Hallelujah! the Welcome Table: A Lifetime of Memories with Recipes


Maya Angelou - 2004
    Preparing and enjoying homemade meals provides a sense of purpose and calm, accomplishment and connection. Now in "Hallelujah! The Welcome Table, " Angelou shares memories pithy and poignant-and the recipes that helped to make them both indelible and irreplaceable. Angelou tells us about the time she was expelled from school for being afraid to speak-and her mother baked a delicious maple cake to brighten her spirits. She gives us her recipe for short ribs along with a story about a job she had as a cook at a Creole restaurant (never mind that she didn't know how to cook and had no idea what Creole food might entail). There was the time in London when she attended a wretched dinner party full of wretched people; but all wasn't lost-she did experience her initial taste of a savory onion tart. She recounts her very first night in her new home in Sonoma, California, when she invited M. F. K. Fisher over for cassoulet, and the evening Deca Mitford roasted a chicken when she was beyond tipsy-and created Chicken Drunkard Style. And then there was the hearty brunch Angelou made for a homesick Southerner, a meal that earned her both a job offer and a prophetic compliment: "If you can write half as good as you can cook, you are going to be famous." Maya Angelou is renowned in her wide and generous circle of friends as a marvelous chef. Her kitchen is a social center. From fried meat pies, chicken livers, and beef Wellington to caramel cake, bread pudding, and chocolate eclairs, the one hundred-plus recipes included here are all tried and true, and come from Angelou's heart and her home. "Hallelujah! The Welcome Table "is a stunning collaboration between the two things Angelou loves best: writing and cooking.

Spiced: A Pastry Chef's True Stories of Trials by Fire, After-Hours Exploits, and What Really Goes on in the Kitchen


Dalia Jurgensen - 2009
    With wit and an appreciation of raunchy insults, Dalia Jurgensen reveals the secrets to holding one's own in male-dominated kitchens, surviving after-hours staff parties and turning out perfect plates when you know you're cooking for a poorly disguised restaurant critic.

The Reporter's Kitchen: Essays


Jane Kramer - 2017
    Her first dish, a tinned-tuna curry, was assembled on a tiny stove in her graduate student apartment while she pondered her first writing assignment. From there, whether her travels took her to a tent settlement in the Sahara for an afternoon interview with an old Berber woman toiling over goat stew, or to the great London restaurateur and author Yotam Ottolenghi's Notting Hill apartment, where they assembled a buttered phylo-and-cheese tower called a mutabbaq, Jane always returned from the field with a new recipe, and usually, a friend.For the first time, Jane's beloved food pieces from The New Yorker, where she has been a staff writer since 1964, are arranged in one place--a collection of definitive chef profiles, personal essays, and gastronomic history that is at once deeply personal and humane. The Reporter's Kitchen follows Jane everywhere, and throughout her career--from her summer writing retreat in Umbria, where Jane and her anthropologist husband host memorable expat Thanksgivings--in July--to the Nordic coast, where Jane and acclaimed Danish chef Rene Redzepi, of Noma, forage for edible sea-grass. The Reporter's Kitchen is an important record of culture distilled through food around the world. It's welcoming and inevitably surprising.

American Cheese: An Indulgent Odyssey Through the Artisan Cheese World


Joe Berkowitz - 2020
    Or at least he thought he did. After stumbling upon an artisinal tasting at an upscale cheese shop one Valentine’s Day, he realized he’d hardly even scratched the surface. These cheeses were like nothing he had ever tasted—a visceral drug-punch that reverberated deliciousness—and they were from America. He felt like he was being let in a great cosmic secret, and instantly he was in love.This discovery inspired Joe to embark on the cheese adventure of a lifetime, spending a year exploring the subculture around cheese, from its trenches to its command centers. He dove headfirst into the world of artisan cheese; of premiere makers and mongers, cave-dwelling affineurs, dairy scientists, and restauranteurs. The journey would take him around the world, from the underground cheese caves in Paris to the mountains of Gruyere, leaving no curd unturned, all the while cultivating an appreciation for cheese and its place in society.Joe’s journey from amateur to aficionado eventually comes to mirror the rise of American cheese on the world stage. As he embeds with Team USA at an international mongering competition and makes cheese in the experimental vats at the Dairy Research Center in Wisconsin, one of the makers he meets along the way gears up to make America’s biggest splash ever at the World Cheese Awards. Through this odyssey of cheese, an unexpected culture of passionate cheesemakers is revealed, along with the impact of one delicious dairy product.

