The best food books of the decade

Michael Pollan's 'In Defense of Food" is an esay read.  Its engaging, staightforward and gives you something to think about.

I'm surprise Fast Food Nation is not on that list. However, I was pleased to see Bourdain's book up there. That novel definitely got me to avoid restaurants like the plague after reading it. I'll go out to eat now and then, but only to places I know and trust.

Books about food and books about music are a lot alike.... When one reads a novel one must be able to imagine the scenes and populate the world described -- but the author has hundreds of pages to paint the scene(s).  In books about music, the vocabulary is primitive and describing the passages is so much less satisfying than actually hearing them.  So too books about food....  I made chocolate chip cookies the other day with my grandson, age 3-1/2, and I could describe the process in enough detail to make the experience come alive for those who are literate (those who can read...) -- but reproducing the recipe on the back of the Nestle's Chocoloate Morsel bag here couldn't come close to conveying the taste of the cookies, or the fun of making them.  That's why I don't read recipe books for fun.  I guess I'm like the human being who complained, 'But I don't see ultraviolet!'  Indeed he didn't, and the butterflies all laughed at him....

Its hard to read about food unless you're reading for a purpose.  Eating is a sensual experience.  Cooking is equal parts art and science.  Journalists and novelists who write about food possess a rare talent that is not needed by those who write about music or other forms of entertainment. 

As we proceed up Maslow's pyramid, eating transcends from survival to aesthetic and we evolve from grunts of approval and guarding our grub to producing art on a plate with a host of professionals to describe to us what our taste buds should be sensing.  Like fashion, it becomes a statement about us, where we've been and what we know about such things and how much we are willing to pay. That's all fine and makes for great conversation; of course, the more the better I say as a capitalist and libertarian. As long as it's art or food for art or food's sake. But snobbery about these things is just not cool. My mom (who lives on a shoestring budget) still makes a meatloaf that is quite extraordinary and as a southerner her banana pudding is pure delight.
 As a semi-eclectic wannabe, I use all of the info from all the media to produce a hybrid approach for myself so cuisine can be five star of often a good Chardonnay with a grilled cheese is just fine, perhaps with an Oreo as the piece de resistance. 

It all comes down to comfort food.  `Meatloaf will probably become the next chic thing as so few young professionals have ever learned to make it. 
 

I like to curl up in bed w/ a cat or two on a rainy day & read books & magazines. Sometimes I enjoy a cookbook thrown in- especially if it has a story. I just got the "21 Club" book of menus, recipes, & the history of that restaurant  at the library. I may curl up w/ my sweetheart later & read.
 
TT- never underestimate the power of a great meatloaf- those comfort foods (especially when made by our mothers- mine is on a shoestring budget too- making it all the more special) become the best meal ever.
There is a vast difference between appreciating wonderful food & being a food snob- the latter being a HUGE bore.

Animal, Vegetable, Miracle by Barbara Kingsolver changed my life.

I tend to approach my cooking like my art. When I do go to a book it is to see how others have approached the subject before.  Pieta's and Paella's for example. Pieta's are always the same subject matter, but Michelangelo's interpretation is very different from Kathe Kollwitz. The same is true for Paella, similar ingredients; different interpretation. I will look at four or five recipes, and then adapt it to my own interpretation...
 
It usually works, sometimes I end up ordering take out.
 

I tend to approach my cooking like my art. When I do go to a book it is to see how others have approached the subject before.  's and Paella's for example. 's are always the same subject matter, but Michelangelo's interpretation is very different from Kathe Kollwitz. The same is true for Paella, similar ingredients; different interpretation. I will look at four or five recipes, and then adapt it to my own interpretation...  
 
It usually works, sometimes I end up ordering take out.

This conversation has made me somewhat ravenous. So I shall don my Christmas Shanghai Collar shirt from J. Peterman and have a dose of very cost effective Cashew Chicken. I shall be quite comfortable (and happy) I would suspect. I have to admit I did splurge for some custom chopsticks. Sets the mood doncha think?

Wow...how did that happen? Ignore one of those.

Bebe~The 21 Club has meatloaf on their lunch menu.  (Its veal meatloaf.)
 
I didn't know that they had a book out.
 
They just had they're annual Salvation Army Band event last week.  Unfortuanately, I was too busy to attend this year, but that is one of the best kept secrets of the New York holiday season. 
 
I'm going to look that book this week. 
 

JULIA- Do tell about this "21" event please!!!!!!!!!!!! It sounds like you have been before.
 
Must know more...

Doc Nolan is quite right..... To me food and music are pleasures that are almost selfishly enjoyed best.  Through much use we've all agreed upon a vocabulary to describe the visual that means the same to all of us.  "Big red cube." I daresay that all of us visualized the same thing.  The gustatory pleasures are a different thing.....I smell/taste caramelized sugars in bread--my husband smells/tastes burned toast!! So also, auditorially--those exquisite high notes that delight some, can actually cause acute discomfort to others.  In the group Chanticleer their bass is the deepest most profound bass I've heard and I love his part.  To others bass is simply a mushy pulse somewhere down at the bottom.  Or that thing that makes your car vibrate when someone who has theirs turned up full blast pulls up next to you at a stop light! Perhaps because while visual art--painting, photos, sculpture--are lasting and the enjoyment of music and food are fleeting.  Experienced and done.  Yes, the piece of music can be replayed.  Just like the recipe can be made again.  But capturing it's essence is done only once.  
 

