Book picks similar to
Best Food Writing 2015 by Holly Hughes
food
nonfiction
non-fiction
essays
BraveTart: Iconic American Desserts
Stella Parks - 2017
Whether down-home delights like Blueberry Muffins and Glossy Fudge Brownies or supermarket mainstays such as Vanilla Wafers and Chocolate Chip Cookie Dough Ice Cream, your favorites are all here. These meticulously tested recipes bring an award-winning pastry chef’s expertise into your kitchen, along with advice on how to “mix it up” with over 200 customizable variations—in short, exactly what you’d expect from a cookbook penned by a senior editor at Serious Eats. Yet BraveTart is much more than a cookbook, as Stella Parks delves into the surprising stories of how our favorite desserts came to be, from chocolate chip cookies that predate the Tollhouse Inn to the prohibition-era origins of ice cream sodas and floats. With a foreword by The Food Lab’s J. Kenji López-Alt, vintage advertisements for these historical desserts, and breathtaking photography from Penny De Los Santos, BraveTart is sure to become an American classic.
Her Fork in the Road: Women Celebrate Food and Travel
Lisa S. Bach - 2001
This savory sampling of stories — by some of the best writers in and out of the food and travel fields — journeys to the heart of these age-old relationships, taking readers from the familiar kitchens of contemporary America to the far reaches of the globe. In France, an over-enthusiastic waitress serves M. F. K. Fisher the lunch of a lifetime to sustain her on a walk to Avallon. In Tunisia, Ruth Reichl dines at the home of a local, where the meal is eaten with the hands and a dash of sensuality. And in Fiji, where the women are big and beautiful and walk like royalty, Laurie Gough encounters food as a grand and constant celebration. The lively, literate tone of Her Fork in the Road makes it both an enduring read and an ideal companion for the kitchen or the road.
The Language of Baklava: A Memoir
Diana Abu-Jaber - 2005
Diana Abu-Jaber weaves the story of her life in upstate New York and in Jordan around vividly remembered meals: everything from Lake Ontario shish kabob cookouts with her Arab-American cousins to goat stew feasts under a Bedouin tent in the desert. These sensuously evoked meals, in turn, illuminate the two cultures of Diana's childhood—American and Jordanian—and the richness and difficulty of straddling both. They also bring her wonderfully eccentric family to life, most memorably her imperious American grandmother and her impractical, hotheaded, displaced immigrant father, who, like many an immigrant before him, cooked to remember the place he came from and to pass that connection on to his children.As she does in her fiction, Diana draws us in with her exquisite insight and compassion, and with her amazing talent for describing food and the myriad pleasures and adventures associated with cooking and eating. Each chapter contains mouthwatering recipes for many of the dishes described, from her Middle Eastern grandmother's Mad Genius Knaffea to her American grandmother's Easy Roast Beef, to her aunt Aya's Poetic Baklava. The Language of Baklava gives us the chance not only to grow up alongside Diana, but also to share meals with her every step of the way—unforgettable feasts that teach her, and us, as much about identity, love, and family as they do about food.
Always Home: A Daughter's Recipes & Stories
Fanny Singer - 2020
Across dozens of vignettes with accompanying recipes, she shares the story of her own culinary coming of age and reveals a side of her legendary mother that has never been seen before. A charming, smart translation of Alice Waters's ideals and attitudes about food for a new generation, Always Home is a loving, often funny, unsentimental, and exquisitely written look at a life defined in so many ways by food, as well as the bond between mother and daughter.
French Kids Eat Everything: How Our Family Moved to France, Cured Picky Eating, Banned Snacking, and Discovered 10 Simple Rules for Raising Happy, Healthy Eaters
Karen Le Billon - 2012
But she didn't expect to be lectured for slipping her fussing toddler a snack, or to be forbidden from packing her older daughter a school lunch. Karen is intrigued by the fact that French children happily eat everything—from beets to broccoli, from salad to spinach—while French obesity rates are a fraction of what they are in North America.Karen soon begins to see the wisdom in the "food rules" that the French use to foster healthy eating habits and good manners in babies and children. Some of the rules call into question both our eating habits and our parenting styles. Other rules evoke commonsense habits that we used to share but have somehow forgotten. Taken together, the rules suggest that we need to dramatically rethink the way we feed children, at home and at school.Combining personal anecdotes with practical tips and appetizing recipes—including Zucchini and Spinach Puree and Bouillabaisse (Fish Soup) for Babies—French Kids Eat Everything is a humorous, provocative look at families, food, and children that is filled with inspiration and advice that every parent can use.
