Showing titles in Gastronomy

This memoir is laced with wonderful stories about the French character, particularly in the world of food, and the way of life that Julia Child embraced so wholeheartedly. Above all, she reveals the kind of spirit and determination, the sheer love of cooking, and the drive to share that with her fellow Americans that made her the extraordinary success she became.

In Tuscany celebrates the abundant pleasures of life in Italy as it is lived at home, at festivals, feasts, restaurants and markets, in the kitchen and on the piazza, in the vineyards, fields, and olive groves. Combining essays by Frances Mayes and a chapter by her husband, poet Edward Mayes, each of this book's five sections highlights a signature aspect of Tuscan life.

Every cheese tells a story. Whether it's a fresh young goat's cheese or a big, beefy 18-month-old Cheddar, each variety holds the history of the people who first made it, from the builders of Stonehenge to medieval monks, from the Stilton-makers of the 18th century to the factory cheesemakers of the Second World War. Cheesemonger Ned Palmer takes us on a delicious journey across Britain and Ireland and through time to uncover the histories of beloved old favourites like Cheddar and Wensleydale and fresh innovations like the Irish Cashel Blue or the rambunctious Renegade Monk.

In 1949, a young Chinese housewife arrived in Taiwan and transformed herself from a novice to a natural in the kitchen. She launched a career as a cookbook author and television cooking instructor. Years later, in America, flipping through her mother's copies of Fu Pei-mei's Chinese cookbooks, historian Michelle T. King discovered more than the recipes to meals of her childhood. She found, in Fu's story and in her food, a portal to another time, when a generation of middle-class female home cooks navigated the postwar transformations taking place across the world.

Noted chef and James Beard Award-winning essayist Lisa Donovan helped establish some of the South's most important kitchens, and her pastry work is at the forefront of a resurgence in traditional desserts. Yet Donovan struggled to make a living in an industry where male chefs built successful careers on the stories, recipes, and culinary heritage passed down from generations of female cooks and cooks of color. Our Lady of Perpetual Hunger is Donovan's searing, beautiful, and searching chronicle of reclaiming her own story and the narrative of the women who came before her.

Beneath the gloss of star chefs and crystal-laden tables, the truffle supply chain is touched by theft, secrecy, sabotage, and fraud. Farmers patrol their fields with rifles and fear losing trade secrets to spies. Hunters plant poisoned meatballs to eliminate rival truffle-hunting dogs. Naive buyers and even experts are duped by liars and counterfeits. Deeply reported and elegantly written, this exposé documents the dark, sometimes deadly crimes at each level of the truffle’s path from ground to plate, making sense of an industry that traffics in scarcity, seduction, and cash.

Discover the underdog story of the improbable rise of small-batch distilling in America. This bracingly written, fast-paced work traces the relationship of Americans to spirits such as bourbon, scotch, vodka, gin, and rum. And it presents the full story of a plucky band of entrepreneurs who disrupted the nation's conception of how those libations could appear and taste - and how much they could cost.

From the cassoulet that won a war to the crêpe that doomed Napoleon, from the rebellions sparked by bread and salt to the new cuisines forged by empire, the history of France is intimately entwined with its gastronomic pursuits. A witty exploration of the facts and legends surrounding some of the most popular French foods and wines by a French cheesemonger and an American academic, A Bite-Sized History of France tells the compelling and often surprising story of France from the Roman era to modern times.

In the gonzo spirit of Anthony Bourdain and Hunter S. Thompson, Witold Szabłowski has tracked down—and broken bread with—people whose stories of working in Kremlin kitchens impart a surprising flavor to our understanding of one of the world’s superpowers. Traveling across Stalin’s Georgia, the war fronts of Afghanistan, the nuclear wastelands of Chornobyl, and even to a besieged steelworks plant in Mariupol, he shows that a century after the revolution, Russia still uses food as an instrument of war and feeds its people on propaganda.

