On Food and Cooking is not a cookbook. It’s a science book that explains ingredients and their behaviours—information that allows readers to work without cookbooks. The fifteen chapters cover everything from the coevolution of dairy cows and modern man to how to regulate the ratio of water to coffee in espresso. In today’s kitchens, that kind of knowledge has surpassed the “useful” mark and moved on to “crucial.”

The 2004 revision of McGee’s classic kitchen tome was as ahead of its time as the original 1984 edition (which pre-dated extra-virgin olive oil in American cuisine). In his introduction, the exuberant and inquisitive food scholar explains that “a lot has changed in twenty years! It turned out that On Food and Cooking was riding a rising wave of general interest in food, a wave that grew and grew and knocked down the barriers between science and cooking.” McGee suggests that he’s merely observing the water as it washes onto the beach—really, he’s Poseidon, God of the Sea.

The New York Times’ Dining & Wine section now relies on the author to discuss topics like innovations in bread baking and the toxicity of absinthe in his new “Curious Cook” column, and McGee has recently refashioned himself as a food blogger.

This newfound public awareness about responsible eating has largely been made possible by a new crop of books on the ethics and implications of the modern diet. Marion Nestle’s nutrition book What To Eat can be found on many sophisticated eaters’ coffee tables. Michael Singer and Jim Mason’s criticisms of the commercial food industry in The Way We Eat: Why Our Food Choices Matter are turning more and more people onto veganism. And the erudite journalist Michael Pollan’s The Onnivore’s Dilemma has brought the debate on processed food into the limelight. Of course, Nestle, Singer, Mason, and Pollan aren’t the first authors to question our eating habits — they just timed their books incredibly well. In 1994, microbiology professor Richard Lacey tackled the same subject in a book called Hard to Swallow: A Brief History of Food. His study is divided into six sections (”Farming,” “Food processing,” “Composition of food,” “Getting ready to eat,” “The ideal diet,” and “Is there a solution?”), which are still on track with our concerns and preoccupations about food today. “The central purpose of each chapter is to tell you about different aspects of what has come to be called the food chain,” Lacey writes in his preface. “This is an appropriate phrase,” he continues, “as it suggests the possibility of a few weak links…”

His discussion of the perils of salmon farms (then just a few pilot projects in the North Atlantic, now as commonplace as tuna canneries) shows how prophetic his analysis was. The book’s only shortcoming is that it’s a bit dry — at the time, the topic was far from trendy. But even with all of the other texts available today, Hard to Swallow is worth a read, to remind us of the progress we have already made. “Another purpose of the book is that it will stimulate you to question in the future what exactly you are eating,” writes Lacey. The future is now, and we are doing exactly that. ]]> http://paperpalate.net/2006/10/31/easier-to-swallow/feed/ http://paperpalate.net/2006/10/14/food_writing_as_travel_writing/ http://paperpalate.net/2006/10/14/food_writing_as_travel_writing/#comments Sat, 14 Oct 2006 07:31:05 +0000 Emily Stone Uncategorized On the heels of The 150 Best American Recipes (reviewed here), The Best American Travel Writing 2006 comes out this month. The collection, edited by Tim Cahill, is written by an intimidating band of bourgeois philosophers (Alain de Botton), essay-writing New Yorkers (Ian Frazier), persuasive satirical fiction writers moonlighting as investigative journalists (George Saunders), beloved expat humorists (David Sedaris), and several others.

The book opens with a touching piece called “A Shared Plate” from Gourmet by Bengali food writer Chitrita Banerji. Her essay is part chronicle of a traditional wedding ceremony in Calcutta and part tribute to her parents’ marriage. “That daily tableau of the table, I now saw, was neither duty nor obligation–” she writes, “it was love.” Through their own experiences, many of her fellow travelers in this anthology no doubt found the same thing.

The 150 Best American Recipes is a cornucopia of glossy pages, artfully styled photographs, and faultless recipes that were painstakingly tested in the home kitchens of the book’s two James Beard Award-winning editors. The Best American team shelled out for a fancy presentation, but this is hardly an elitist publication. McCullough and Stevens culled recipes from websites like The Food Maven and free flyers like the Whole Foods Holiday Entertaining Guide, as well as high-profile cookbooks like Suzanne Goin’s Sunday Suppers at Lucques and major magazines like Bon Appetit and Gourmet. I was delighted to see caterer Mindy Heiferling, a long-time family friend, featured for her “Amazing Five-Hour Roast Duck.” Other readers will surely find great satisfaction with Alice Waters’s coleslaw, Mark Bittman’s Spanish-style shrimp, or some of the dozens of additional recipes from the “undiscovered cooks” touted on the book’s cover.

The laudable recipe collection Digital Dish has a narrower focus: only recipes published on food blogs are included. Publisher and Editor Linderholm selected the passionate online ramblings of twenty-four bloggers, including the writers of Accidental Hedonist, Il Forno, Meathenge, and Spiceblog. The book’s back cover boldly displays the statement, “Once the best food writing and recipes were in cookbooks and magazines. Not anymore.” Considering the inclusiveness of mainstream publications like The 150 Best American Recipes, the us-against-them attitude may be unnecessary. Still, food blogs are a medium unto themselves, and Digital Dish marvelously captures their confidently casual character. The book takes a linear approach, following stand-out blog posts from the summer of 2003 until the summer of 2004. Recipes ranging from Gumbo du Monde to Scotch Fillet in a Blue Cheese and Beer Marinade to Grapefruit Marmalade show the breadth of the featured bloggers, but each post has in common a refreshingly personal relationship between writer and reader.