Tastes Like Cuba: An Exile's Hunger for Home


Eduardo Machado - 2007
    An internationally acclaimed playwright, Eduardo Machado has grappled with questions of identity, loss and resistance throughout his life and work. He hasmore than any other playwrightbeen able to convey the experiences of both the Cubans who chose to stay in Cuba and those who chose to leave. His fearless style and unabashed politicism in the face of dissent have made him a controversial figure to the Cubans and Americans on opposite sides of an intense conflict. In his memories and in his more recent travels to Cuba, he has found that the most natural means of connecting with todays Cuban experience is through food. Machado says, When I taste something I havent tasted in twenty years, I cant resist that connection to the past, to the conflict, to the identity that is mine. I know the feeling as I taste the flavor. There are no arguments, no political controversies, just the real sensation. If its that complex, it must be Cuban. To any exile, food represents not only the lost comfort of home, but the best chance to reclaim it. The stories of Machados lifefrom child of privilege in pre-Revolutionary Cuba; to exile in Los Angeles; to actor, director, playwright and professor in New Yorkare interleaved with recipes for the meals that have enriched him. Every recipe has been updated for the modern home cook, enabling us to recreate the flavors of traditional Cuban dishes such as Machados favorite roast pork and his grandfathers arroz con pollo, as well as the cuisine of necessity he encountered in 1960s suburban America: Velveeta, SPAM, and otherprocessed wonders. What emerges is a larger picture of what it means to be a Latino in America today. For anyone who has ever longed for a home, real or imagined, Tastes Like Cuba delivers a fascinating story of two worldsand one delectable life.

Best Food Writing 2008


Holly Hughes - 2008
    This anthology features both established food writers and rising stars addressing everything from celebrated chefs to the travails of the home cook, and from erudite culinary history to food-inspired memoirs. By turns opinionated, evocative, nostalgic, sensuous, and just plain funny, it’s a tasty sampler to dip into time and again, whether you’re in the mood for foie gras or fruitcake. Like previous collections, Best Food Writing 2008 will include writers such as Colman Andrews, Anthony Bourdain, Frank Bruni, Bill Buford, Barbara Kingsolver, Madhur Jaffrey, Ruth Reichl, Raymond Sokolov, Jeffrey Steingarten, and many others.

Burnt Toast Makes You Sing Good: A Memoir of Food and Love from an American Midwest Family


Kathleen Flinn - 2014
    Burnt Toast Makes You Sing Good explores the very beginnings of her love affair with food and its connection to home. It is the story of her midwestern childhood, its memorable home cooks, and the delicious recipes she grew up with. Flinn shares tales of her parents’ pizza parlor in San Francisco, where they sold Uncle Clarence’s popular oven-fried chicken, as well as recipes for the vats of chili made by her former army cook Grandpa Charles, fluffy Swedish pancakes from Grandma Inez, and cinnamon rolls for birthday breakfasts. Through these dishes, Flinn came to understand how meals can be memories, and how cooking can be a form of communication. Brimming with warmth and wit, this book is sure to appeal to Flinn’s many fans as well as readers of Marcus Samuelsson, Ruth Reichl, and Julie Powell.