Food is one of life's great joys. So why has eating become such a source of anxiety and confusion? Bee Wilson shows that in two generations the world has undergone a massive shift from traditional, limited diets to more globalized ways of eating, from bubble tea to quinoa, from Soylent to meal kits. Paradoxically, our diets are getting healthier and less healthy at the same time. For some, there has never been a happier food era than today: a time of unusual herbs, farmers' markets, and internet recipe swaps.

Long before the advent of conventional farming methods - which have focused on constant growth, human intervention, and genetic homogeneity - the apple had already grown to become the ubiquitous all-American symbol it is today. Known for their hardiness, ability to adapt to new environments, natural diversity, and plentiful bounty, wildly grown apples were once known as “America’s fruit” throughout the trading world.

The Apple: A Delicious History tells the engrossing and richly informative story of a fruit with a unique attachment to the human story. The 10,000-year tale of the round and pleasantly crunchy products of the trees of the genus Malus embraces not only culinary, horticultural, social and commercial history but also age-old traditions in mythology, folklore and religion.

In First Bite, the beloved food writer Bee Wilson draws on the latest research from food psychologists, neuroscientists, and nutritionists to reveal that our food habits are shaped by a whole host of factors, including family, culture, memory, gender, hunger, and love.

Bacon. McDonalds. Cinnabon. Hot Pockets. Kale. Stand-up comedian and author Jim Gaffigan has made his career rhapsodizing over the most treasured dishes of the American diet (“choking on bacon is like getting murdered by your lover”) and decrying the worst offenders (“kale is the early morning of foods”).

Nearing 30 and trapped in a dead-end secretarial job, Julie Powell reclaims her life by cooking every single recipe in Julia Child's legendary Mastering the Art of French Cooking in the span of one year. It's a hysterical, inconceivable redemptive journey—life rediscovered through aspics, calves' brains and cré me brûlée.

The first edition, published in 2007, won a James Beard Award. Now updated with newly discovered recipes and historical information, this updated edition includes the origins of the first American drink, the mint julep (which Wondrich places before the American Revolution) and those of the cocktail itself. It also provides more detail about 19th-century spirits, many new and colorful anecdotes and details about Thomas' life, and a number of particularly notable, delicious, and influential cocktails not covered in the original edition.

Bonny Reichert avoided everything to do with the Holocaust until she found herself, in midlife, suddenly typing those words into an article she was writing. The journalist had grown up hearing stories about her father’s near-starvation and ultimate survival in Auschwitz-Birkenau, but she never imagined she would be able to face this epic legacy head-on. Then a chance encounter with a perfect bowl of borscht in Warsaw set Bonny on a journey to unearth her culinary lineage, and she began to dig for the roots of her food obsession, dish by dish.

Alcohol and Medicine have an inextricably intertwined history, with innovations in each altering the path of the other. The story stretches back to ancient times, when beer and wine were used to provide nutrition and hydration, and were employed as solvents for healing botanicals. Over time, alchemists distilled elixirs designed to cure all diseases, monastic apothecaries developed mystical botanical liqueurs, traveling physicians concocted dubious intoxicating nostrums, and the drinks we’re familiar with today began to take form.

The avocado is the quintessential symbol of aspirational living, a ubiquitous agricultural favorite, and the driver of an $18 billion global industry. How did this regional Latin American staple become a star of Super Bowl ads and a byword for wellness? Documenting more than a century of cross-cultural cooperation, cutting-edge science, and savvy marketing, Green Gold tells the remarkable story of the fruit's rise to prominence as both a culinary and cultural juggernaut.

The characters in Tasting the Past include a young Swiss scientist who set out to decode the DNA of every single wine grape in the world; Middle Eastern researchers who seek to discover the wines that King David drank; and a University of Pennsylvania academic who has spent decades analyzing wine remains. The science illuminates wine in ways no critic can, and demolishes some of the most sacred dogmas of the industry: well-known French grapes aren't especially noble.