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MBR: The Culinary Shelf
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Midwest Book Review
Sep 28, 2015, 12:38:56 PM9/28/15
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The Culinary Shelf
The Dorito Effect
Mark Schatzker
Simon & Schuster
1230 Avenue of the Americas, 14th fl., New York, NY 10020
9781476724218 $27.00 www.simonandschuster.com
While The Dorito Effect: The Surprising New Truth About Food and Flavor is written (and intended) for health and fitness collections, it's being reviewed here because nobody with any degree of interest in food should miss its discussions of how the flavor of food is changing. It's a well-known fact that fresh produce looks better and lasts longer - but at the sacrifice of taste. At the same time, new technology is allowing replication of even that missing component - but, at what cost? Discussions uses advances in brain science, food addiction and biology to consider the latest discoveries of the chemical properties of taste and nutrition and surveys solutions to common problems in a treatment recommended not just for health readers; but for any involved in the culinary industry.
Front of the House
Jeff Benjamin with Jeff Jones
Burgess Lea Press
http://www.burgessleapress.com/contact
9781941868027 $23.00 www.burgessleapress.com
Front of the House: Restaurant Manners, Misbehaviors and Secrets provides a lively survey of what it takes to run a fine restaurant, and comes from author Jeff Benjamin, who began as a teen waiter in a Long Island country club and evolved to become the managing partner of a family of restaurants. In his story of his encounters and growth, Benjamin provides a very lively survey of what happens behind the scenes in a restaurant, detailing stories of challenging guests, those who overdo, how customers are handled, and why food and its delivery is only part of the key to a restaurant's ultimate success. This lively survey offers an inspiring read that is involving and engrossing, detailing the underlying expectations, encounters, and manners demanded of staff and diner alike, and it's a fun and very different review than most books about restaurants can offer. Any food fan interested in restaurant snafus and insights will relish this blend of autobiography and restaurant establishment insights.
Cooking and Eating in Renaissance Italy
Katherine A. McIver
Rowman & Littlefield
c/o Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group
4501 Forbes Blvd., Suite 200, Lanham, MD 20706
9781442227187 $38.00 www.rowman.com
Cooking and Eating in Renaissance Italy From Kitchen to Table is a culinary history recommended for college-level collections strong in food studies and Renaissance times, and traces how food was cultivated and moved from garden to table. It isn't so much a recipe collection (other medieval recipe collections are on the market) as it is a discussion of how food in this period was prepared and how it evolved, surveying everything from medieval shopping lists and methods to how servants pictured in the preparation process, how recipes evolved, and how ingredient availability lent to innovation (or not). From medieval communal eating to food etiquette, this is a solid survey that uses a range of resources to reconstruct the history and evolution of not just Italian food, but Italian traditions.
The Food Activist Handbook
Ali Berlow
Storey Publishing
210 Mass MoCA Way, North Adams, MA 01247
9781612121802 $17.95 www.storey.com
The Food Activist Handbook provides a political view of food systems, their dysfunctions, and how to make community-level changes in food distribution and growth to return food to small-scale management, and is a top pick for any interested in developing community food projects from neighborhood gardens and harvesting methods to setting up a community composting program. It discusses food pantries and how they can connect with local producers and products, it considers ethnic food traditions, and it advocates being a 'guerrilla gardener', among other approaches, to keep food fresh, healthy, and at a small-scale community level. Any interested in the intrusion of big business and agribusiness into the food chain will find this handbook offers solid, practical recipes for success based on country-wide small community experiences.
Pig Tales
Barry Estabrook
W. W. Norton & Company
500 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10110
www.wwnorton.com
9780393240245 $26.95 www.amazon.com
Pig Tales: An Omnivore's Quest for Sustainable Meat comes from a prize-winning food writer who here examines the American pork industry, and uses his same light conversational style to inquire into American methods of raising, processing, cooking and presenting pork. It's filled with both insights into the idea and challenges of sustainable meat and keys to understanding why pork from such animals looks and tastes more succulent than the ordinary factory pork most Americans are more familiar with, and it considers the finer points of commercial pig farming, wild pig harvesting, and more. The result is a 'must' for any interested in the possibilities of the pig.
