The Book of Eating


Book Description

A wildly hilarious and irreverent memoir of a globe-trotting life lived meal-to-meal by one of our most influential and respected food critics As the son of a diplomat growing up in places like Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Japan, Adam Platt didn’t have the chance to become a picky eater. Living, traveling, and eating in some of the most far-flung locations around the world, he developed an eclectic palate and a nuanced understanding of cultures and cuisines that led to some revelations which would prove important in his future career as a food critic. In Tokyo, for instance—“a kind of paradise for nose-to-tail cooking”—he learned that “if you’re interested in telling a story, a hair-raisingly bad meal is much better than a good one." From dim sum in Hong Kong to giant platters of Peking duck in Beijing, fresh-baked croissants in Paris and pierogi on the snowy streets of Moscow, Platt takes us around the world, re-tracing the steps of a unique, and lifelong, culinary education. Providing a glimpse into a life that has intertwined food and travel in exciting and unexpected ways, The Book of Eating is a delightful and sumptuous trip that is also the culinary coming-of-age of a voracious eater and his eventual ascension to become, as he puts it, “a professional glutton.”




Class Act


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The Jane Austen Diet


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What can Jane Austen teach us about health? Prepare to have your bonnet blown... From the food secrets of Pride and Prejudice to the fitness strategies of Sense and Sensibility, there’s a modern health code hidden in the world’s most popular romances. Join Bryan Kozlowski as he unlocks this “health and happiness” manifesto straight from Jane Austen’s pen, revealing why her prescriptions for achieving total body “bloom” still matter in the 21st century. Whether that’s learning how to eat like Lizzie Bennet, exercise like Emma Woodhouse, or think like Elinor Dashwood, explore how Austen’s timeless body beliefs are more relevant, refreshing, and scientifically sensible now than ever before. After all, it's still a truth universally acknowledged – Jane Austen’s heroines don’t get fat.




Elegant Eating


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Surveying the art of fine dining in Europe from the 16th century to the present day, this work concentrates on the many decorative items - and their usage - that eating and drinking in style have inspired through the ages.




Eating as I Go


Book Description

What do we learn from eating? About ourselves? Others? In this unique memoir of a life shaped by the pleasures of the table, Doris Friedensohn uses eating as an occasion for inquiry. Munching on quesadillas and kimchi in her suburban New Jersey neighborhood, she reflects on her exploration of food over fifty years and across four continents. Relishing couscous in Tunisia and khachapuri in the Republic of Georgia, she explores the ways strangers come together and maintain their differences through food. As a young woman, Friedensohn was determined not to be a provincial American. Chinese, French, Mexican, and Mediterranean cuisines beckoned to her like mysterious suitors. She responded, pursuing suckling pig, snails, baba ghanoush, tripe, jellyfish, and anything with rosemary or cumin. Each rendezvous with an unfamiliar food was a celebration of cosmopolitan living. Friedensohn's memories range from Thanksgiving at a Middle Eastern restaurant to the taste of fried grasshoppers in Oaxaca. Her wry dramas of the dining room, restaurant, market, and kitchen ripple with tensions—political, religious, psychological, and spiritual. Eating as I Go is one woman's distinctive mélange of memoir, traveler's tale, and cultural commentary.




Eating, Drinking, and Visiting in the South


Book Description

A lively, informal history of over three centuries of southern hospitality and cuisine, Eating, Drinking, and Visiting in the South traces regional gastronomy from the sparse diet of Jamestown settlers, who learned from necessity to eat what the Indians ate, to the lavish corporate cocktail parties of the New South. Brimming with memorable detail, this book by Joe Gray Taylor ranges from the groaning plates of the great plantations, witnessed by Frederick Law Olmsted and a great many others, to the less-than-appetizing extreme guests often confronted in the South's nineteenth-century inns and taverns: "execrable coffee, rancid butter, and very dubious meat." Taylor describes the diet of the early pioneers, with its corn bread, beaver-tail soup, and black bear meat, and the creation of the South's regional cuisines, including Kentucky's burgoo and south Louisiana's gumbo. He tells of the rounds of visitation that were the social lifeblood of the Old South, of the fatback and hoecake that fed plantation slaves, and of the starvation diet of the Confederate soldier and civilian. Taylor then looks at how technological advances and urbanization have in some cases enhanced, but more often diluted, the southern eating experience, and he finds that despite the introduction of fast-food "abominations" and factory-made horrors such as quick grits and canned biscuits, the region's sturdy eating, drinking, and social traditions still flourish in many byways and on some main avenues of the modern South. In a new introduction, noted food writer John Egerton looks at what motivated Joe Gray Taylor to undertake this fine study and discusses how southern food studies have progressed since the book was first released.