The Comfort Food Diaries: My Quest for the Perfect Dish to Mend a Broken Heart


Emily Nunn - 2017
    After a few glasses of wine, heartbroken and lost, Emily, an avid cook and professional food writer, poured her heart out on Facebook. The next morning she woke up with a terrible hangover and a feeling she'd made a terrible mistake, only to discover she had more friends than she knew, many of whom invited her to come visit and cook with them while she put her life back together. Thus began the Comfort Food Tour.Searching for a way forward, Emily travels the country, cooking and staying with relatives and friends, among them renowned chefs Mark Bittman and Ina Garten. She also travels back to revisit scenes from her dysfunctional Southern upbringing, dominated by her dramatic, unpredictable mother and her silent, disengaged father. Her wonderfully idiosyncratic aunts and uncles and cousins come to life in these pages, all part of the rich Southern story in which past and present are indistinguishable, food is a source of connection and identity, and a good story is often preferred to a not-so-pleasant truth. But truth, pleasant or not, is what Emily Nunn craves, and with it comes an acceptance of the losses she has endured, and a sense of hope for the future.In the salty snap of a single Virginia ham biscuit, in the sour tang of Grandmother's Lemon Cake, Nunn experiences the healing power of comfort food, and offers up dozens of recipes for the wonderful meals that saved her life. With the biting humor of David Sedaris and the emotional honesty of Cheryl Strayed, Nunn delivers a moving account of her descent into darkness and her gradual, hard-won return to the living.

Lucky Peach, Issue 7


David Chang - 2013
    ANTHONY BOURDAIN talks Deliverance, Apocalypse Now, and Southern Comfort. HAROLD MCGEE schools us about the (possibly) harmful substances that travel from plastic to-go containers and into our food. ROY CHOI waxes poetic on “the Aloha spirit.” JASON POLAN visits the most beautiful Taco Bell in the world. And it wouldn’t be a travel issue without travel tips galore: how to avoid traveler’s diarrhea (BENJAMIN WOLFE), the ins and outs of street food (RICK BAYLESS), and all about traveling with kids (NAOMI DUGUID). Ultimately, we learn that getting lost means finding good stuff in places we least expect it: chicken tamales at a gay cantina in Mérida; the world’s most dangerous chicken in Rio de Janeiro; an epic sub on the Jersey Shore. Plus: the history of curry—the world’s best traveled dish—from bunny chow to fish-head curry, along with recipes too.PLUS:Travel tips from AZIZ ANSARI, JONATHAN GOLD, MARIO BATALI, and morePunk rock touring with BROOKS HEADLEYOn the road with ANDY RICKEREating camel with ANISSA HELOUCocktail recipes straight from the minibarDispatches from Crete, Tartarstan, North KoreaNew fiction by JACK PENDARVISHawaiian recipes from ROY CHOI and CHRISTINA TOSI

Food for Free (Collins Gem)


Richard Mabey - 1972
    Over 100 edible plants are listed, fully illustrated and described, together with recipes and other fascinating details on their use throughout the ages.Practical advice on how to pick along with information on countryside laws and regulations on picking wild plants helps you to plan your foray with a feast in mind.This is the ideal book for both nature lovers and cooks keen to enjoy what the countryside has to offer.

Love by the Glass: Tasting Notes from a Marriage


Dorothy J. Gaiter - 2002
    Gaiter and John Brecher, who have merged their journalism careers with their love of wine. She grew up in the all-black environment of Florida A&M University in Tallahassee, and he was raised in Jacksonville, where his was one of a handful of Jewish families. Follow Dottie and John from their June 4, 1973, meeting in the newsroom of The Miami Herald to their first "Open That Bottle Night," which put them on the road to becoming full-time wine columnists. From the Andr� Cold Duck that accompanied their first date to the bottle of Taittinger Champagne smuggled into the delivery room to wet the lips of their newborn second daughter, lovers of books as well as lovers of wine can now join the wine world's favorite couple as they embark on the ultimate quest for the perfect grape.

Consuming Passions: A Food-Obsessed Life


Michael Lee West - 1999
    Laced with delicious secret recipes passed from generation to generation, West's irresistible chronicle recalls good times and wild times—mothers swinging from chandeliers, elderly aunts brewing up love potions, a South American nymphomaniac stirring up trouble at a Louisiana barbeque joint, and the spooky hauntings of a cabbage-eating ghost—all in the pursuit of good dining. Thoroughly entertaining, alive with West's distinctive humor and sharp, irrepressible insight, here are incomparable American kitchen tales as warm and tasty as freshly baked bread.

