Every Nation Has Its Dish


Book Description

Jennifer Jensen Wallach's nuanced history of black foodways across the twentieth century challenges traditional narratives of "soul food" as a singular style of historical African American cuisine. Wallach investigates the experiences and diverse convictions of several generations of African American activists, ranging from Booker T. Washington and W. E. B. Du Bois to Mary Church Terrell, Elijah Muhammad, and Dick Gregory. While differing widely in their approaches to diet and eating, they uniformly made the cultivation of "proper" food habits a significant dimension of their work and their conceptions of racial and national belonging. Tracing their quests for literal sustenance brings together the race, food, and intellectual histories of America. Directly linking black political activism to both material and philosophical practices around food, Wallach frames black identity as a bodily practice, something that conscientious eaters not only thought about but also did through rituals and performances of food preparation, consumption, and digestion. The process of choosing what and how to eat, Wallach argues, played a crucial role in the project of finding one's place as an individual, as an African American, and as a citizen.




Recipes for Respect


Book Description

Food studies, once trendy, has settled into the public arena. In the academy, scholarship on food and literary culture constitutes a growing river within literary and cultural studies, but writing on African American food and dining remains a tributary. Recipes for Respect bridges this gap, illuminating the role of foodways in African American culture as well as the contributions of Black cooks and chefs to what has been considered the mainstream. Beginning in the early nineteenth century and continuing nearly to the present day, African Americans have often been stereotyped as illiterate kitchen geniuses. Rafia Zafar addresses this error, highlighting the long history of accomplished African Americans within our culinary traditions, as well as the literary and entrepreneurial strategies for civil rights and respectability woven into the written records of dining, cooking, and serving. Whether revealed in cookbooks or fiction, memoirs or hotel-keeping manuals, agricultural extension bulletins or library collections, foodways knowledge sustained Black strategies for self-reliance and dignity, the preservation of historical memory, and civil rights and social mobility. If, to follow Mary Douglas’s dictum, food is a field of action—that is, a venue for social intimacy, exchange, or aggression—African American writing about foodways constitutes an underappreciated critique of the racialized social and intellectual spaces of the United States.




Bacon Nation


Book Description

Everything tastes better with bacon. One of those flavor-packed, umami-rich, secret-weapon ingredients, it has the power to elevate just about any dish, from soups to souffle ́s, braises to bread pudding. Peter Kaminsky and Marie Rama know just how to employ it. Peter is the author of both Pig Perfect—a paean to the noble swine—and, most recently, Culinary Intelligence, which argues that the healthiest way to eat is to eat less but really well. He and Marie know that adding irresistible bacon transforms an ordinary dish into an extraordinary one. Bacon Nation is a bacon-lover’s dream, a collection of 125 smoky, savory, crispy, meaty, salty, and sweetly sensuous recipes that go right through the menu. Starters like Spiced Nuts with Bacon; Bacon and Butternut Squash Galette; Bacon, Pear, and Humboldt Fog Salad. Main courses featuring meats—Brawny Bacon Beef Bourguignon, Saltimbacon; poultry—Paella with Chicken and Bacon; fish—Flaky Cod Fillets with Bacon and Wine-Braised Fennel; and pasta, including an update of the classic Roman dish Bucatini all’Amatriciana. Even dessert: Rum Ice Cream with Candied Bacon Chips and Chocolate-Peanut-Bacon Toffee. Or, as Homer Simpson would say, Mmmm, bacon.




Diners, Dudes, and Diets


Book Description

The phrase "dude food" likely brings to mind a range of images: burgers stacked impossibly high with an assortment of toppings that were themselves once considered a meal; crazed sports fans demolishing plates of radioactively hot wings; barbecued or bacon-wrapped . . . anything. But there is much more to the phenomenon of dude food than what's on the plate. Emily J. H. Contois's provocative book begins with the dude himself—a man who retains a degree of masculine privilege but doesn't meet traditional standards of economic and social success or manly self-control. In the Great Recession's aftermath, dude masculinity collided with food producers and marketers desperate to find new customers. The result was a wave of new diet sodas and yogurts marketed with dude-friendly stereotypes, a transformation of food media, and weight loss programs just for guys. In a work brimming with fresh insights about contemporary American food media and culture, Contois shows how the gendered world of food production and consumption has influenced the way we eat and how food itself is central to the contest over our identities.




