Book picks similar to
Consider the Oyster by M.F.K Fisher


food
food-writing
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Zingerman's Guide to Good Eating: How to Choose the Best Bread, Cheeses, Olive Oil, Pasta, Chocolate, and Much More


Ari Weinzweig - 2003
    Now, Ari Weinzweig, the founder of Zingerman’s, shares two decades of knowledge gained in his pursuit of the world’s finest food products. In this fascinating resource guide, he tells you everything you need to know about how to choose top-quality basics that can transform every meal from ordinary to memorable: oils, vinegars, and olives; bread, pasta, and rice; cheeses and cured meats; seasonings like salt, pepper, and saffron; vanilla, chocolate, and tea. How do you tell the difference between a great aged balsamic vinegar and a caramel-flavored impostor? How do you select an extraordinary olive oil from the bewildering array of bottles on the grocery shelf? Which Italian rice makes the creamiest risotto (and what are the tricks to making a terrific one)? Is there a difference between traditionally made pastas and commercial brands? How do English and American Cheddars compare? How do you make sense of the thousands of teas in the world to find one you love? What should you look for on the label of a good chocolate? In Zingerman's Guide to Good Eating, Ari Weinzweig provides the answers -- and includes approximately 100 recipes, many collected from artisan food makers, from Miguel’s Mother’s Macaroni to “LEO” (lox, eggs, and onions) to Funky, Chunky Dark Chocolate Cookies. This book is not only an indispensable guide to pantry essentials, it’s an enthralling read. You’ll visit artisan food producers, learn fascinating facts, find sources for the best brands and food suppliers, and get valuable advice that will change the way you cook forever.

Alone in the Kitchen with an Eggplant: Confessions of Cooking for One and Dining Alone


Jenni Ferrari-Adler - 2007
     If, sooner or later, we all face the prospect of eating alone, then Alone in the Kitchen with an Eggplant provides the perfect set of instructions. In this unique collection, twenty-six writers and foodies invite readers into their kitchens to reflect on the secret meals they make for themselves when no one else is looking: the indulgent truffled egg sandwich, the comforting bowl of black beans, the bracing anchovy fillet on buttered toast. From Italy to New York to Cape Cod to Thailand, from M. F. K. Fisher to Steve Almond to Nora Ephron, the experiences collected in this book are as diverse, moving, hilarious, and uplifting as the meals they describe. Haruki Murakami finds solace in spaghetti. Ephron mends a broken heart with mashed potatoes in bed. Ann Patchett trades the gourmet food she cooks for others for endless snacks involving saltines. Marcella Hazan, responsible for bringing sophisticated Italian cuisine into American homes, craves a simple grilled ham-and-cheese sandwich. Courtney Eldridge, divorced from a fancy chef, reconnects with the salsa she learned to cook from her cash-strapped mother. Rosa Jurjevics reflects on the influence of her mother, Laurie Colwin, as she stocks her home with salty treats. Almost all of the essays include recipes, making this book the perfect companion for a happy, lonely-or just hungry-evening home alone. Part solace, part celebration, part handbook, Alone in the Kitchen with an Eggplant offers a wealth of company, inspiration, and humor-and, finally, recipes that require no division or subtraction.

Table Talk


A.A. Gill - 2007
    Gill is an unashamedly intolerant perfectionist whose witty observations and scathing criticism have made him one of the most respected critics to walk through a restaurant's doors. 'Table Talk' is an idiosyncratic selection of A.A. Gill's writing about food, taken from his Sunday Times and Tatler columns.

Feed the Resistance: Recipes + Ideas for Getting Involved


Julia Turshen - 2017
    As the millions who marched in January 2017 demonstrated, activism is the new normal. When people search for ways to resist injustice and express support for civil rights, environmental protections, and more, they begin by gathering around the table to talk and plan. These dishes foster community and provide sustenance for the mind and soul, including a dozen of the healthy, affordable recipes Turshen is known for, plus over 15 more recipes from a diverse range of celebrated chefs. With stimulating lists, extensive resources, and essays from activists in the worlds of food, politics, and social causes, Feed the Resistance is a must have handbook for anyone hoping to make a difference.

All or Nothing: One Chef's Appetite for the Extreme


Jesse Schenker - 2014
    An Iron Chef winner and a James Beard nominee, he was voted Best New Chef by New York magazine, and his acclaimed Recette was named Best New Restaurant by the New York Times. Manhattan magazine has called him "a boy wonder . . . young, hungry, and talented," while Zagat has hailed him as a "wunderkind." But Jesse's epic rise masks a little-known past filled with demons and obsession, genius and mania."For as long as I can remember, I've had this unquenchable thirst to keep moving, going, and doing. I've never felt comfortable in my own skin and have always needed an outlet for that uneasiness." Jesse first found that outlet in the South Florida kitchens where he showed great promise as a teenager, but it was in those same kitchens that he was introduced to the world of hard drugs. He was fourteen when he first got arrested and seventeen when he became physically addicted to Oxycontin. Becoming a high school dropout addicted to heroin and crack, alienated from his family and wanted by the cops, by the age of twenty-one Jesse had overdosed and nearly been beaten to death while robbing, cheating, and lying to everyone in his life.After getting arrested and going to jail, Jesse got clean and slowly put back together the pieces of his fractured life, ultimately channeling the same energy that had earlier fueled his addiction into making a name for himself in the fast-paced, competitive New York restaurant scene. In this startling and down-to-earth memoir, he lays it all on the table for the first time, coming clean about his insatiable appetite for the extreme—which has led to his biggest triumphs and failures—and shares the shocking story of his turbulent life. All or Nothing is a candid exploration of the manic culture of some of the world's most celebrated kitchens. A drug-fueled, anxiety-ridden epic, it reads like a rollicking rock-and-roll memoir—with amazing food.