Nothing Fancy


Book Description

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • The social media star, New York Times columnist, and author of Dining In helps you nail dinner with unfussy food and the permission to be imperfect. “Enemy of the mild, champion of the bold, Ms. Roman offers recipes in Nothing Fancy that are crunchy, cheesy, tangy, citrusy, fishy, smoky and spicy.”—Julia Moskin, The New York Times IACP AWARD FINALIST • NAMED ONE OF THE BEST COOKBOOKS OF THE YEAR BY The New York Times Book Review • The New Yorker • NPR • The Washington Post • San Francisco Chronicle • BuzzFeed • The Guardian • Food Network An unexpected weeknight meal with a neighbor or a weekend dinner party with fifteen of your closest friends—either way and everywhere in between, having people over is supposed to be fun, not stressful. This abundant collection of all-new recipes—heavy on the easy-to-execute vegetables and versatile grains, paying lots of close attention to crunchy, salty snacks, and with love for all the meats—is for gatherings big and small, any day of the week. Alison Roman will give you the food your people want (think DIY martini bar, platters of tomatoes, pots of coconut-braised chicken and chickpeas, pans of lemony turmeric tea cake) plus the tips, sass, and confidence to pull it all off. With Nothing Fancy, any night of the week is worth celebrating. Praise for Nothing Fancy “[Nothing Fancy] is full of the sort of recipes that sound so good, one contemplates switching off any and all phones, calling in sick, and cooking through the bulk of them.”—Food52 “[Nothing Fancy] exemplifies that classic Roman approach to cooking: well-known ingredients rearranged in interesting and compelling ways for young home cooks who want food that looks (and photographs) as good as it tastes.”—Grub Street




You are What You Eat


Book Description

You are What You Eat: Literary Probes into the Palate offers tantalizing essays immersed in the culture of food, expanded across genres, disciplines, and time. The entire collection of You Are What You Eat includes a diversity of approaches and foci from multicultural, national and international scholars and has a broad spectrum of subjects including: feminist theory, domesticity, children, film, cultural history, patriarchal gender ideology, mothering ideology, queer theory, politics, and poetry. Essays include studies of food-related works by John Milton, Emily Dickinson, Fay Weldon, Kenneth Grahame, Roald Dahl, Shel Silverstein, J. K. Rowling, Mother Goose, John Updike, Maxine Hong Kingston, Alice Walker, Amy Tan, Louise Erdrich, Amanda Hesser, Julie Powell, Mary Wilkins Freeman, Martin Scorsese, Bob Giraldi, Clarice Lispector, José Antônio Garcia, Fran Ross, and Gish Hen. The topic addresses a range of interests appealing to diverse audiences, expanding from college students to food enthusiasts and scholars.





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Fictitious Dishes


Book Description

FOR THOSE WHO LOVE GREAT FICTION AND FOOD Pairing approximately 50 charming photographic re-creations of meals from classic and contemporary literature—all prepared, styled, and shot by the author—with relevant excerpts, Fictitious Dishes is an innovative gift book for literature lovers, foodies, as well as design and book junkies. Fictitious Dishes presents these imaginative pairings in an eye-catching format. Along with the excerpt from the original work, each entry includes information about food, the author, their works, and the food itself. Fun facts—Proust's infamous madeleine made its appearance on the printed page the same year the Oreo was invented, for example—along with anecdotes about writers, their works, and their culinary predilections, fill the charming book from start to finish. Among the highlighted meals are: Alice’s Adventures in Wonderful: The Mad Hatter’s Tea Party The Bell Jar: Crab-stuffed Avocado The Catcher in the Rye: Cheese sandwich and Malted The Corrections: Cupcakes and Chardonnay Emma: Picnic Lunch The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo: Open-faced Sandwich with Coffee The Great Gatsby: “Glistening Hors-d’oeuvre” and cocktail Middlesex: Hercules “flexing” hotdog On the Road: Apple Pie with Ice Cream To Kill a Mockingbird: Fried Chicken, Tomatoes, Beans, Scuppernong, and Rolls To the Lighthouse: Boeuf en Daube Comprehensive and entertaining, Fictitious Dishes is an irresistible impulse buy, and makes the perfect gift for food, literature, and design aficionados for every occasion.