In her touching introduction to The World Is a Kitchen, Susan Brady (a food blogger herself) explains that when she was hired by Travelers’ Tales fourteen years ago, she had hardly traveled at all. As an editor during those early days at the publishing company, she relied on exotic recipes to understand foreign cultures. Since then, Brady’s culinary and editorial endeavors have taken her everywhere from New Orleans to Taipei, and her coeditor, Michele Anna Jordan, is a whirlwind who developed a love for rare prime rib on the California Zephyr, led her family to San Francisco to taste Dungeness crab as a small child, and learned very early on how to make authentic chapattis in India. Together, Brady, Jordan, and thirty-six other food writers (from first time authors to heavy-weights like Gourmet’s Kemp Minifie) have created a culinary atlas that reveals the indigenous plants of Mexico, the all-powerful spices of India, and the other-worldly shellfish of Australia. The entries in The World Is a Kitchen are presented as essays (some with accompanying recipes, some without), making the book a wonderful literary supplement to The 150 Best American Recipes and Digital Dish. The final chapter, outlining cooking schools and culinary tours, sends readers to look for more world-class meals on their own.

The original Moosewood Cookbook, however, was not authored by the collective but by a sole founding member, Mollie Katzen. Katzen has gone on to be incredibly enterprising, selling millions of cookbooks, hosting four different cooking shows, and now partnering with Harvard University on a lofty new program for students called the “Food Literacy Initiative.” That first edition of The Moosewood Cookbook, published just four years into the famous restaurant’s life story in 1977, is gospel for many vegetarians (from many generations). But too many meat-eaters have been unfairly skeptical of the Moosewood doctrine. “Yet this is not an exclusive message for vegetarians!” declares Katzen in the introduction to one of her books, The New Enchanted Broccoli Forest. “What I find from traveling around the country, listening and talking to many people about food–as well as from the mail I receive–is that an ever-increasing number of people who don’t identify themselves at all as vegetarian are interested in eating less meat.” That statement is even more true now than it was when Katzen wrote The New Enchanted Broccoli Forest in 2000 (not to mention the old Enchanted Broccoli Forest, in 1982).

I know that I had been dismissive of vegetarian cooking for too long. I finally decided that I needed a book to show me how to broaden my use of fresh vegetables, as well as spectacularly versatile ingredients like beans, grains, tofu, and eggs. Anything Moosewood-related would have done the job, and it happened that my library had Katzen’s most recent ode to the broccoli forest on display with a collection of “Notable Nonfiction” titles. Enchanted Broccoli is indeed a notable piece of writing: it’s charmingly conversational, peppered with clever insights such as “greens should be dressed only at the very last minute. Otherwise, sogginess.” It’s also a remarkable achievement from a bookmaking perspective alone: Katzen is known for doing all of her own illustrations, and this recipe collection is entirely hand-written (a process from which the author has retired). Katzen is quite remarkable for adapting very specific ethnic recipes to her purposes while keeping them authentic. I’ll be cooking her avocado enchiladas, spinach kugel, and cheddar spoonbread very soon.

Allergy: The History of a Modern Malady, a new book by Mark Jackson (a professor of the history of medicine in England), offers academic insight into a set of common medical conditions that were not widely recognized until the late nineteenth century and not fully understood until well into the twentieth. Though written for a general audience, this is a dense book, riddled with scientific language and punctuated with foot notes. And those who persevere through each of the seven chapters may be disappointed to find that food allergies, sensitivities, and intolerance are given only cursory attention in what turns out be largely a socioeconomic analysis of the history of hay fever. The author frequently explains that hay fever, asthma, and food and drug allergies have “a common pathology, a common epidemiology, and a common history,” but he pays less attention to the alarming increase in deadly peanut allergies in today’s children than he does to the life and death (an odd joint suicide with his wife) of the Austrian pediatrician Clemens von Pirquet who originated the term “allergy” in 1906.

After galloping through the pollen-filled pages of Allergy, some readers may find themselves hungry for more detailed information on the diagnosis, treatment, and management of food allergies. The Food Allergy & Anaphylaxis Network in the US, the British Institute for Allergy and Environmental Therapy in the UK, and the Allergy Unit at the Royal Price Albert Hospital in Australia are all good places to start.

Two of the books I kept were originally given to me by a Boston food writer. They are a matched set: Cooks’ Tools by Susan Campbell and Cooks’ Ingredients by Philip Dowell and Adrian Bailey, both published by William Morrow and Company in 1980. Newer editions are available (in fact, there have been several intermittent printings), but something about the stodgy design and slightly dated language of these encyclopedic reference books seems appropriate. When I take down one of the hardcover volumes with crumbling dust jackets and starchy pages from the shelf above my stove, I feel like a world-class scholar conducting critical archival research.