Darjeeling
Jeff Koehler
Bloomsbury Press
175 Fifth Avenue, Suite 315, New York, NY 10010
9781620405123 $27.00 www.bloomsbury.com
Darjeeling: The Colorful History and Precarious Fate of the World's Greatest Tea surpasses most explorations of tea history in that it narrows its focus to Darjeeling's tea bushes and their story, following how India's tea industry grew to be the biggest in the world and considering how it came to symbolize British rule in India. Any with an affection for tea and history will find this a solid story of family plantations, political influences on tea development, discussions of tea's organic future, and more. The history also involves a sense of place, so others interested in India's overall history, culture, and agriculture will find Darjeeling explores the tea, the people, and the place with equal detail, all presented in a lively cup of wonder.
Eating Viet Nam
Graham Holliday
Anthony Bourdain Books / Ecco
c/o HarperCollins Publishers
10 East 53rd Street, New York, NY 10022-5299
www.eccobooks.com
9780062293053, $26.99, www.harpercollins.com
Eating Viet Nam: Dispatches from a Blue Plastic Table includes a foreword by culinary traveler Anthony Bourdain as it offers a journalist's take on Viet Nam, and while this book could have been featured in our Travel Shelf section, it's profiled here so that no fan of food misses it. The author, unlike most sojourners, wasn't keen on travel; but his curiosity about Viet Nam prompted him to journey halfway around the world and his particular focus was on living in the country, not just journeying through it. As such, he decided to focus on local food and searched for authentic Vietnamese cuisine. Eating Viet Nam chronicles this culinary journey where he risks disease and more to sample some of the dishes unique to that country. The result is an assessment of land and people but, most of all, of culinary traditions and specialties unique to Vietnam, making this book a recommended pick for any who would learn more about the region and the nation's byways and culinary oddities.
Collecting Culinaria
Caroline Lieffers & Merrill Distad
University of Alberta Press
Ring House 2, Edmonton, Alberta, Canada, T6G 2E1
www.uap.ualberta.ca
9781551953243, $35.95, 92pp, www.amazon.com
A cookbook is a kitchen reference publication that typically contains a collection of recipes. Modern versions may also include colorful illustrations and advice on purchasing quality ingredients or making substitutions. Cookbooks can also cover a wide variety of topics, including cooking techniques for the home, recipes and commentary from famous chefs, institutional kitchen manuals, and cultural commentary. Cookbooks are often collected as a kind of culinary hobby by women. Linda Distad was a University of Alberta librarian who died in 2012. Linda Distad had passion for heritage recipes; her collection ran to more than 3,000 titles and was donated to the Bruce Peel Special Collections Library of the University of Alberta. Compiled by Caroline Lieffers and Merrill Distad, "Collecting Culinaria: Cookbooks and domestic manuals mainly from the Linda Miron Distad Collection" is a profusely illustrated, 92 page compendium sampling and showcasing the diversity of Linda Distad's collection of cookbooks and domestic manuals. Unique, impressive, and inherently fascinating, "Collecting Culinaria" is highly recommended to the attention of cookbook collection enthusiasts and would well serve as a template for other curators hosting similar large collections of cookbooks.
