One of the cool things about writing a book about a particular food item is that, whether you consider yourself to be or not, other people will look to you as an expert on that topic, and will heap free samples upon you in the hope that you will write about them. I met author Steve Almond as he was being gifted with container after container of free organic cotton candy. Despite his polite insistence that he couldn’t possibly carry six tubs of cotton candy home on a plane, the manufacturer wanted him to try every flavor.

Almond was in Toronto this past spring to give what he thought was a reading at the unfortunately named Canadian Sweets Expo (www.sweetsexpo.ca). Badly promoted and equally poorly organized, what was meant to be on par with the big candy shows in the US turned out to be a sad collection of local vendors of mostly waxy chocolate, oddly flavored jellybeans and some crazy chocolate-flavored energy balls that made me extremely ill. Also present were a few Canadian Food Network celebrities, a face-painter (for the kids) and a circus troupe. Not exactly the type of forum where a well-known author and creative writing professor is going to be known for his non-fiction work on rare US candy bars.

Which is too bad, because CandyFreak is a sugar-laced tour of the rare, the wonderful and the delicious. It’s Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, minus Johnny Depp. A self-defined candy freak, Almond traveled far and wide to learn the story of some rare and wondrous local favorites. From the southern icon the GooGoo Cluster, to the darling of Boise, the Idaho Spud (which yours truly has never tried but desperately wants to – readers in Idaho, help a poor Canadian gal out, won’t you?), Almond tours factories, talks to chocolatiers, and waxes poetic about enrobers.

Along the way, he shares his personal candy quirks: he dislikes maple, compares coconut to bits of torn-off hangnails (which made me look at both coconut and hangnails in a very different light), and interviews chocolate engineer Dave Bolton, who compares the taste of mainstream milk chocolate to baby vomit. As a chocolate snob myself, I’d have to agree with Bolton – I never really had the right words to describe that slightly sour tang most milk chocolate bars have, and now I do.

In fact, the chapter where Almond visits Dave Bolton at the Lake Champlain chocolate factory is the most food-porn worthy in the book. And given that much of Almond’s short fiction leans to the more, uh… graphic, his skill at describing some of the bars Bolton creates definitely left me desperate for a chocolate fix.

I suppose I was aware, in an abstract way, that there were men and women upon this earth who served in this capacity, as chocolate engineers. In the same way that I was aware there are job titles out there such as bacon taster and sex surrogate, which is to say, job titles that made me want to weep at my own appointed lot in life. But I had never considered the prospect of visiting a chocolate engineer. I could think of nothing else for days.

[…]

Dave himself was hunched over a counter, scrutinizing what looked like an overgrown Junior Mint. He looked up when we came in and, almost reflexively, held the piece out to me. The dark chocolate shell gave way to an intense burst of sweet chewy fruit. The texture was soft enough to yield to the teeth, yet firm enough to absorb the musky undertones of the chocolate.

“What you’re eating,” Dave said, “is a dried cherry, infused with raspberry and covered in a Select Origin 75 percent dark chocolate.” He held out the bag. “Have another.”

Here is what I wanted to say to Dave Bolton at that precise moment: Take me home and love me long time, GI.

Almond’s appearance at the Sweets Expo didn’t come close to showing off his candy knowledge or writing skills. In a sad audience of about forty people, only four of us had actually read his book, and his planned reading instead became a surreal quiz show in which precocious three-year-olds were pushed onstage by their parents to meet Steve and collect a free GooGoo cluster after giving incorrect answers to questions based on the book.

If you dig candy, you owe it to yourself to read CandyFreak. Almond is sharp, witty and insightful, and his descriptions will send you headed for the nearest candy counter to get your freak on.

One of the interesting aspects of food theory and food history – studying what people ate and why - is that there’s not a lot of evidence left behind. All we’ve really got to go by is what the scholars of the day thought to record, and depending on the particular biases of those scholars, what became “history” may or may not have been particularly accurate.

Which is what makes In the Devil’s Garden such a delightful romp. Author Stewart Allen Lee leads us through the Seven Deadly Sins, sorting our food myths and hang-ups into the various topical categories, complete with an appropriate menu for each one.

My favourite part has to be the first chapter and the origin of the apple as the forbidden fruit:

For years after my Christmas on Mount Athos I puzzled over the hermit’s comment that the naming of the apple as the forbidden fruit was a “lie of the Pope”. I knew, of course, that the Greek Orthodox Church and the Roman Catholic Church had been bitter enemies for almost a thousand years. So his remark could have just been a spurious attack on an old enemy. But another possible explanation could be found in the maps of pre-Christian Europe. The Old World at the time can be roughly divided into two groups. South of the Italian-Austrian border lived the Mediterranean race, a dark-complexioned people who, among other things, were lovers of the grape. Worshipers, really, because the vine provided their preferred intoxicant, wine, which was used as a mystical tipple by everyone from the pagan Dionysian cults to the modern Roman Catholic. North of this imaginary border lived a bunch of barbarians called the Celts. Since grapes did not thrive in their climate, they revered the apple. Instead of wine, their priests, the Druids, are believed to have used an alcoholic cider in their ceremonies. They even called their paradise Avalon, or Isle of the Apples, presumably with a cider press on the premises.

[…]

This description of Eve’s first insidious bite was written by the Roman poet Avitus around A.D. 470, near the height of the Celtic/Roman conflict. It could have been coincidence that the Romans used this particular moment to use the Celt’s sacred fruit to epitomize all evil knowledge.

