Paper Palate

Cindy Mushet’s terrific Art & Soul of Baking is one of those baking books that every baker should make room for on his or her shelf. Why? Because it’s not just a book of recipes. It’s a book of techniques. To me, the real value in this book - in any cookery book - is found in the truc […]

As a single-subject cookbook, Gene Opton’s Honey: A Connoisseur’s Guide with Recipes is all about one thing. Each of the eighty-plus recipes featured in the book incorporates honey. But you’ll find a lot more than recipes in this slender volume. You learn how to taste a spoonful of honey to tease out the subtle nuances of flavor that distinguish varietals produced from different flower […]

British food magazine Taste Italia is packed with delicious-sounding recipes illustrated by gorgeous photos. American readers can order the magazine, but as with other imported goods, you can expect to pay a premium for it (59.95 in British pounds, to be exact). Happily, you can now subscribe to Taste Italia online, in a digital edition available from Exact Editions, […]

We love food, a lot. But not just any food. For example, while others wake up thinking, “Hmm, Frosted Flakes or Pop Tart,” our mind is filled with visions of Saturn peaches, labneh, and ginger-fig jam on wild-yeast sourdough. We are foodies, which, according to Sudi Pigott’s luscious little brown-and-pink bonbon of a book, involves, “eating with integrity, bettering our already demanding palate, and […]

Recently, I added a small, fat book to my collection of desk reference books. Paperbound, organized in alphabetical dictionary-style entries, and over 800 pages long, this little gem has catapulted itself into my top 10 food-book favorites. I find myself pulling it off the shelf just to thumb through, craving the tasty little bites of information it contains.
The […]

“. . . And the calf that you carve with a smile
Is MURDER
And the turkey you festively slice
Is MURDER
Do you know how animals die?”
So sang The Smiths back in 1985, inspiring a legion of teenage vegetarian-converts to verbally abuse their mother’s pot roast with Indie-pop stoked passion. A forward-thinking teenager at the time, I flirted briefly with the meat-free way […]

Every baker has one — the cookbook that is grease spotted and batter flecked, dog eared, flour dusted, and perhaps has more than one spread of pages honey-glued together. But it’s the book we keep going back to. The one that has the lemon bar recipe we never “adjust.” The chocolate chip cookies better (gasp!) than Mom’s. […]

Although there are plenty of books about how to make homemade ice cream that feature cute, catchy titles capitalizing on the gold mine of puns related to the subject, David Lebovitz refreshingly demurs. Instead, he takes a more straightforward path, bringing us, simply, The Perfect Scoop.
Ice-cream making is not something I have ever considered part of my bailiwick in […]

I didn’t come upon this wonderful book in the usual way, which is to say drooling over it in a bookstore or browsing on Amazon. Instead, my sister sent me a forwarded e-mail with the subject line reading something like “Count Your Blessings.” Now I don’t typically open these types of e-mails, but my sister […]