thyme, cinnamon and coriander. Siren-like sweets, from world-renowned Baklava to uniquely Greek preserves: Rose Petal, Cherry and Grappa, Apricot and Metaxa.In addition, it opens with a sixteen-page full-color section and has dozens of lively essays throughout the book--about the origins of Greek food, about village life, history, language, customs--making this a lively adventure in reading as well as cooking.

    Using the colorful diaries of a sixteenth-century merchant as a narrative guide, Empires of Food vividly chronicles the fate of people and societies for the past twelve thousand years through the foods they grew, hunted, traded, and ate—and gives us fascinating, and devastating, insights into what to expect in years to come. In energetic prose, agricultural expert Evan D. G. Fraser and journalist Andrew Rimas tell gripping stories that capture the flavor of places as disparate as ancient Mesopotamia and imperial Britain, taking us from the first city in the once-thriving Fertile Crescent to today’s overworked breadbaskets and rice bowls in the United States and China, showing just what food has meant to humanity. Cities, culture, art, government, and religion are founded on the creation and exchange of food surpluses, complex societies built by shipping corn and wheat and rice up rivers and into the stewpots of history’s generations. But eventually, inevitably, the crops fail, the fields erode, or the temperature drops, and the center of power shifts. Cultures descend into dark ages of poverty, famine, and war. It happened at the end of the Roman Empire, when slave plantations overworked Europe’s and Egypt’s soil and drained its vigor. It happened to the Mayans, who abandoned their great cities during centuries of drought. It happened in the fourteenth century, when medieval societies crashed in famine and plague, and again in the nineteenth century, when catastrophic colonial schemes plunged half the world into a poverty from which it has never recovered. And today, even though we live in an age of astounding agricultural productivity and genetically modified crops, our food supplies are once again in peril. Empires of Food brilliantly recounts the history of cyclic consumption, but it is also the story of the future; of, for example, how a shrimp boat hauling up an empty net in the Mekong Delta could spark a riot in the Caribbean. It tells what happens when a culture or nation runs out of food—and shows us the face of the world turned hungry. The authors argue that neither local food movements nor free market economists will stave off the next crash, and they propose their own solutions. A fascinating, fresh history told through the prism of the dining table, Empires of Food offers a grand scope and a provocative analysis of the world today, indispensable in this time of global warming and food crises.

    Flow spans its fascinating, occasionally wacky and sometimes downright scary story: from mikvahs (ritual cleansing baths) to menopause, hysteria to hysterectomies—not to mention the Pill, cramps, the history of underwear, and the movie about puberty they showed you in 5th grade. Flow answers such questions as: What’s the point of getting a period? What did women do before pads and tampons? What about new drugs that promise to end periods—a hot idea or not? Sex during your period: gross or a turn-on? And what’s normal, anyway?  With color reproductions of (campy) historical ads and early (excruciating) femcare devices, it also provides a fascinating (and mind-boggling) gallery of this complex, personal and uniquely female process. As irreverent as it is informative, Flow gives an everyday occurrence its true props – and eradicates the stigma placed on it for centuries.