Cranberries Revealed
Wayne R. Martin
Martin Photo Media LLC
13245 North 55th Avenue, Plymouth, MN 55442
9780990812906, $24.95, www.cranberriesrevealed.com
Cranberries are a group of evergreen dwarf shrubs or trailing vines in the subgenus Oxycoccus of the genus Vaccinium. In North America, cranberry may refer to Vaccinium macrocarpon. Cranberries are low, creeping shrubs or vines up to 2 meters (7 ft) long and 5 to 20 centimeters (2 to 8 in) in height; they have slender, wiry stems that are not thickly woody and have small evergreen leaves. The flowers are dark pink, with very distinct reflexed petals, leaving the style and stamens fully exposed and pointing forward. They are pollinated by bees. The fruit is a berry that is larger than the leaves of the plant; it is initially white, but turns a deep red when fully ripe. It is edible, with an acidic taste that can overwhelm its sweetness. Cranberries are a major commercial crop in certain American states and Canadian provinces. Most cranberries are processed into products such as juice, sauce, jam, and sweetened dried cranberries, with the remainder sold fresh to consumers. Cranberry sauce is a traditional accompaniment to Thanksgiving dinners in the United States. Since the early 21st century within the global functional food industry, raw cranberries have been marketed as a "super fruit" due to their nutrient content and antioxidant qualities. "Cranberries Revealed: From The Marsh To The Table" is an 84 page profusely illustrated compendium by photojournalist and freelance commercial photographer Wayne R. Martin that takes the reader on a truly impressive visual journey into the world of cranberries that goes quite literarily from the marshes where they grow to some truly nutritious and delicious cranberry cuisine. Deftly organized and presented in three major sections (Art and Beauty of the Cranberry; Cranberry Culture; Cranberry Inspirations), "Cranberries Revealed: From The Marsh To The Table" will prove an enduringly popular addition to community library collections and should be considered a "must" for all cranberry enthusiasts!
EDITOR'S NOTE:
The Midwest Book Review is an organization of volunteers committed to promoting literacy, library usage, and small press publishing. We accept no funds from authors or publishers. Full permission is given to post any of these reviews on thematically appropriate websites, newsgroups, listserves, internet discussion groups, organizational newsletters, or to interested individuals. Please give the Midwest Book Review a credit line when doing so.
The Midwest Book Review publishes the monthly book review magazines "California Bookwatch", "Internet Bookwatch", "Children's Bookwatch", "MBR Bookwatch", "Reviewer's Bookwatch", and "Small Press Bookwatch". All are available for free on the Midwest Book Review website at www (dot) midwestbookreview (dot) com
Anyone wanting to submit books for review consideration can send them to:
James A. Cox, Editor-in-Chief
Midwest Book Review
278 Orchard Drive
Oregon, WI 53575-1129
To submit reviews of any fiction or non-fiction books, email them to Frugalmuse (at) aol (dot) com (Be sure to include the book title, author, publisher, publisher address, publisher website/phone number, 13-digit ISBN number, and list price).
James A. Cox, Editor-in-Chief
Midwest Book Review
The Dorito Effect
Mark Schatzker
Simon & Schuster
1230 Avenue of the Americas, 14th fl., New York, NY 10020
9781476724218 $27.00 www.simonandschuster.com
While The Dorito Effect: The Surprising New Truth About Food and Flavor is written (and intended) for health and fitness collections, it's being reviewed here because nobody with any degree of interest in food should miss its discussions of how the flavor of food is changing. It's a well-known fact that fresh produce looks better and lasts longer - but at the sacrifice of taste. At the same time, new technology is allowing replication of even that missing component - but, at what cost? Discussions uses advances in brain science, food addiction and biology to consider the latest discoveries of the chemical properties of taste and nutrition and surveys solutions to common problems in a treatment recommended not just for health readers; but for any involved in the culinary industry.
Front of the House
Jeff Benjamin with Jeff Jones
Burgess Lea Press
http://www.burgessleapress.com/contact
9781941868027 $23.00 www.burgessleapress.com
Front of the House: Restaurant Manners, Misbehaviors and Secrets provides a lively survey of what it takes to run a fine restaurant, and comes from author Jeff Benjamin, who began as a teen waiter in a Long Island country club and evolved to become the managing partner of a family of restaurants. In his story of his encounters and growth, Benjamin provides a very lively survey of what happens behind the scenes in a restaurant, detailing stories of challenging guests, those who overdo, how customers are handled, and why food and its delivery is only part of the key to a restaurant's ultimate success. This lively survey offers an inspiring read that is involving and engrossing, detailing the underlying expectations, encounters, and manners demanded of staff and diner alike, and it's a fun and very different review than most books about restaurants can offer. Any food fan interested in restaurant snafus and insights will relish this blend of autobiography and restaurant establishment insights.