Made in America


Book Description

Made in America: Our Best Chefs Reinvent Comfort Food, features updated classic recipes from the most innovative and remarkable chefs working today. Inspired by turn-of-the-20th century regional American cookbooks, Lucy Lean, former editor of edible LA, has delved through thousands of traditional recipes to define the 100 that best represent America's culinary legacy, and challenged today's leading chefs to deconstruct and rebuild them in entirely original ways. The result is the ultimate contemporary comfort food bible for the home cook and armchair food lover. Each recipe is enhanced with an introduction that includes the background and origin of the dish and a unique profile of the chef who has undertaken it, as well as sumptuous photographs of the dish, chef, and restaurant. Representing the entire United States, chefs have been selected for their accomplishments, talent, and focus on local and sustainable cooking. From Ludo Lefebvre's Duck Fat Fried Chicken to Alain Ducasse's French Onion Soup to Mario Batali's Pappardelle Bolognese to John Besh's Banana Rum Cake, Made in America showcases our favorite dishes as conceived by our finest chefs.




Rice and Beans


Book Description

Rice and Beans is a book about the paradox of local and global. On the one hand, this is a globe-spanning dish, a simple source of complete nutrition for billions of people in hundreds of countries. On the other hand, in every place people insist that rice and beans is a local invention, deeply rooted in a particular history and culture. How can something so universal also be so particular? The authors of this book explore the specific history of the versions of rice and beans beloved and indigenous in cultures from Brazil to West Africa. But they also plumb the shared African, Native American and European trans-Atlantic encounters and exchanges, and the contemporary forces of globalization and nation-building, which combine to make rice and beans a powerful substance and symbol of the relationship between food and culture.




Dethroning the Deceitful Pork Chop


Book Description

Uses a variety of methodological perspectives to demonstrate that throughout time black people have used both overt and subtle food practices to resist white oppression.




The Mission Chinese Food Cookbook


Book Description

From rising culinary star Danny Bowien, chef and cofounder of the tremendously popular Mission Chinese Food restaurants, comes an exuberant cookbook that tells the story of an unconventional idea born in San Francisco that spread cross-country, propelled by wildly inventive recipes that have changed what it means to cook Chinese food in America Mission Chinese Food is not exactly a Chinese restaurant. It began its life as a pop-up: a restaurant nested within a divey Americanized Chinese joint in San Francisco’s Mission District. From the beginning, a spirit of resourcefulness and radical inventiveness has infused each and every dish at Mission Chinese Food. Now, hungry diners line up outside both the San Francisco and New York City locations, waiting hours for platters of Sizzling Cumin Lamb, Thrice-Cooked Bacon, Fiery Kung Pao Pastrami, and pungent Salt-Cod Fried Rice. The force behind the phenomenon, chef Danny Bowien is, at only thirty-three, the fastest-rising young chef in the United States. Born in Korea and adopted by parents in Oklahoma, he has a broad spectrum of influences. He’s a veteran of fine-dining kitchens, sushi bars, an international pesto competition, and a grocery-store burger stand. In 2013 Food & Wine named him one of the country’s Best New Chefs and the James Beard Foundation awarded him its illustrious Rising Star Chef Award. In 2011 Bon Appétit named Mission Chinese Food the second-best new restaurant in America, and in 2012 the New York Times hailed the Lower East Side outpost as the Best New Restaurant in New York City. The Mission Chinese Food Cookbook tracks the fascinating, meteoric rise of the restaurant and its chef. Each chapter in the story—from the restaurant’s early days, to an ill-fated trip to China, to the opening of the first Mission Chinese in New York—unfolds as a conversation between Danny and his collaborators, and is accompanied by detailed recipes for the addictive dishes that have earned the restaurant global praise. Mission Chinese’s legions of fans as well as home cooks of all levels will rethink what it means to cook Chinese food, while getting a look into the background and insights of one of the most creative young chefs today.




The Complete Book of National Dishes


Book Description

The Complete Book of National Dishes is a culinary journey (Cookbook), featuring recipes from every nation in the world. The book (Cook book) highlights the history and origin; with full-colored images, of over 200 recipes. For dinner tonight you can decide to dine in Asia, the Middle East, Africa, Arabia, Europe, the Americas, the Caribbean, Australia or Oceania, the choices are unlimited. Salt, fat, acid, heat, bizarre and strange, they are all there. This book is an invitation to everyone who wants to travel the world from the comfort of their own kitchen. There is a recipe for every food lover, from country A to Z. Full-color photo for every recipe Recipe from every sovereign country in the world Over 200 plus recipes With a historical background of every recipe A section for notes at the end of each recipe Recipes are divided into seven regions of the world Colored edges allow you to easily locate the different regions An easy to follow INDEX table A Calorie & Nutritional Comparison table