    Rombauer self-published the first three thousand copies of Joy of Cooking in 1931, it has become the kitchen bible, with more than 20 million copies in print. This new edition of Joy has been thoroughly revised and expanded by Irma’s great-grandson John Becker and his wife, Megan Scott.John and Megan developed more than six hundred new recipes for this edition, tested and tweaked thousands of classic recipes, and updated every section of every chapter to reflect the latest ingredients and techniques available to today’s home cooks. Their strategy for revising this edition was the same one Irma and Marion employed: Vet, research, and improve Joy’s coverage of legacy recipes while introducing new dishes, modern cooking techniques, and comprehensive information on ingredients now available at farmers’ markets and grocery stores. You will find tried-and-true favorites like Banana Bread Cockaigne, Chocolate Chip Cookies, and Southern Corn Bread—all retested and faithfully improved—as well as new favorites like Chana Masala, Beef Rendang, Megan’s Seeded Olive Oil Granola, and Smoked Pork Shoulder. In addition to a thoroughly modernized vegetable chapter, there are many more vegan and vegetarian recipes, including Caramelized Tamarind Tempeh, Crispy Pan-Fried Tofu, Spicy Chickpea Soup, and Roasted Mushroom Burgers. Joy’s baking chapters now include gram weights for accuracy, along with a refreshed lineup of baked goods like Cannelés de Bordeaux, Rustic No-Knead Sourdough, Ciabatta, Chocolate-Walnut Babka, and Chicago-Style Deep-Dish Pizza, as well as gluten-free recipes for pizza dough and yeast breads. A new chapter on streamlined cooking explains how to economize time, money, and ingredients and avoid waste. You will learn how to use a diverse array of ingredients, from amaranth to za’atar. New techniques include low-temperature and sous vide cooking, fermentation, and cooking with both traditional and electric pressure cookers. Barbecuing, smoking, and other outdoor cooking methods are covered in even greater detail. This new edition of Joy is the perfect combination of classic recipes, new dishes, and indispensable reference information for today’s home cooks. Whether it is the only cookbook on your shelf or one of many, Joy is and has been the essential and trusted guide for home cooks for almost a century. This new edition continues that legacy.

    As the home of A. J. Liebling, Joseph Wechsberg, and M.F.K. Fisher, who practically invented American food writing, the magazine established a tradition that is carried forward today by irrepressible literary gastronomes, including Calvin Trillin, Bill Buford, Adam Gopnik, Jane Kramer, and Anthony Bourdain. Now, in this indispensable collection, "The New Yorker "dishes up a feast of delicious writing on food and drink, seasoned with a generous dash of cartoons. Whether you re in the mood for snacking on humor pieces and cartoons or for savoring classic profiles of great chefs and great eaters, these offerings, from every age of The New Yorker s fabled eighty-year history, are sure to satisfy every taste. There are memoirs, short stories, tell-alls, and poems ranging in tone from sweet to sour and in subject from soup to nuts. M.F.K. Fisher pays homage to cookery witches, those mysterious cooks who possess an uncanny power over food, while John McPhee valiantly trails an inveterate forager and is rewarded with stewed persimmons and white-pine-needle tea. There is Roald Dahl s famous story Taste, in which a wine snob s palate comes in for some unwelcome scrutiny, and Julian Barnes s ingenious tale of a lifelong gourmand who goes on a very peculiar diet for still more peculiar reasons. Adam Gopnik asks if French cuisine is done for, and Calvin Trillin investigates whether people can actually taste the difference between red wine and white. We journey with Susan Orlean as she distills the essence of Cuba in the story of a single restaurant, and with Judith Thurman as she investigates the arcane practices of Japan s tofu masters. Closer to home, Joseph Mitchell celebrates the old New York tradition of the beefsteak dinner, and Mark Singer shadows the city s foremost fisherman-chef. Dining out: All you can hold for five bucks / Joseph Mitchell --The finest butter and lots of time / Joseph Wechsberg --A good appetite / A.J. Liebling --The afterglow / A.J. Liebling --Is there a crisis in French cooking? / Adam Gopnik --Don't eat before reading this / Anthony Bourdain --A really big lunch / Jim Harrison --Eating in: The secret ingredient / M.F.K. Fisher --The trouble with tripe / M.F.K. Fisher --Nor censure nor disdain / M.F.K. Fisher --Good cooking: / Calvin Tomkins --Look back in hunger / Anthony Lane --The reporter's kitchen / Jane Kramer --Fishing and foraging: A mess of clams / Joseph Mitchell --A forager / John McPhee --The fruit detective / John Seabrook --Gone fishing / Mark Singer --On the bay / Bill Buford --Local delicacies: An attempt to compile a short history of The buffalo chicken wing / Calvin Trillin --The homesick restaurant / Susan Orlean --The magic bagel / Calvin Trillin --A rat in my soup / Peter Hessler --Raw faith / Burkhard Bilger --Night kitchens / Judith Thurman --The pour: Dry martini / Roger Angell --The red and the white / Calvin Trillin --The russian god / Victor Erofeyev --The ketchup conundrum / Malcolm Gladwell --Tastes funny: But the one on the right / Dorothy Parker --Curl up and diet / Ogden Nash --Quick, hammacher, my stomacher! / Ogden Nash --Nesselrode to jeopardy / S.J. Perelman --Eat, drink, and be merry / Peter De Vries --Notes from the overfed / Woody Allen --Two menus / Steve Martin --The zagat history of my last relationship 409(3) / Noah Baumbach --Your table is ready / John Kenney --Small plates: Bock / William Shawn --Diat / Geoffrey T. Hellman --4 a.m. / James Stevenson --Slave / Alex Prud'Homme --Under the hood / Mark Singer --Protein source / Mark Singer --A sandwich / Nora Ephron --Sea urchin / Chang-Rae Lee --As the french do / Janet MalColm --Blocking and chowing / Ben McGrath --When edibles attack / Rebecca Mead --Killing dinner / Gabrielle Hamilton --Fiction: Taste / Roald Dahl --Two roast beefs / V.S. Pritchett --The sorrows of gin / John Cheever --The jaguar sun / Italo Calvino --There should be a name for it / Matthew Klam --Sputnik / Don DeLillo --Enough / Alice McDermott --The butcher's wife / Louise Erdrich --Bark / Julian Barnes