Cooking and Eating in Renaissance Italy
Katherine A. McIver
Rowman & Littlefield
c/o Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group
4501 Forbes Blvd., Suite 200, Lanham, MD 20706
9781442227187 $38.00 www.rowman.com
Cooking and Eating in Renaissance Italy From Kitchen to Table is a culinary history recommended for college-level collections strong in food studies and Renaissance times, and traces how food was cultivated and moved from garden to table. It isn't so much a recipe collection (other medieval recipe collections are on the market) as it is a discussion of how food in this period was prepared and how it evolved, surveying everything from medieval shopping lists and methods to how servants pictured in the preparation process, how recipes evolved, and how ingredient availability lent to innovation (or not). From medieval communal eating to food etiquette, this is a solid survey that uses a range of resources to reconstruct the history and evolution of not just Italian food, but Italian traditions.
The Food Activist Handbook
Ali Berlow
Storey Publishing
210 Mass MoCA Way, North Adams, MA 01247
9781612121802 $17.95 www.storey.com
The Food Activist Handbook provides a political view of food systems, their dysfunctions, and how to make community-level changes in food distribution and growth to return food to small-scale management, and is a top pick for any interested in developing community food projects from neighborhood gardens and harvesting methods to setting up a community composting program. It discusses food pantries and how they can connect with local producers and products, it considers ethnic food traditions, and it advocates being a 'guerrilla gardener', among other approaches, to keep food fresh, healthy, and at a small-scale community level. Any interested in the intrusion of big business and agribusiness into the food chain will find this handbook offers solid, practical recipes for success based on country-wide small community experiences.
Pig Tales
Barry Estabrook
W. W. Norton & Company
500 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10110
www.wwnorton.com
9780393240245 $26.95 www.amazon.com
Pig Tales: An Omnivore's Quest for Sustainable Meat comes from a prize-winning food writer who here examines the American pork industry, and uses his same light conversational style to inquire into American methods of raising, processing, cooking and presenting pork. It's filled with both insights into the idea and challenges of sustainable meat and keys to understanding why pork from such animals looks and tastes more succulent than the ordinary factory pork most Americans are more familiar with, and it considers the finer points of commercial pig farming, wild pig harvesting, and more. The result is a 'must' for any interested in the possibilities of the pig.
Darjeeling
Jeff Koehler
Bloomsbury Press
175 Fifth Avenue, Suite 315, New York, NY 10010
9781620405123 $27.00 www.bloomsbury.com
Darjeeling: The Colorful History and Precarious Fate of the World's Greatest Tea surpasses most explorations of tea history in that it narrows its focus to Darjeeling's tea bushes and their story, following how India's tea industry grew to be the biggest in the world and considering how it came to symbolize British rule in India. Any with an affection for tea and history will find this a solid story of family plantations, political influences on tea development, discussions of tea's organic future, and more. The history also involves a sense of place, so others interested in India's overall history, culture, and agriculture will find Darjeeling explores the tea, the people, and the place with equal detail, all presented in a lively cup of wonder.
Eating Viet Nam
Graham Holliday
Anthony Bourdain Books / Ecco
c/o HarperCollins Publishers
10 East 53rd Street, New York, NY 10022-5299
www.eccobooks.com
9780062293053, $26.99, www.harpercollins.com
Eating Viet Nam: Dispatches from a Blue Plastic Table includes a foreword by culinary traveler Anthony Bourdain as it offers a journalist's take on Viet Nam, and while this book could have been featured in our Travel Shelf section, it's profiled here so that no fan of food misses it. The author, unlike most sojourners, wasn't keen on travel; but his curiosity about Viet Nam prompted him to journey halfway around the world and his particular focus was on living in the country, not just journeying through it. As such, he decided to focus on local food and searched for authentic Vietnamese cuisine. Eating Viet Nam chronicles this culinary journey where he risks disease and more to sample some of the dishes unique to that country. The result is an assessment of land and people but, most of all, of culinary traditions and specialties unique to Vietnam, making this book a recommended pick for any who would learn more about the region and the nation's byways and culinary oddities.