Cooks’ Tools seems most like a textbook. British author Campbell’s gives readers a stern, straight-forward lesson on when to use various devices (ranging from specialized forks for thinly slicing onions to traditional Spanish molinillos for whisking hot chocolate), and when not to use them (she explains that the best chefs rely on carefully-learned skills not expensive gadgets). The first chapter focuses on the cook’s most important tool–the hands–and the most substantial entries (totaling forty-six pages) are on knives, including poultry carvers, clam shuckers, and Chinese cleavers. In her prophetic opening lines, Campbell writes that “although cook books are to be found in almost too much abundance, there are very few books devoted solely to the tools and techniques of this art.” She did an excellent job in compiling just such a book and made a wise choice in refraining from endorsing specific brands (which would have rendered this book useless two and a half decades later) in favor of providing readers with enough knowledge to effectively choose the best tools for themselves.

Cooks’ Ingredients is the larger of the two books, but its presentation is more that of a photo album than an academic tome. More than half the pages are dedicated to full-color photographs (of fresh nasturtiums, dried cardamom pods, ducks’ eggs, and prickly pears), followed by detailed descriptions in the book’s closing chapters. In her introduction, Nika Hazelton also notes that “cookbooks now proliferate like rabbits,” but goes on to explain that “I have seldom found one that satisfies my curiosity about the ingredients.” Of course, there are now numerous reference books on the subject of understanding ingredients (several more specific and perhaps more accurate), and the internet has made researching exotic food items far less of a chore. Still, I have seldom found a kitchen resource that makes such ingenuous use of photographs printed to scale–everyone needs an occasional reminder of how long a vanilla bean should be and how dill seeds and fennel seeds compare.

Both of these books predate culinary advances such as silicone baking equipment and the popularization of kiwi fruits in American supermarkets. But they also predate the celebrity chefs and their insidious campaigns to market their own overpriced cookbooks, spice rubs and pasta pots. Cooks’ Tools and Cooks’ Ingredients offer an entirely objective view of a well-stocked (if slightly dated) kitchen.

Bill Granger, Kylie Kwong, and Melbourne locals Allan Campion and Michele Curtis are among the Aussie chefs whose appetizing tomes line the Cook Book Kitchen’s walls. There’s also a shelf full of kitchen reference books, and diners are welcome to browse the collection over breakfast or lunch. But given the resources available, the menu is disappointingly bland — is it really necessary to attribute a toasted cheese and tomato sandwich to Jamie Oliver? Of course, in light of the current controversy over recipe copyrights in the restaurant world, this cafe may be wise to give credit where it’s due.

The Cookbook Kitchen
116 Union Road
Surrey Hills (Melbourne, Australia)
(04) 9888-4046
Mon-Sat 8am-4pm

But what exactly is Slow Food? In his introduction to the book, Slow Food: Collected Thoughts on Taste, Tradition, and the Honest Pleasures of Food, the twenty-five-year-old movement’s founder Carlo Petrini writes that “the cultural goals of the international Slow Food movement are: to defeat all forms of chauvinism, to re-appropriate diversity, and to indulge in a healthy dose of cultural relativism.” That’s a difficult bill for human rights activists to fill, let alone cafe owners and supermarket shoppers. Slow Food is one of those multidimensional, multidisciplinary concepts that’s incredibly inspiring until the ideological riff you’re riding starts to disappear into itself like a snake (or, in this case, a snail) swallowing its own tail. Some people consider the ethics of Slow Food to be the epitome of rustic, while others dismiss the whole thing as elitist. It can be hard for potential Slow Food supporters to know which way to look. One way to learn more about the school of thought (which is equal parts academic and culinary) is to hit the books. In addition to the collection of essays mentioned above, there are several authoritative texts on the subject. Consider picking up Slow Food: The Case for Taste, also by Petrini with a forward by Alice Waters of Berkeley’s Chez Panisse. For an exploration of the concept of “Slow” as it applies not only to food but to several other aspects of daily life, pick up In Praise of Slowness: How A Worldwide Moviement is Challenging the Cult of Speed by Carl Honore.

For further information on Slow Food events, the original Slow Food website (based in Italy) and its Slow Food USA counterpart are excellent resources. Australia’s Taste of Slow festival begins in Melbourne on August 28th.

I grew into an everyday cook a couple of years ago when I lived in the historic Central American town of Antigua, Guatemala. The abundance of locally-grown avocados, chiles, mangos, pineapples, and other produce�together with my unstructured schedule as an expatriate living in Latin America�threw me into the kitchen for hours each day. And, in the absence of a phone book full of ethnic restaurants and supermarkets stocked with gourmet meals, I was determined to create for myself everything that I loved to eat. These days, I try to travel everywhere with a block of Scharffen Berger 70%-cacao chocolate, but otherwise I rely on locally-produced and freshly-grown ingredients.

My writing on travel, food, and the world at large has appeared in Travel + Leisure, Premiere, Time Out New York, and other magazines. I also chronicle my adventures as a chocolate enthusiast on my blog, Chocolate in Context.