Sean Brock's South


Sean Brock - 2019
    And who better to give us the key elements of Southern cuisine than Sean Brock, the award-winning chef and Southern-food crusader. In Sean Brock’s South, Brock shares his recipes for key components of the cuisine, from grits and fried chicken to collard greens and corn bread. Recipes can be mixed and matched to make a meal or eaten on their own. Taken together, they make up the essential elements of Southern cuisine, from fried green tomatoes to smoked baby back ribs and from tomato okra stew to biscuits. Regional differences are highlighted in recipes for shrimp and grits, corn bread, fried chicken, and more. Includes key Southern knowledge too: how to fry, how to care for cast iron, how to cook over a hearth, and more. This is the book fans of Sean Brock have been waiting for, and it’s the book Southern-food lovers the world over will use as their bible.

Rice, Noodle, Fish: Deep Travels Through Japan's Food Culture


Matt Goulding - 2015
    In this 5000-mile journey through the noodle shops, tempura temples, and teahouses of Japan, Matt Goulding, co-creator of the enormously popular Eat This, Not That! book series, navigates the intersection between food, history, and culture, creating one of the most ambitious and complete books ever written about Japanese culinary culture from the Western perspective.Written in the same evocative voice that drives the award-winning magazine Roads & Kingdoms, Rice, Noodle, Fish explores Japan's most intriguing culinary disciplines in seven key regions, from the kaiseki tradition of Kyoto and the sushi masters of Tokyo to the street food of Osaka and the ramen culture of Fukuoka. You won't find hotel recommendations or bus schedules; you will find a brilliant narrative that interweaves immersive food journalism with intimate portraits of the cities and the people who shape Japan's food culture.This is not your typical guidebook. Rice, Noodle, Fish is a rare blend of inspiration and information, perfect for the intrepid and armchair traveler alike. Combining literary storytelling, indispensable insider information, and world-class design and photography, the end result is the first ever guidebook for the new age of culinary tourism.

The Taste of Country Cooking


Edna Lewis - 1976
    With menus for the four seasons, she shares the ways her family prepared and enjoyed food, savoring the delights of each special time of year:• The fresh taste of spring—the first shad, wild mushrooms, garden strawberries, field greens and salads . . . honey from woodland bees . . . a ring mold of chicken with wild mushroom sauce . . . the treat of braised mutton after sheepshearing.• The feasts of summer—garden-ripe vegetables and fruits relished at the peak of flavor . . . pan-fried chicken, sage-flavored pork tenderloin, spicy baked tomatoes, corn pudding, fresh blackberry cobbler, and more, for hungry neighbors on Wheat-Threshing Day . . . Sunday Revival, the event of the year, when Edna’s mother would pack up as many as fifteen dishes (what with her pickles and breads and pies) to be spread out on linen-covered picnic tables under the church’s shady oaks . . . hot afternoons cooled with a bowl of crushed peaches or hand-cranked custard ice cream.• The harvest of fall—a fine dinner of baked country ham, roasted newly dug sweet potatoes, and warm apple pie after a day of corn-shucking . . . the hunting season, with the deliciously “different” taste of game fattened on hickory nuts and persimmons . . . hog-butchering time and the making of sausages and liver pudding . . . and Emancipation Day with its rich and generous thanksgiving dinner.• The hearty fare of winter—holiday time, the sideboard laden with all the special foods of Christmas for company dropping by . . . the cold months warmed by stews, soups, and baked beans cooked in a hearth oven to be eaten with hot crusty bread before the fire.The scores of recipes for these marvelous dishes are set down in loving detail. We come to understand the values that formed the remarkable woman—her love of nature, the pleasure of living with the seasons, the sense of community, the satisfactory feeling that hard work was always rewarded by her mother’s good food. Having made us yearn for all the good meals she describes in her memories of a lost time in America, Edna Lewis shows us precisely how to recover, in our own country or city or suburban kitchens, the taste of the fresh, good, natural country cooking that was so happy a part of her girlhood in Freetown, Virginia.

The Tassajara Bread Book


Edward Espe Brown - 1970
    It requires nurturing and care. In this twenty-fifth anniversary edition of the international best-seller that started a generation of Americans baking, Ed Brown shows how to make—and enjoy—breads, pastries, muffins, and desserts for today's sophisticated palates. And in a new afterword, he reflects on the widespread influence of the book and offers five new recipes.This is 2010. I have just purchased a new copy of this book, which I first owned back in 1970 or 1971. I love them and use them until they fall apart. I believe they are a GREAT introduction to breakmaking for a new baker, and an excellent wedding gift.