Collecting Culinaria
Caroline Lieffers & Merrill Distad
University of Alberta Press
Ring House 2, Edmonton, Alberta, Canada, T6G 2E1
www.uap.ualberta.ca
9781551953243, $35.95, 92pp, www.amazon.com
A cookbook is a kitchen reference publication that typically contains a collection of recipes. Modern versions may also include colorful illustrations and advice on purchasing quality ingredients or making substitutions. Cookbooks can also cover a wide variety of topics, including cooking techniques for the home, recipes and commentary from famous chefs, institutional kitchen manuals, and cultural commentary. Cookbooks are often collected as a kind of culinary hobby by women. Linda Distad was a University of Alberta librarian who died in 2012. Linda Distad had passion for heritage recipes; her collection ran to more than 3,000 titles and was donated to the Bruce Peel Special Collections Library of the University of Alberta. Compiled by Caroline Lieffers and Merrill Distad, "Collecting Culinaria: Cookbooks and domestic manuals mainly from the Linda Miron Distad Collection" is a profusely illustrated, 92 page compendium sampling and showcasing the diversity of Linda Distad's collection of cookbooks and domestic manuals. Unique, impressive, and inherently fascinating, "Collecting Culinaria" is highly recommended to the attention of cookbook collection enthusiasts and would well serve as a template for other curators hosting similar large collections of cookbooks.
Cranberries Revealed
Wayne R. Martin
Martin Photo Media LLC
13245 North 55th Avenue, Plymouth, MN 55442
9780990812906, $24.95, www.cranberriesrevealed.com
Cranberries are a group of evergreen dwarf shrubs or trailing vines in the subgenus Oxycoccus of the genus Vaccinium. In North America, cranberry may refer to Vaccinium macrocarpon. Cranberries are low, creeping shrubs or vines up to 2 meters (7 ft) long and 5 to 20 centimeters (2 to 8 in) in height; they have slender, wiry stems that are not thickly woody and have small evergreen leaves. The flowers are dark pink, with very distinct reflexed petals, leaving the style and stamens fully exposed and pointing forward. They are pollinated by bees. The fruit is a berry that is larger than the leaves of the plant; it is initially white, but turns a deep red when fully ripe. It is edible, with an acidic taste that can overwhelm its sweetness. Cranberries are a major commercial crop in certain American states and Canadian provinces. Most cranberries are processed into products such as juice, sauce, jam, and sweetened dried cranberries, with the remainder sold fresh to consumers. Cranberry sauce is a traditional accompaniment to Thanksgiving dinners in the United States. Since the early 21st century within the global functional food industry, raw cranberries have been marketed as a "super fruit" due to their nutrient content and antioxidant qualities. "Cranberries Revealed: From The Marsh To The Table" is an 84 page profusely illustrated compendium by photojournalist and freelance commercial photographer Wayne R. Martin that takes the reader on a truly impressive visual journey into the world of cranberries that goes quite literarily from the marshes where they grow to some truly nutritious and delicious cranberry cuisine. Deftly organized and presented in three major sections (Art and Beauty of the Cranberry; Cranberry Culture; Cranberry Inspirations), "Cranberries Revealed: From The Marsh To The Table" will prove an enduringly popular addition to community library collections and should be considered a "must" for all cranberry enthusiasts!
EDITOR'S NOTE:
The Midwest Book Review is an organization of volunteers committed to promoting literacy, library usage, and small press publishing. We accept no funds from authors or publishers. Full permission is given to post any of these reviews on thematically appropriate websites, newsgroups, listserves, internet discussion groups, organizational newsletters, or to interested individuals. Please give the Midwest Book Review a credit line when doing so.
The Midwest Book Review publishes the monthly book review magazines "California Bookwatch", "Internet Bookwatch", "Children's Bookwatch", "MBR Bookwatch", "Reviewer's Bookwatch", and "Small Press Bookwatch". All are available for free on the Midwest Book Review website at www (dot) midwestbookreview (dot) com
Anyone wanting to submit books for review consideration can send them to:
James A. Cox, Editor-in-Chief
Midwest Book Review
278 Orchard Drive
Oregon, WI 53575-1129
To submit reviews of any fiction or non-fiction books, email them to Frugalmuse (at) aol (dot) com (Be sure to include the book title, author, publisher, publisher address, publisher website/phone number, 13-digit ISBN number, and list price).
James A. Cox, Editor-in-Chief
Midwest Book Review
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