My Place at the Table: A Recipe for a Delicious Life in Paris
Alexander Lobrano - 2021
An interview with the owner of a renowned cheese shop for his first article nearly proves a disaster because he speaks no French. As he goes on to cover celebrities and couturiers and improves his mastery of the language, he gradually learns what it means to be truly French. He attends a cocktail party with Yves St. Laurent and has dinner with Giorgio Armani. Over a superb lunch, it’s his landlady who ultimately provides him with a lasting touchstone for how to judge food: “you must understand the intentions of the cook.” At the city’s brasseries and bistros, he discovers real French cooking. Through a series of vivid encounters with culinary figures from Paul Bocuse to Julia Child to Ruth Reichl, Lobrano hones his palate and finds his voice. Soon the timid boy from Connecticut is at the epicenter of the Parisian dining revolution and the restaurant critic of one of the largest newspapers in France. A mouthwatering testament to the healing power of food, My Place at the Table is a moving coming-of-age story of how a gay man emerges from a wounding childhood, discovers himself, and finds love. Published here for the first time is Lobrano’s “little black book,” an insider’s guide to his thirty all-time-favorite Paris restaurants.
The Devil in the Kitchen: Sex, Pain, Madness and the Making of a Great Chef
Marco Pierre White - 2006
In the UK, White's brilliant cooking and high-wattage antics have made him a legend: the first British chef (and the youngest chef anywhere) to win three Michelin stars, a chain-smoking, pot-throwing, multiply married culinary genius whose fierce devotion to food and restaurants has been the only constant in a life of tabloid-ready turmoil. In The Devil in the Kitchen, he tells the story of his life in food, spanning his apprenticeship with Albert and Michel Roux, his wild years in the bacchanal of 1980s Chelsea, his ferocious pursuit of the highest Michelin rating, and his "retirement career" as a hugely successful restaurateur. With cameos from the likes of Michael Caine, Madonna, and Damien Hirst, The Devil in the Kitchen leaves no dish unserved, relating the backroom antics, the blood feuds, and the passion for great food that have driven London's greatest restaurants for decades.
Taste: The Story of Britain Through Its Cooking
Kate Colquhoun - 2007
It encompasses royal feasts and street food, the skinning of eels and the making of strawberry jelly, mixing tales of culinary stars with those of the invisible hordes cooking in kitchens across the land. Beginning before Roman times, the book journeys through the ingredients, equipment, kitchens, feasts, fads, and famines of the British. It covers the piquancy of Norman cuisine, the influx of undreamed-of spices and new foods from the East and the New World, the Tudor pumpkin pie that journeyed with the founding fathers to become America's national dish, the austerity of rationing during World War II, and the birth of convenience foods and take-away, right up to the age of Nigella Lawson, Heston Blumenthal, and Jamie Oliver. The first trade book to tell the story of British cooking-which is, of course, the history that led up to American colonial cooking as well-Taste shows that kitchens are not only places of steam, oil, and sweat, but of politics, invention, cultural exchange, commerce, conflict, and play.
