Book picks similar to
Black Smoke: African Americans and the United States of Barbecue by Adrian Miller
food
cookbooks
non-fiction
history
Parwana: Recipes and Stories from an Afghan Kitchen
Durkhanai Ayubi - 2020
Author Durkhanai Ayubi’s parents, Zelmai and Farida Ayubi, fled Afghanistan with their young family in 1987, at the height of the Cold War. When their family-run restaurant Parwana opened its doors in Adelaide, Australia in 2009, their vision was to share an authentic piece of the Afghanistan the family had left behind—a country rich in culture, family memories infused with Afghanistan’s traditions of generosity and hospitality. These recipes have been in the family for generations and include rice dishes, curries, meats, dumplings, Afghan pastas, sweets, drinks, chutneys and pickles, soups and breads. Some are celebratory special dishes while most are day to day dishes. Each has a story to tell. With beautiful food and location photography, this compilation offers valuable insights into the origins and heritage of Afghan cuisine and a fresh perspective to one of the oldest civilizations. • Authentic recipes from an Afghan kitchen. • Inspiration and ideas for special and everyday dishes, combined with stories about the ritual and significance of Afghan ingredients and recipes. • A vivid and enriching story about how food connects people and communities, showing how food anchors us to our ancestry and can also be a bridge that connects us to people with very different experiences of life. • With more than 65 million refugees, asylum seekers or displaced people worldwide, there is a poignant universality in this story, regardless of where in the world the story starts and ends. • Approximately 100 recipes that have been in the family for generations, especially adapted for the home cook. • Breathtakingly beautiful food photography and family photos.
Will Write for Food: The Complete Guide to Writing Cookbooks, Restaurant Reviews, Articles, Memoir, Fiction and More
Dianne Jacob - 2005
Dianne Jacob—journalist and food-writing instructor and coach—offers interviews with award-winning writers such as Jeffrey Steingarten, Calvin Trillin, Molly O'Neill, and Deborah Madison, plus well-known book and magazine editors and literary agents, give readers the tools to get started and the confidence to follow through. Comprehensive yet accessible chapters range from restaurant reviewing to cookbooks to memoirs. Focused exercises at the end of chapters stimulate creativity, help organize thought, and build practical skills. Will Write for Food is the first and ultimate ins and outs guidebook to the incredibly popular world of food writing.
I'm Just Here for the Food: Food + Heat = Cooking
Alton Brown - 2002
Blending humor, wisdom, history, pop culture, science, and basic cooking knowledge, the host of Food Network's Good Eats presents a special edition of his innovative, instructional cooking guide that features various cooking techniques accompanied by a "master" recipe for each technique, and provides a vast array of food-related tips and advice.
The Secret Lives of Baked Goods: Sweet Stories & Recipes for America's Favorite Desserts
Jessie Oleson Moore - 2013
Moore has put her sweet-sleuthing skills to work uncovering the fascinating histories and tastiest recipes for America's favorite sweets, including whoopee pies, chocolate chip cookies, Baked Alaska, and New York cheesecake. From romantic musings on how desserts got their names to sugar-fueled scandals, these classic recipes and photographs are guaranteed to offer food for thought and leave you with plenty of room for dessert.
Larousse Gastronomique: The World's Greatest Culinary Encyclopedia
Larousse - 1976
In one volume, it presents the history of foods, eating, and restaurants; cooking terms; techniques from elementary to advanced; a review of basic ingredients with advice on recognizing, buying, storing, and using them; biographies of important culinary figures; and recommendations for cooking nearly everything.The new edition, the first since 1988, expands the book’s scope from classic continental cuisine to include the contemporary global table, appealing to a whole new audience of internationally conscious cooks. Larousse Gastronomique is still the last word on béchamel and béarnaise, Brillat-Savarin and Bordeaux, but now it is also the go-to source on biryani and bok choy, bruschetta and Bhutan rice.Larousse Gastronomique is rich with classic and classic-to-be recipes, new ingredients, new terms and techniques, as well as explanations of current food legislation, labeling, and technology. User-friendly design elements create a whole new Larousse for a new generation of food lovers.
Nigella Express: Good Food, Fast
Nigella Lawson - 2007
Nigella's ratings are through the roof, and she was recently featured in In Style. The cookbook is all of the delicious foods Nigella is known for but the emphasis is on fast, really fast! This is for everyone who loves good food, but just doesn't have time or patience at the end of the day for a long, drawn-out cooking session. More than 130 recipes!