    Barbara Tuchman anatomizes the century, revealing both the great rhythms of history and the grain and texture of domestic life as it was lived.

    In that time, the culinary culture of France has shifted as a new generation of chefs and home cooks—most notably in Paris—incorporates ingredients and techniques from around the world into traditional French dishes.      In My Paris Kitchen, David remasters the classics, introduces lesser-known fare, and presents 100 sweet and savory recipes that reflect the way modern Parisians eat today. You’ll find Soupe à l’oignon, Cassoulet, Coq au vin, and Croque-monsieur, as well as Smoky barbecue-style pork, Lamb shank tagine, Dukkah-roasted cauliflower, Salt cod fritters with tartar sauce, and Wheat berry salad with radicchio, root vegetables, and pomegranate. And of course, there’s dessert: Warm chocolate cake with salted butter caramel sauce, Duck fat cookies, Bay leaf poundcake with orange glaze, French cheesecake...and the list goes on. David also shares stories told with his trademark wit and humor, and lush photography taken on location around Paris and in David’s kitchen reveals the quirks, trials, beauty, and joys of life in the culinary capital of the world.

    Get started on your Whole30 transformation with the #1 New York Times best-selling The Whole30. Since 2009, Melissa Hartwig Urban's critically-acclaimed Whole30 program has quietly led hundreds of thousands of people to effortless weight loss and better health—along with stunning improvements in sleep quality, energy levels, mood, and self-esteem. The program accomplishes all of this by specifically targeting people’s habits and emotional relationships with food. The Whole30 is designed to help break unhealthy patterns of behavior, stop stress-related comfort eating, and reduce cravings, particularly for sugar and carbohydrates. Many Whole30 participants have described achieving “food freedom”—in just thirty days.   Now, The Whole30 offers a stand-alone, step-by-step plan to break unhealthy habits, reduce cravings, improve digestion, and strengthen your immune system. The Whole30 prepares participants for the program in five easy steps, previews a typical thirty days, teaches the basic meal preparation and cooking skills needed to succeed, and provides a month’s worth of recipes designed to build confidence in the kitchen and inspire the taste buds. Motivating and inspiring with just the right amount of signature tough love, The Whole30 features real-life success stories, an extensive quick-reference FAQ, detailed elimination and reintroduction guidelines, and more than 100 recipes using familiar ingredients, from simple one-pot meals to complete dinner party menus.

    The million copy, ultimate #1 bestseller that is changing the way Americans eat and liveDon't DietEat ChocolateDrink WineTake Long WalksEnjoy LifeStay Slim the French way Experience the joie de vivre of French Women Don't Get Fat by Mireille Guiliano.