Sourdough: Recipes for Rustic Fermented Breads, Sweets, Savories, and More


Sarah Owens - 2015
    Unable to enjoy many of her most favorite foods, she knew she must find a health-sustaining alternative. Thus Sarah started experimenting with sourdough leavening, which almost immediately began to heal her gut and inspire her anew in the kitchen. Soon after, her artisan small-batch bakery, BK17, was launched, and with that, a new way to savor and share nutritious sourdough breads and treats with her Brooklyn community.      Sourdough and other fermented foods are making a comeback because of their rich depth of flavor and proven health benefits. In Sourdough, Sarah demystifies keeping a sourdough culture, which is an extended fermentation process that allows for maximum flavor and easy digestion, showing us just how simple it can be to create a healthy starter from scratch. Moreover, Sarah uses home-grown sourdough starter in dozens of baked goods, including cookies, cakes, scones, flatbreads, tarts, and more--well beyond bread. Sarah is a botanist and gardener as well as a baker--her original recipes are accented with brief natural history notes of the highlighted plants and ingredients used therein. Anecdotes from the garden will delight naturalists and baked-goods lovers among us. Laced with botanical and cultural notes on grains, fruits and vegetables, herbs, and even weeds, Sourdough Baking celebrates seasonal abundance alongside the timeless craft of artisan baking.

Hot Sour Salty Sweet: A Culinary Journey Through Southeast Asia


Jeffrey Alford - 2000
    Here, along the world's tenth largest river, which rises in Tibet and joins the sea in Vietnam, traditions mingle and exquisite food prevails. Award-winning authors Jeffrey Alford and Naomi Duguid followed the river south, as it flows through the mountain gorges of southern China, to Burma and into Laos and Thailand. For a while the right bank of the river is in Thailand, but then it becomes solely Lao on its way to Cambodia. Only after three thousand miles does it finally enter Vietnam and then the South China Sea.It was during their travels that Alford and Duguid—who ate traditional foods in villages and small towns and learned techniques and ingredients from cooks and market vendors—came to realize that the local cuisines, like those of the Mediterranean, share a distinctive culinary approach: Each cuisine balances, with grace and style, the regional flavor quartet of hot, sour, salty, and sweet. This book, aptly titled, is the result of their journeys.Like Alford and Duguid's two previous works, Flatbreads and Flavors ("a certifiable publishing event" —Vogue) and Seductions of Rice ("simply stunning"—The New York Times), this book is a glorious combination of travel and taste, presenting enticing recipes in "an odyssey rich in travel anecdote" (National Geographic Traveler).The book's more than 175 recipes for spicy salsas, welcoming soups, grilled meat salads, and exotic desserts are accompanied by evocative stories about places and people. The recipes and stories are gorgeously illustrated throughout with more than 150 full-color food and travel photographs.In each chapter, from Salsas to Street Foods, Noodles to Desserts, dishes from different cuisines within the region appear side by side: A hearty Lao chicken soup is next to a Vietnamese ginger-chicken soup; a Thai vegetable stir-fry comes after spicy stir-fried potatoes from southwest China.The book invites a flexible approach to cooking and eating, for dishes from different places can be happily served and eaten together: Thai Grilled Chicken with Hot and Sweet Dipping Sauce pairs beautifully with Vietnamese Green Papaya Salad and Lao sticky rice.North Americans have come to love Southeast Asian food for its bright, fresh flavors. But beyond the dishes themselves, one of the most attractive aspects of Southeast Asian food is the life that surrounds it. In Southeast Asia, people eat for joy. The palate is wildly eclectic, proudly unrestrained. In Hot, Sour, Salty, Sweet, at last this great culinary region is celebrated with all the passion, color, and life that it deserves.