Tomatoland: How Modern Industrial Agriculture Destroyed Our Most Alluring Fruit
Barry Estabrook - 2011
But in Tomatoland, which is based on his James Beard Award-winning article, "The Price of Tomatoes," investigative food journalist Barry Estabrook reveals the huge human and environmental cost of the $5 billion fresh tomato industry. Fields are sprayed with more than one hundred different herbicides and pesticides. Tomatoes are picked hard and green and artificially gassed until their skins acquire a marketable hue. Modern plant breeding has tripled yields, but has also produced fruits with dramatically reduced amounts of calcium, vitamin A, and vitamin C, and tomatoes that have fourteen times more sodium than the tomatoes our parents enjoyed. The relentless drive for low costs has fostered a thriving modern-day slave trade in the United States. How have we come to this point? Estabrook traces the supermarket tomato from its birthplace in the deserts of Peru to the impoverished town of Immokalee, Florida, a.k.a. the tomato capital of the United States. He visits the laboratories of seedsmen trying to develop varieties that can withstand the rigors of agribusiness and still taste like a garden tomato, and then moves on to commercial growers who operate on tens of thousands of acres, and eventually to a hillside field in Pennsylvania, where he meets an obsessed farmer who produces delectable tomatoes for the nation's top restaurants.Throughout Tomatoland, Estabrook presents a who's who cast of characters in the tomato industry: the avuncular octogenarian whose conglomerate grows one out of every eight tomatoes eaten in the United States; the ex-Marine who heads the group that dictates the size, color, and shape of every tomato shipped out of Florida; the U.S. attorney who has doggedly prosecuted human traffickers for the past decade; and the Guatemalan peasant who came north to earn money for his parents' medical bills and found himself enslaved for two years.Tomatoland reads like a suspenseful whodunit as well as an expose of today's agribusiness systems and the price we pay as a society when we take taste and thought out of our food purchases.
Mango and Peppercorns: A Memoir of Food, an Unlikely Family, and the American Dream
Tung Nguyen - 2021
This serendipitous meeting evolved into a decades-long partnership, one that eventually turned strangers into family and a tiny, no-frills eatery into one of the most lauded restaurants in the country.Tung's fierce practicality often clashed with Kathy's free-spirited nature, but over time, they found a harmony in their contrasts—a harmony embodied in the restaurant's signature mango and peppercorns sauce.• IMPORTANT, UNIVERSAL STORY: An inspiring memoir peppered with recipes, it is a riveting read that will appeal to fans of Roy Choi, Ed Lee, Ruth Reichl, and Kwame Onwuachi.• TIMELY TOPIC: This real-life American dream is a welcome reminder of our country's longstanding tradition of welcoming refugees and immigrants. This book adds a touchpoint to that larger conversation, resonating beyond the bookshelf.• INVENTIVE COOKBOOK: This book is taking genre-bending a step further, focusing on the story first and foremost with 20 complementary recipes. Perfect for:• Fans of culinary nonfiction• Fans of Ruth Reichl, Roy Choi, Kwame Onwuachi, and Anya Von Bremzen• Home cooks who are interested in Asian food and cooking
Shark's Fin and Sichuan Pepper: A Sweet-Sour Memoir of Eating in China
Fuchsia Dunlop - 2008
How can something she has eaten readily in China seem grotesque in England? The question lingers over this "autobiographical food-and-travel classic" (Publishers Weekly).
Mastering the Art of Soviet Cooking: A Memoir of Food and Longing
Anya von Bremzen - 2013
Anya von Bremzen has vobla-rock-hard, salt-cured dried Caspian roach fish. Lovers of vobla risk breaking a tooth or puncturing a gum on the once-popular snack, but for Anya it's transporting. Like kotleti (Soviet burgers) or the festive Salat Olivier, it summons up the complex, bittersweet flavors of life in that vanished Atlantis called the USSR. There, born in 1963 in a Kafkaesque communal apartment where eighteen families shared one kitchen, Anya grew up singing odes to Lenin, black-marketeering Juicy Fruit gum at her school, and, like most Soviet citizens, longing for a taste of the mythical West. It was a life by turns absurd, drab, naively joyous, melancholy-and, finally, intolerable to her anti-Soviet mother. When she was ten, the two of them fled the political repression of Brezhnev-era Russia, arriving in Philadelphia with no winter coats and no right of return.These days Anya lives in two parallel food universes: one in which she writes about four-star restaurants, the other in which a simple banana-a once a year treat back in the USSR-still holds an almost talismanic sway over her psyche. To make sense of that past, she and her mother decided to eat and cook their way through seven decades of the Soviet experience. Through the meals she and her mother re-create, Anya tells the story of three generations-her grandparents', her mother's, and her own. Her family's stories are embedded in a larger historical epic: of Lenin's bloody grain requisitioning, World War II hunger and survival, Stalin's table manners, Khrushchev's kitchen debates, Gorbachev's anti-alcohol policies, and the ultimate collapse of the USSR. And all of it is bound together by Anya's sardonic wit, passionate nostalgia, and piercing observations.This is that rare book that stirs our souls and our senses.