Working his way through the Sins, Allen touches upon topics such as cannibalism, organ meat, the Irish potato famine, dirt eaters, kosher and halal meat and even the debate over breast milk and baby formula.

Like any good meal, however, the menu Allen serves up is best taken with a grain of salt. The book is laid out in the recent style of including endnotes with no references in the body of the text, so unless you go looking for them, his additional comments may be lost. Allen serves up as truth two common food myths that have been thoroughly debunked. First that Marie Antoinette said the famous “Let them eat cake!” line (she didn’t), and secondly, that Adolf Hitler was a vegetarian (he wasn’t). Given that Lee quotes common myths as fact, you’ve got to wonder how much else in the book is theory or conjecture.

Like the apple story, it’s one of those things that modern man will never truly know, but In the Devil’s Garden is still a great fun read for anyone interested in the origins of food. Allen is a sharp and entertaining writer and brings a personal element to many chapters as he makes reference to his well-traveled life. The story of the drunken healing Guinea Pig used to absorb Allen’s illness while in Peru is one of the best in the book.

I can happily recommend this as an enjoyable and interesting read – but one to serve as food for thought, and not the main course.

Sheryl is also the editor of the Well Fed blogs FitFare and Growers and Grocers, and is a contributor to the Toronto online food magazine, Gremolata. She also moderates the LiveJournal community Toronto Eats.

If the name Poppy Z. Brite rings a bell with you, then you might be a Goth, or at least a horror fan. Or, if you’re more familiar with Brite’s recent writings, you might just be a foodie.

In the late-nineties, Brite abandoned the vampires and demons of her earlier work in favor of stories about chefs and kitchens. Her novels, which once focused on the darker side of the city of New Orleans, now feature the tasty and delicious side of that city. Having worked in a variety of restaurants herself over the years to support her writing career, and being married a chef, Poppy Z. Brite has an insider’s point of view of the restaurant kitchen and is happy to share what she knows.

In Liquor, main characters chefs John Rickey and Gary (G-Man) Stubbs come up with an ingenious plan to open a restaurant called Liquor, where, in true New Orleans style, all the dishes include alcohol. Problem is, they’re flat broke and can’t afford to open the place themselves.

The book gets off to a slow start – it isn’t until about halfway through that the real excitement begins, at which point the plot takes some sharp turns and some odd coincidences occur to create a nice tension. It’s not until the end that we see Brite has been setting us up for the ending, and the slow beginning was actually imperative.

Throughout, Brite makes her love of good food well known. Almost every page is full of vivid descriptions of everything the main characters cook and eat. As Rickey and G-Man and their hand-picked staff get set for opening night, the reader is a fly on the wall as they test recipes and argue over ingredients; camembert ice cream, risotto with truffles, proscuitto-wrapped figs in Calvados and a rum beurre blanc will all have the reader drooling on the pages.

The day before opening and they were in the kitchen working out the last kinks. Tanker’s dessert menu was mostly brilliant: he’d taken classic cocktails and reconstructed them into sweets. There was the “Mint Julep,” a tuile cookie cup filled with chocolate-mint and chocolate bourbon mousses; the “Amaretto Sour,” lemon curd touched with di Saronno in an almond tart crust; the “Fuzzy Navel,” two perfect poached peach halves in a Grand Marnier sabayon sauce; the “Margarita,” orange and tequila-lime sorbets served in a sugar-edged martini glass garnished with a chocolate-dipped pretzel swizzle stick.

There were others and Tanker was just trying to narrow them down to five that could be served on opening night. But his concept for a big, expensive signature dessert hurt Rickey’s brain. Though he was calling it a Napoleon, it had nothing to do with puff pastry or cream. That would have made too much sense. Instead, he’d found an actual reproduction of Napoleon Bonaparte’s death mask and coated the inside with chocolate to make a mold which he proposed to fill with a frozen mousse of Napoleon brandy surrounding a scoop of the terrifying Camembert ice cream.

“C’mon, Rickey. It’s no more extravagant than a whole Baked Alaska. They do those at Antoine’s and charge a fortune for them.”

“Yeah, but people actually want to eat Baked Alaska. Nobody wants to have some guy’s face for dessert. And why the Camembert?”

“To follow through on the death mask theme. I want it to have a little bit of a corpsey flavor.”

“You’re nuts!”

“Just try it.”

“I don’t want to.”

“Remember what you told me when you fixed those kidneys?” said G-Man from his spot by the sauté station. “A good cook is a fearless cook.”

“So I suppose you tried it already?”

“And?”

“It’s pretty gross,” G-Man said cheerfully.

Liquor’s climax comes with a show-down in the restaurant kitchen, and a sharp look at New Orleans’ underbelly. The restaurant profession isn’t always the exciting, glamorous lifestyle it’s made out to be, and the long hours of physically and emotionally demanding work can often take their toll. Brite offers a clear and concise look at the drawbacks to that world, all the while celebrating the creations that come out of it.

As an entertaining thriller, Liquor does its job well. The plot is engaging and the characters are sympathetic and well-drawn. The splendid city of New Orleans itself becomes a character in the story, creating a unique plot that would be significantly different were it set anywhere else.

For anyone who enjoys a fun read studded with descriptions of a gorgeous city and equally gorgeous food, Liquor will be a fun treat that will send you scurrying to make reservations at your favorite local bistro.

Liquor is the first in a planned series of five books featuring the New Orleans’ restaurant scene and the characters Rickey and G-Man. The third book in the series, Soul Kitchenleased in July 2006. Brite’s website can be found at www.poppyzbrite.com.