2014 Top Ten Books on Food and Cooking

Published by Thursday, November 27, 2014 Permalink 0

 

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By Elatia Harris

Every Thanksgiving I make a list of the 10 books about food and cooking that made the greatest impact on me that year. My criteria? I have to have bought them, read them through, loved them and cooked from them if they include recipes. Not all do. Food writing is changing — one glance at the list below will show you how much. What about your own Top Ten?

1.) The Third Plate: Field Notes on the Future of Food, by Dan Barber
A visionary book. Can we make this future? Will we?

2.) The Culinary Imagination: From Myth to Modernity, by Sandra M. Gilbert
The subject as considered by one of the great minds of our time. Endlessly rewarding.

3.) The Food History Reader: Primary Sources, by Ken Albala
Magnificent choices. Now everyone can be a student of the dazzling Ken Albala.

4.) Cumin, Camels and Caravans: A Spice Odyssey, by Gary Paul Nabhan
Nobody knows the desert and its potential like professor and farmer Gary Paul Nabhan. An exceptionally moving book.

5.) Mediterranean Vegetarian Feasts, by Aglaia Kremezi
To simplify, to exalt real flavor, to live lightly on the earth — this is the book.

6.) Yucatan: Recipes from a Culinary Expedition, by David Sterling
Deep insight into a marvelous, highly local cuisine with unique features.

7.) Heritage, by Sean Brock
A chef of passionate dedication works to preserve the heritage foodways of the American South. Certain people who shall be nameless have given Southern cooking a bad name lately. THIS helps!

8.) The Language of Food: A Linguist Reads the Menu, by Dan Jurafsky
Hilarious and erudite. If you don’t really know if you like language better than food, or vice versa, read this. Zero conflict.

9.) Porta Palazzo: The Anthropology of an Italian Market, by Rachel Black (paperback edition 2014)
The largest open market in Europe holds up the mirror to Italian society.

10) Simple French Food, by Richard Olney (40th Anniversary Edition)
Were you trying, as a teenager, to master the art of French cooking? Then of course you went to Julia, but you might have gone to Richard, too. Matchless instruction, such beautiful prose that you can read it aloud for pleasure, and recipes that cannot disappoint.

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Food Writing Tips & Resources

Published by Wednesday, November 5, 2014 Permalink 0

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This site has a helpful list of tips and resources for food writers. Although outdated, it still serves as a good source, and recommends books, periodicals, works and websites. Click here.

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Wendell Berry Quotes

Published by Wednesday, November 5, 2014 Permalink 0
When people learn to preserve the richness of the land that God has given them and the rights to enjoy the fruits of their own labors then will be the time when all shall have meat in the smokehouse corn in the crib and time to go to the election. (“W.C.” of Rural Neck, Kentucky in a letter to “Farmers Home Journal – 1892”) ― Wendell Berry, The Unsettling of America: Culture and Agriculture
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About Jonell Galloway

Jonell Galloway grew up on Wendell Berry and food straight from a backyard Kentucky garden. She is a freelance writer. She attended Le Cordon Bleu and La Varenne cooking schools in Paris and the Académie du Vin, worked for the GaultMillau restaurant guide and CityGuides in France and Paris and for Gannett Company in the U.S., and collaborated on Le tour du monde en 80 pains / Around the World with 80 Breads with Jean-Philippe de Tonnac in France; André Raboud, Sculptures 2002-2009 in Switzerland; Ma Cuisine Méditerranéenne with Christophe Certain in France, At the Table: Food and Family around the World with Ken Albala, and a biography of French chef Pierre Gagnaire. She ran a cooking school in France, and owned a farm-to-table restaurant, The Three Sisters’ Café, with her two sisters in the U.S. She organizes the Taste Unlocked bespoke food and wine tasting awareness workshops with James Flewellen, is an active member of Slow Food, and runs the food writing website The Rambling Epicure. Her work has been published in numerous international publications and she has been interviewed on international public radio in France, Switzerland, and the U.S. She has just signed on at In Search of Taste, a British print publication, and is now working on a book, What to Eat in Venice

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Recipe: Shaker-style Apple Custard Oat Pie

Published by Tuesday, November 4, 2014 Permalink 1

by Jonell Galloway

Shaker-style apple custard oatmeal pie

Shaker-style apple custard oatmeal pie

Apple Custard Oatmeal Filling

For one 9-inch pie crust

Ingredients

6 egg yolks
4 egg whites
1 cups brown sugar
1 cup melted butter
1/3 cup old-fashioned oats
Juice of one lemon
1 tsp. cinnamon
2 cups peeled, cored, sliced cooking apples
2 egg whites, beaten until they form hard peaks

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Wendell Berry Quote: Why do Farmers Farm?

Published by Monday, November 3, 2014 Permalink 0

Why do farmers farm, given their economic adversities on top of the many frustrations and difficulties normal to farming? And always the answer is: “Love. They must do it for love.” Farmers farm for the love of farming. They love to watch and nurture the growth of plants. They love to live in the presence of animals. They love to work outdoors. They love the weather, maybe even when it is making them miserable. They love to live where they work and to work where they live. If the scale of their farming is small enough, they like to work in the company of their children and with the help of their children. They love the measure of independence that farm life can still provide. I have an idea that a lot of farmers have gone to a lot of trouble merely to be self-employed to live at least a part of their lives without a boss.― Wendell Berry, Bringing it to the Table: Writings on Farming and Food

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