Food52 Genius Recipes: 100 Recipes That Will Change the Way You Cook


Kristen Miglore - 2015
      Genius recipes surprise us and make us rethink the way we cook. They might involve an unexpectedly simple technique, debunk a kitchen myth, or apply a familiar ingredient in a new way. They’re handed down by luminaries of the food world and become their legacies. And, once we’ve folded them into our repertoires, they make us feel pretty genius too. In this collection are 100 of the smartest and most remarkable ones.   There isn’t yet a single cookbook where you can find Marcella Hazan’s Tomato Sauce with Onion and Butter, Jim Lahey’s No-Knead Bread, and Nigella Lawson’s Dense Chocolate Loaf Cake—plus dozens more of the most talked about, just-crazy-enough-to-work recipes of our time. Until now.   These are what Food52 Executive Editor Kristen Miglore calls genius recipes. Passed down from the cookbook authors, chefs, and bloggers who made them legendary, these foolproof recipes rethink cooking tropes, solve problems, get us talking, and make cooking more fun. Every week, Kristen features one such recipe and explains just what’s so brilliant about it in the James Beard Award-nominated Genius Recipes column on Food52. Here, in this book, she compiles 100 of the most essential ones—nearly half of which have never been featured in the column—with tips, riffs, mini-recipes, and stunning photographs from James Ransom, to create a cooking canon that will stand the test of time.   Once you try Michael Ruhlman’s fried chicken or Yotam Ottolenghi and Sami Tamimi’s hummus, you’ll never want to go back to other versions. But there’s also a surprising ginger juice you didn’t realize you were missing and will want to put on everything—and a way to cook white chocolate that (finally) exposes its hidden glory. Some of these recipes you’ll follow to a T, but others will be jumping-off points for you to experiment with and make your own. Either way, with Kristen at the helm, revealing and explaining the genius of each recipe, Genius Recipes is destined to become every home cook’s go-to resource for smart, memorable cooking—because no one cook could have taught us so much.

New Food of Life: Ancient Persian & Modern Iranian Cooking & Ceremonies


Najmieh Batmanglij - 1986
    This book describes ancient and modern ceremonies, poetry, folk tales, travelogue excerpts, and anecdotes. It helps you learn how to cook rice, the jewel of Persian cooking, simply yet deliciously.

Cooked: A Natural History of Transformation


Michael Pollan - 2013
    Here, he discovers the enduring power of the four classical elements - fire, water, air, and earth - to transform the stuff of nature into delicious things to eat and drink. Apprenticing himself to a succession of culinary masters, Pollan learns how to grill with fire, cook with liquid, bake bread, and ferment everything from cheese to beer. In the course of his journey, he discovers that the cook occupies a special place in the world, standing squarely between nature and culture. Both realms are transformed by cooking, and so, in the process, is the cook.Each section of Cooked tracks Pollan's effort to master a single classic recipe using one of the four elements. A North Carolina barbecue pit master tutors him in the primal magic of fire; a Chez Panisse-trained cook schools him in the art of braising; a celebrated baker teaches him how air transforms grain and water into a fragrant loaf of bread; and finally, several mad-genius "fermentos" (a tribe that includes brewers, cheese makers, and all kinds of picklers) reveal how fungi and bacteria can perform the most amazing alchemies of all. The listener learns alongside Pollan, but the lessons move beyond the practical to become an investigation of how cooking involves us in a web of social and ecological relationships: with plants and animals, the soil, farmers, our history and culture, and, of course, the people our cooking nourishes and delights. Cooking, above all, connects us.The effects of not cooking are similarly far reaching. Relying upon corporations to process our food means we consume huge quantities of fat, sugar, and salt; disrupt an essential link to the natural world; and weaken our relationships with family and friends. In fact, Cooked argues, taking back control of cooking may be the single most important step anyone can take to help make the American food system healthier and more sustainable. Reclaiming cooking as an act of enjoyment and self-reliance, learning to perform the magic of these everyday transformations, opens the door to a more nourishing life.

The Model Bakery Cookbook: 75 Favorite Recipes from the Beloved Napa Valley Bakery


Sarah Mitchell Hansen - 2013
    And this book of sensational artisan baked goods makes clear why there are lines out the door! Featuring 75 recipes and 60 photos, it's as luscious to look at as their most-requested breads, classic desserts, and fresh pastries--all arrayed here--are to eat. Pain au Levain, Sticky Buns, Peach Streusel Pie, Ginger Molasses Cookies, and many more glorious recipes make this a mouthwatering read and a reference gem for lovers of bread and pastry, cakes and cookies, and, of course, the Model Bakery!