My Bread: The Revolutionary No-Work, No-Knead Method
Jim Lahey - 2009
Witnessing the excitement that Bittman’s initial piece unleashed worldwide among bakers experienced and beginner alike, Jim grew convinced that home cooks were eager for a no-fuss way to make bread, and so now, in this eagerly anticipated collection of recipes, Jim shares his one-of-a-kind method for baking rustic, deep-flavored bread in your own oven.The secret to Jim Lahey’s bread is slow-rise fermentation. As Jim shows in My Bread, with step-by-step instructions followed by step-by-step pictures, the amount of labor you put in amounts to 5 minutes: mix water, flour, yeast, and salt, and then let time work its magic—no kneading necessary. Wait 12 to 18 hours for the bread to rise, developing structure and flavor; then, after another short rise, briefly bake the bread in a covered cast-iron pot.The process couldn’t be more simple, or the results more inspiring. My Bread devotes chapters to Jim’s variations on the basic loaf, including an olive loaf, pecorino cheese bread, pancetta rolls, the classic Italian baguette (stirato), and the stunning bread stick studded with tomatoes, olives, or garlic (stecca). He gets even more creative with loaves like Peanut Butter and Jelly Bread, others that use juice instead of water, and his Irish Brown Bread, which calls for Guinness stout. For any leftover loaves, Jim includes what to do with old bread (try bread soup or a chocolate torte) and how to make truly special sandwiches. And no book by Jim Lahey would be complete without his Sullivan Street Bakery signature, pizza Bianca—light, crispy flatbread with olive oil and rosemary that Jim has made even better than that of Italy’s finest bakeries. Other pizza recipes, like a pomodoro (tomato), only require you to spread the risen dough across a baking sheet and add toppings before baking. Here—finally—Jim Lahey gives us a cookbook that enables us to fit quality bread into our lives at home.
Around My French Table: More than 300 Recipes from My Home to Yours
Dorie Greenspan - 2010
Julia’s praise was echoed by the New York Times and the Los Angeles Times, which referred to Dorie’s “wonderfully encouraging voice” and “the sense of a real person who is there to help should you stumble.” Now in a big, personal, and personable book, Dorie captures all the excitement of French home cooking, sharing disarmingly simple dishes she has gathered over years of living in France. Around My French Table includes many superb renditions of the great classics: a glorious cheese-domed onion soup, a spoon-tender beef daube, and the “top-secret” chocolate mousse recipe that every good Parisian cook knows—but won’t reveal. Hundreds of other recipes are remarkably easy: a cheese and olive quick bread, a three-star chef’s Basque potato tortilla made with a surprise ingredient (potato chips), and an utterly satisfying roast chicken for “lazy people.” Packed with lively stories, memories, and insider tips on French culinary customs, Around My French Table will make cooks fall in love with France all over again, or for the first time.
Plenty: One Man, One Woman, and a Raucous Year of Eating Locally
Alisa Smith - 2007
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.
The Last Days of Haute Cuisine: The Coming of Age of American Restaurants
Patric Kuh - 2001
Kuh takes readers inside this high-stakes business, sharing little-known anecdotes, describing legendary cooks and bright new star chefs, and relating his own reminiscences. Populated by a host of food personalities, including Julia Child, M.F.K. Fisher, and James Beard, Kuh's social and cultural history of America's great restaurants reveals the dramatic transformations in U.S. cuisine. "If you believe we are what we eat, this is the book that tells you who we are." (The San Diego Union-Tribune) ßAUTHORBIO: Patric Kuh is a Paris-trained chef who has worked in preeminent restaurants in France, New York, and California. He has written a novel, as well as numerous articles for Gourmet, Esquire, Salon.com, and Los Angeles magazine.
The Kitchen Counter Cooking School: How a Few Simple Lessons Transformed Nine Culinary Novices into Fearless Home Cooks
Kathleen Flinn - 2011
Flinn's "chefternal" instinct kicked in: she persuaded the stranger to reload with fresh foods, offering her simple recipes for healthy, easy meals. The Kitchen Counter Cooking School includes practical, healthy tips that boost readers' culinary self-confidence, and strategies to get the most from their grocery dollar, and simple recipes that get readers cooking.From the Trade Paperback edition.