 Julia Masi,

"Cooking is equal parts art and science." To which one might add: Soul.

The evidence around here, is watching my wife looking never more beautiful than aproned with flour or chocolate on her nose, knocking out batches of vegan candy, cookies and pies.





Nathan "Nodaju" (his term) Raskin presents a year end quiz based mostly on the memories of  persons privileged to have seen his family's kitchen videos.

For years they had multi-camera presentations of what went on there and it was informative as well as fascinating viewing.

Last year, I skunked all opposition by being most precise in defining the purpose of the deep black bowl always seen near the whisks on a window counter: "To aid in the detection of nasty bits of eggshell."

I can't help it if Nate expresses himself in the same slightly annoying way as I do making it easier to recall his exact words.

With that little coup came the honor of posing my own tie-breaker question for this year.

It was embarrassingly simple: "Name the olive oil in evidence in two-liter cans, cases and bottles all over the kitchen." And then, to add insult to well, insult: "in twelve letters."

The fact that it is less expensive or pretentious than most of them use at home probably helped but only twenty percent got it right. Twenty percent got it wrong and the rest goofed up the spelling. The intent was not evil but the ragged results were downright funny.
 

Every year during the Salvation Army's Christmas fundraising drive the 21 Club does a series of prix fixe menu lunches and dinners.  The Salvation Army band plays and they pass a top hat.  I assume that  The 21 Club donates a portion of the proceeds, but passing the top hat just adds a little novelty to it.  The music is all the standard Christmas caroles.  Its beautiful and a lot of people sing along. 
 
As far as landmark resturants in NYC go, the 21 Club is not too bad price wise.  They have a few prix fixe menues that are moderate. I used to be very involved with the museum crowd, the Junior Associates at MOMA and the Young Collectors Coucil at the Guggenheim.  Most of the members would do something at 21 for a 21st birthday. 
 
Its  the kind of place Bert would love.  It draws elegant, unpretensious New Yorkers and CEO types.  Most of the celebreties are off in the private rooms.
 
  

  
The food writings of Calvin Trillin and Jeffrey Steingarten are enjoyable and for many years I have regretted losing track of a very excellent Sherlock Holmes related novel in which food played a large part.

We are more lunch and supper than dinner people.

Chefs are known by the new ideas that they come up with but cooks are my favorites for preserving the old proven wonders and often cooking up powerful personal meals out of their own memories and respect for what they know you love to eat.

so Stoney...........that's why the apple pie you so generously offered my yesterday was so good and so satisfying.  Ahhh..........

M.F.K. Fisher:
To my mind, she was the most excellent and entertaining food writer I've ever come across.  I didn't read her for the "food" so much as to climb between the covers of her books and let myself be taken into her life and "listen" to her stories.
 
"People ask me: Why do you write about food, and eating, and drinking? Why don't you write about the struggle for power and security and about love, the way others do?

They ask it accusingly, as if I were somehow gross, unfaithful to the honor of my craft.

The easiest answer is to say that, like most other humans, I am hungry. But there is more than that. It seems to me that our three basic needs, for food and security and love, are so mixed and mingled and entwined that we cannot straightly think of one without the others. So it happens that when I write of hunger, I am really writing about love and the hunger for it, and warmth and the love of it and the hunger for it...and then the warmth and richness and fine reality of hunger satisfied...and it is all one."  ~ from "The Gastronomical Me" by M.F.K. Fisher
 
M.F.K. Fisher was the only food writer I really wanted to meet in person, had that been possible in time and space. which it wasn't.  Julia Child was the other -- like Mary Francis Kennedy Fisher, she was so very real.  (I can still hear her say "bon appetit!" in that one of a kind voice of hers.)
 
 
More M.F.K. Fisher books and collections:
 
The Art of Eating is really five books in one. It contains the following works: Serve It Forth, Consider The Oyster, How To Cook A Wolf, The Gastronomical Me, and An Alphabet For Gourmets.  This is the first collection of her writing, and if you're thinking of reading one of her books, read this one.  It's great, for foodies and non-foodies, alike. 
 
As They Were
 
Among Friends
 
Two Towns in Provence
 
 
As They Were and Among Friends are more autobiographical, less food-y, but not entirely of course.  And the last is of course M.F.K. Fisher writing of her time in France; Francophiles should probably read this first, it might be all they want or need of Mary Francis Fisher.  But I took them all on, over the years, and I'm really glad I did.
 

 
Carol,

Preslicely!

Park4,

Forgot all about her magical way with simple food and simple words. My kinda woman.

This has absolutely NOTHING to do with anything being discussed here!  Enjoy at your own risk: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8cBtid-v_JE

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FQMbXvn2RNI
this is the one you will be singing tomorrow

My favorite foodie was Geof Smith, The Frugal Gourmet.
Now I know he was defamed, but my sincere belief was that he was wrongly interpreted....
At any rate, he taught me more about food and its origins,and preperations,and its place in our primal mammal memory-olfactory,familial,etc.
and, as you may remember from an earlier scree of mine;there were genius teachers,cooks,philosophers,builders,engineers,et.al.,long before a written,or spoken,language....that is why we have one;to pass on those incredible receipes,and stories,and the places we gathered