Yes, Chef
Marcus Samuelsson - 2012
The grandmother is Swedish, a retired domestic. The boy is Ethiopian and adopted, and he will grow up to become the world-renowned chef Marcus Samuelsson. This book is his love letter to food and family in all its manifestations. Marcus Samuelsson was only three years old when he, his mother, and his sister—all battling tuberculosis—walked seventy-five miles to a hospital in the Ethiopian capital city of Addis Adaba. Tragically, his mother succumbed to the disease shortly after she arrived, but Marcus and his sister recovered, and one year later they were welcomed into a loving middle-class white family in Göteborg, Sweden. It was there that Marcus’s new grandmother, Helga, sparked in him a lifelong passion for food and cooking with her pan-fried herring, her freshly baked bread, and her signature roast chicken. From a very early age, there was little question what Marcus was going to be when he grew up.Yes, Chef chronicles Marcus Samuelsson’s remarkable journey from Helga’s humble kitchen to some of the most demanding and cutthroat restaurants in Switzerland and France, from his grueling stints on cruise ships to his arrival in New York City, where his outsize talent and ambition finally come together at Aquavit, earning him a coveted New York Times three-star rating at the age of twenty-four. But Samuelsson’s career of “chasing flavors,” as he calls it, had only just begun—in the intervening years, there have been White House state dinners, career crises, reality show triumphs and, most important, the opening of the beloved Red Rooster in Harlem. At Red Rooster, Samuelsson has fufilled his dream of creating a truly diverse, multiracial dining room—a place where presidents and prime ministers rub elbows with jazz musicians, aspiring artists, bus drivers, and nurses. It is a place where an orphan from Ethiopia, raised in Sweden, living in America, can feel at home. With disarming honesty and intimacy, Samuelsson also opens up about his failures—the price of ambition, in human terms—and recounts his emotional journey, as a grown man, to meet the father he never knew. Yes, Chef is a tale of personal discovery, unshakable determination, and the passionate, playful pursuit of flavors—one man’s struggle to find a place for himself in the kitchen, and in the world.
100 Cookies: The Baking Book for Every Kitchen, with Classic Cookies, Novel Treats, Brownies, Bars, and More
Sarah Kieffer - 2020
Nominated for a 2020 Goodreads Choice Award for Best CookbooksFrom celebrated blogger Sarah Kieffer of The Vanilla Bean Baking Blog!100 Cookies is a go-to baking book featuring 100 recipes for cookies and bars, organized into seven chapters.Chocolatey, fruity, crispy, chewy, classic, inventive—there's a foolproof recipe for the perfect treat for everyone in this cookie recipe book.• Introduces innovative baking techniques• Includes an entire chapter dedicated to Kieffer's "pan banging" technique that ensures crisp edges and soft centers for the most delicious cookies• Nearly every cookie dough recipe is accompanied by a photograph.Dessert recipes range from the Classic Chocolate Chip made three different ways, to bars, brownies, and blondies that reflect a wide range of flavors and global inspiration.This is the comprehensive-yet-charming cookbook every cookie lover (or those who love to bake cookies) needs.• Highly giftable with a textured case and a ribbon marker• Recipes include Marshmallow Peanut Butter Brownies, Olive Oil Sugar Cookies with Blood Orange Glaze, Red Wine Cherry Cheesecake Swirl Bars, and Pan-Banging Ginger Molasses, S'mores Cookies, Snickerdoodles, and more• A great pick for the home baker in search of a new bake sale recipe or someone who just loves cookies, as well as fans of Sarah Kieffer's blog and Instagram• Add it to the shelf with cookbooks like Sally's Cookie Addiction by Sally McKenney; Dorie's Cookies by Dorie Greenspan; and The Perfect Cookie: Your Ultimate Guide to Foolproof Cookies, Brownies & Bars by America's Test Kitchen
Extra Virginity: The Sublime and Scandalous World of Olive Oil
Tom Mueller - 2011
Today's researchers are continuing to confirm the remarkable, life-giving properties of true extra-virgin, and "extra-virgin Italian" has become the highest standard of quality.But what if this symbol of purity has become deeply corrupt? Starting with an explosive article in The New Yorker, Tom Mueller has become the world's expert on olive oil and olive oil fraud-a story of globalization, deception, and crime in the food industry from ancient times to the present, and a powerful indictment of today's lax protections against fake and even toxic food products in the United States. A rich and deliciously readable narrative, Extra Virginity is also an inspiring account of the artisanal producers, chemical analysts, chefs, and food activists who are defending the extraordinary oils that truly deserve the name "extra-virgin."