Everyday Food: Great Food Fast


Martha Stewart - 2007
    And you want lots of choices and variations—recipes that call for your favorite foods and take advantage of excellent (and readily available) ingredients. In the first book from the award-winning magazine Everyday Food, you’ll find all of that: 250 simple recipes for delicious meals that are quick enough to make any day of the week. Because a change in weather affects how we cook as much as what we cook, the recipes in Everyday Food are arranged by season. For spring, you’ll find speedy preparations for main-course salads, chicken, and poached salmon that minimize time spent at the stove; summer features quick techniques for grilling the very best burgers and kabobs as well as no-cook pasta sauces; for fall, there are braised meats and hearty main-course soups; and winter provides new takes on rich one-dish meals, roasts and stews, and hearty baked pastas. Finally, a chapter on basics explains how to make year-round staples such as foolproof roast chicken, risotto, couscous, and chocolate sauce.Designed in a contemporary and easy-to-read format, Everyday Food boasts lush, full-color photography and plenty of suggestions for substitutions and variations. With Everyday Food, even the busiest on-the-go cook can look forward to meals that bring freshness, nutrition, and a range of flavors to dinner all week long.

Dessert Person: Recipes and Guidance for Baking with Confidence


Claire Saffitz - 2020
    In Dessert Person, fans will find Claire's signature spin on sweet and savory recipes like Babkallah (a babka-Challah mashup), Apple and Concord Grape Crumble Pie, Strawberry-Cornmeal Layer Cake, Crispy Mushroom Galette, and Malted Forever Brownies. She outlines the problems and solutions for each recipe--like what to do if your pie dough for Sour Cherry Pie cracks (patch it with dough or a quiche flour paste!)--as well as practical do's and don'ts, skill level, prep and bake time, and foundational know-how. With Claire at your side, everyone can be a dessert person.

Tyler Florence Family Meal: Bringing People Together Never Tasted Better


Tyler Florence - 2010
    In a book with 60 full-color photos the star of the Food Network's Tyler's Ultimate celebrates the pleasures of cooking with wholesome, local, in-season ingredients by discussing how his life influenced his food philosophy and providing delectableTitle: Tyler Florence Family MealAuthor: Florence, TylerPublisher: St Martins PrPublication Date: 2010/10/12Number of Pages: 301Binding Type: HARDCOVERLibrary of Congress: 2010035300

The Man Who Ate Everything


Jeffrey Steingarten - 1997
    He succeeded at all but the last: Steingarten is "fairly sure that God meant the color blue mainly for food that has gone bad." In this impassioned, mouth-watering, and outrageously funny book, Steingarten devotes the same Zen-like discipline and gluttonous curiosity to practically everything that anyone anywhere has ever called "dinner." Follow Steingarten as he jets off to sample choucroute in Alsace, hand-massaged beef in Japan, and the mother of all ice creams in Sicily. Sweat with him as he tries to re-create the perfect sourdough, bottle his own mineral water, and drop excess poundage at a luxury spa. Join him as he mounts a heroic--and hilarious--defense of salt, sugar, and fat (though he has some nice things to say about Olestra). Stuffed with offbeat erudition and recipes so good they ought to be illegal, The Man Who Ate Everything is a gift for anyone who loves food.

Indian for Everyone: The Home Cook's Guide to Traditional Favorites


Anupy Singla - 2014
    --Publishers Weekly, starred reviewOnly have room for one go-to book for Indian home cooking on your shelf? This is it. --BooklistIndian for Everyone is the third book by Anupy Singla, by far her most stunning and comprehensive offering yet. Singla is America's favorite authority on Indian home cooking, and her expertise with delicious, healthful recipes has endeared her to fans everywhere. This new book opens up the true simplicity and flavor of Indian food for anyone, regardless of dietary restrictions or familiarity.Singla's recipes feature popular favorites, regional specialties, and--unlike any other Indian cookbook--alternative preparation styles for every recipe. Included are quick-and-easy adaptations for making a meal vegetarian, vegan, or gluten-free, or even in the slow cooker. Beginners appreciate the book's step-by-step instructions, while veteran home cooks now have a reference point for family favorites, including little-known instructions and standard cook times.With deeply personal, detailed stories behind these recipes, readers see how healthy cooking connected Singla's family through many generations and disparate cultural heritages. More than the next great Indian cookbook, this is the next great American cookbook -- sure to become a staple of every family's collection.