Blue Plate Special: An Autobiography of My Appetites


Kate Christensen - 2013
    Readers of memoirs of high literary quality, particularly those with food themes—most conspicuously Ruth Reichl's Comfort Me with Apples and Gabrielle Hamilton's Blood, Bones, and Butter—as well as admirers of M. F. K. Fisher and Laurie Colwin will be a large and eager audience.This memoir derives from Kate's popular foodcentric blog (http://katechristensen.wordpress.com), in which she shares scenes from an unusual upbringing and an unusually happy present-day life, providing an audience for this book that is already primed. That it is written by Kate Christensen means it will be a delicious reading experience in every sense—a compulsively readable account of a knockabout life, full of sorrows and pleasures, many of the latter of the sensual, appetitive variety.

The Physiology of Taste: Or, Meditations on Transcendental Gastronomy


Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin - 1825
    Brillat-Savarin (1783-1833) made famous the aphorism, "Tell me what you eat, and I'll tell you who you are." He believed that food defines a nation.

The Table Comes First: Family, France, and the Meaning of Food


Adam Gopnik - 2011
    An illuminating, beguiling tour of the morals and manners of our present food manias, in search of eating's deeper truths, asking "Where do we go from here?"Never before have so many North Americans cared so much about food. But much of our attention to it tends towards grim calculation (what protein is best? how much?); social preening ("I can always score the last reservation at xxxxx"); or graphic machismo ("watch me eat this now"). Gopnik shows we are not the first food fetishists but we are losing sight of a timeless truth, "the table comes first": what goes on around the table matters as much to life as what we put on the table: families come together (or break apart) over the table, conversations across the simplest or grandest board can change the world, pain and romance unfold around it—all this is more essential to our lives than the provenance of any zucchini or the road it travelled to reach us. Whatever dilemmas we may face as omnivores, how not what we eat ultimately defines our society.Gathering people and places drawn from a quarter century's reporting in North America and France, The Table Comes First marks the beginning a new conversation about the way we eat now.

A Low Carbohydrate, Ketogenic Diet Manual: No Sugar, No Starch Diet


Eric C. Westman - 2013
    This manual describes the practical details of a low carbohydrate, ketogenic diet as used by nutritional and medical professionals.

Kitchen Yarns: Notes on Life, Love, and Food


Ann Hood - 2018
    In Kitchen Yarns, pairing her signature humor and tenderness with simple, comforting recipes, Hood spins tales of loss and starting from scratch, family love and feasts with friends, and how the perfect meal is one that tastes like home.

something to food about: Exploring Creativity with Innovative Chefs


Ahmir Questlove Thompson - 2016
    What unites all of his work is a profound interest in creativity. In somethingtofoodabout, Questlove applies his boundless curiosity to the world of food. In conversations with ten innovative chefs in America, he explores what makes their creativity tick, how they see the world through their cooking and how their cooking teaches them to see the world. The conversations begin with food but they end wherever food takes them. Food is fuel. Food is culture. Food is history. And food is food for thought.From the Hardcover edition.

Kevin Kling's Holiday Inn


Kevin Kling - 2009
    Celebrate all the holidays–and then some–with renowned storyteller Kevin Kling, whose sense of the ridiculous never gets in the way of his appreciation for human nature.

Eat, Memory: Great Writers at the Table: A Collection of Essays from the New York Times


Amanda Hesser - 2008
    Eat, Memory collects the twenty-six best stories and recipes to accompany them.Ann Patchett confronts her stubbornness in a heated argument she once had with her then-boyfriend, now husband, over dinner at the famed Paris restaurant Taillevent. Tom Perrotta explains how his long list of food aversions almost landed him in an East German prison. Gabrielle Hamilton finds that hiring a blind cook leads her into ethical terrain she wasn't prepared to navigate. And poet Billy Collins muses over his relationship with a fish he once ate.Also included are stories by Chang-rae Lee, Patricia Marx, John Burnham Schwartz, George Saunders, Colson Whitehead, Kiran Desai, Pico Iyer, and Heidi Julavits, among others.

Honey and Dust: Travels in Search of Sweetness


Piers Moore Ede - 2005
    There he met beekeeper Gunter, who showed him the wonders and magic of the beehive. Back in England, Piers decided upon a quest to seek the most wondrous honeys in the world.

In Winter's Kitchen


Beth Dooley - 2015
    But calls for a “food revolution” come most often from a region where the temperature rarely varies more than a few degrees. In the national conversation about developing a sustainable and equitable food tradition, the huge portion of our population who live where the soil freezes hard for months of the year feel like they're left out in the cold.In Winter’s Kitchen reveals how a food movement with deep roots in the Heartland—our first food co-ops, most productive farmland, and the most storied agricultural scientists hail from the region—isn't only thriving, it's presenting solutions that could feed a country, rather than just a smattering of neighborhoods and restaurants. Using the story of one thanksgiving meal, Dooley discovers that a locally-sourced winter diet is more than a possibility: it can be delicious.