Good and Cheap: Eat Well on $4/Day
Leanne Brown - 2011
government’s Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program informally known as food stamps? The answer is surprisingly well: Broiled Tilapia with Lime, Spicy Pulled Pork, Green Chile and Cheddar Quesadillas, Vegetable Jambalaya, Beet and Chickpea Salad—even desserts like Coconut Chocolate Cookies and Peach Coffee Cake. In addition to creating nutritious recipes that maximize every ingredient and use economical cooking methods, Ms. Brown gives tips on shopping; on creating pantry basics; on mastering certain staples—pizza dough, flour tortillas—and saucy extras that make everything taste better, like spice oil and tzatziki; and how to make fundamentally smart, healthful food choices.Download a free PDF copy at http://www.leannebrown.ca/cookbooks
I Like You: Hospitality Under the Influence
Amy Sedaris - 2006
Take a cue from entertaining expert Amy Sedaris and host an unforgettable fete that will have your guests raving. No matter the style or size of the gathering-from the straightforward to the bizarre-I Like You provides jackpot recipes and solid advice laced with Amy's blisteringly funny take on entertaining, plus four-color photos and enlightening sidebars on everything it takes to pull off a party with extraordinary flair. You don't even need to be a host or hostess to benefit-Amy offers tips for guests, too! (Number one: don't be fifteen minutes early.) Readers will discover unique dishes to serve alcoholics (Broiled Frozen Chicken Wings with Applesauce), the secret to a successful children's party (a half-hour time limit, games included), plus a whole appendix chock-full of arts and crafts ideas (from a mini-pantyhose plant-hanger to a do-it-yourself calf stretcher), and much, much more!
The Flavour Thesaurus: Pairings, Recipes and Ideas for the Creative Cook
Niki Segnit - 2010
"Following the instructions in a recipe is like parroting pre-formed sentences from a phrasebook. Forming an understanding of how flavors work together, on the other hand, is like learning the language: it allows you to express yourself freely, to improvise, to cook a dish the way you want to cook it.""The Flavor Thesaurus "is the inquisitive cook's guide to acquiring that understanding--to learning the language of flavor.Breaking the vast universe of ingredients down to 99 essential flavors, Segnit suggests classic and less well-known pairings for each, grouping almost 1,000 entries into flavor families like "Green & Grassy," "Berry & Bush" and "Creamy Fruity." But "The Flavor Thesaurus" is much more than just a reference book, seasoning the mix of culinary science, culture and expert knowledge with the author's own insights and opinions, all presented in her witty, engaging and highly readable style. As appealing to the novice cook as to the experienced professional, "The Flavor Thesaurus "will not only immeasurably improve your cooking--it's the sort of book that might keep you up at night reading.""Cooking is an art, like writing or painting, and great cooks are artists. And although the ultimate source of creativity remains elusive, all painters have their color wheel, all writers their vocabulary. And now, in the form of this beautiful, entertaining and exhaustively researched book, cooks have their own collection of essential knowledge: "The Flavor Thesaurus."
You and I Eat the Same: On the Countless Ways Food and Cooking Connect Us to One Another
Chris Ying - 2018
In nineteen thoughtful and engaging essays and stories, You and I Eat the Same explores the ways in which cooking and eating connect us across cultural and political borders, making the case that we should think about cuisine as a collective human effort in which we all benefit from the movement of people, ingredients, and ideas. An awful lot of attention is paid to the differences and distinctions between us, especially when it comes to food. But the truth is that food is that rare thing that connects all people, slipping past real and imaginary barriers to unify humanity through deliciousness. Don’t believe it? Read on to discover more about the subtle (and not so subtle) bonds created by the ways we eat. Everybody Wraps Meat in Flatbread: From tacos to dosas to pancakes, bundling meat in an edible wrapper is a global practice. Much Depends on How You Hold Your Fork: A visit with cultural historian Margaret Visser reveals that there are more similarities between cannibalism and haute cuisine than you might think. Fried Chicken Is Common Ground: We all share the pleasure of eating crunchy fried birds. Shouldn’t we share the implications as well? If It Does Well Here, It Belongs Here: Chef René Redzepi champions the culinary value of leaving your comfort zone. There Is No Such Thing as a Nonethnic Restaurant: Exploring the American fascination with “ethnic” restaurants (and whether a nonethnic cuisine even exists). Coffee Saves Lives: Arthur Karuletwa recounts the remarkable path he took from Rwanda to Seattle and back again.