A Homemade Life: Stories and Recipes from My Kitchen Table


Molly Wizenberg - 2009
    But when she tried going back to her apartment in Seattle and returning to graduate school, she knew it wasn't possible to resume life as though nothing had happened. So she went to Paris, a city that held vivid memories of a childhood trip with her father, of early morning walks on the cobbled streets of the Latin Quarter and the taste of her first pain au chocolat. She was supposed to be doing research for her dissertation, but more often, she found herself peering through the windows of chocolate shops, trekking across town to try a new pâtisserie, or tasting cheeses at outdoor markets, until one evening when she sat in the Luxembourg Gardens reading cookbooks until it was too dark to see, she realized that her heart was not in her studies but in the kitchen.At first, it wasn't clear where this epiphany might lead. Like her long letters home describing the details of every meal and market, Molly's blog Orangette started out merely as a pleasant pastime. But it wasn't long before her writing and recipes developed an international following. Every week, devoted readers logged on to find out what Molly was cooking, eating, reading, and thinking, and it seemed she had finally found her passion. But the story wasn't over: one reader in particular, a curly-haired, food-loving composer from New York, found himself enchanted by the redhead in Seattle, and their email correspondence blossomed into a long-distance romance.In A Homemade Life: Stories and Recipes from My Kitchen Table, Molly Wizenberg recounts a life with the kitchen at its center. From her mother's pound cake, a staple of summer picnics during her childhood in Oklahoma, to the eggs she cooked for her father during the weeks before his death, food and memories are intimately entwined. You won't be able to decide whether to curl up and sink into the story or to head straight to the market to fill your basket with ingredients for Cider-Glazed Salmon and Pistachio Cake with Honeyed Apricots.

The Good Food Revolution: Growing Healthy Food, People, and Communities


Will Allen - 2012
    But after years in professional basketball and as an executive for Kentucky Fried Chicken and Procter & Gamble, Allen cashed in his retirement fund for a two-acre plot a half mile away from Milwaukee’s largest public housing project. The area was a food desert with only convenience stores and fast-food restaurants to serve the needs of local residents.In the face of financial challenges and daunting odds, Allen built the country’s preeminent urban farm—a food and educational center that now produces enough vegetables and fish year-round to feed thousands of people. Employing young people from the neighboring housing project and community, Growing Power has sought to prove that local food systems can help troubled youths, dismantle racism, create jobs, bring urban and rural communities closer together, and improve public health. Today, Allen’s organization helps develop community food systems across the country.An eco-classic in the making, The Good Food Revolution is the story of Will’s personal journey, the lives he has touched, and a grassroots movement that is changing the way our nation eats.

The Southern Foodie: 100 Places to Eat in the South Before You Die (and the Recipes That Made Them Famous)


Chris Chamberlain - 2012
    Check out the culinary creativity in the Carolinas where you’ll find traditional smoked pork barbecue alongside Southern favorites made with fresh, local produce. Explore the restaurant kitchens of Atlanta and Nashville where the chefs aren’t shy about fusing comfort food standards with international flair and unexpected techniques. Join food and drink writer Chris Chamberlain for access to the South’s best recipes and the kitchens where they were developed. In The Southern Foodie, Chamberlain explores the South’s culinary culture with favorites such as: Jalapeño-and-Cheese-Stuffed Grit Cakes from Mason’s Grill, Baton Rouge, LARoasted Heirloom Pumpkin with Mulled Sorghum Glaze from Capitol Grille, Nashville, TNCountry Ham Fritters from Proof on Main, Louisville, KYBlue Crab Cheesecake from Old Firehouse Restaurant, Hollywood, SCApricot Fried Pies from Penguin Ed’s Bar-B-Q, Fayetteville, AR  The Southern Foodie you where the South eats and how to create those distinct flavors at home. You’re sure to rediscover old favorites and get a closer look at the delicious new traditions in Southern cuisine.