New Books In Food

Not many of us, not even the most ardent foodies, think of the crab apple as a fruit worth eating, much less extolling, but Henry David Thoreau saw something like the American pioneer spirit in this hard, gnarled, sour hunk of fruit. In his essay “Wild Apples,” he celebrates the apple because it “emulates man’s independence and enterprise.” Like America’s first settlers, he goes on, “it has migrated to this New World, and is even, here and there, making its way amid the aboriginal trees.” He claims that “[e]ven the sourest and crabbedest apple, growing in the most unfavorable position, suggests such thoughts as these, it is so noble a fruit.” William Kerrigan quotes from this passage at the start of his fascinating book, Johnny Appleseed and the American Orchard: A Cultural History (The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2012) and he shows us the man behind the myth, a man very different from the one we might expect, but a man who nonetheless seems like

I confess I knew nothing about Julia Child prior to reading Bob Spitz‘s new book. And yet, from the dramatic opening passages through its 500+ pages, Dearie: The Remarkable Life of Julia Child (Knopf, 2012) held me captive. How many people, much less women, change our attitudes, beliefs, and culture? Julia Child did. Perhaps even more impressive is the fact that she did so by becoming a television star at the age of 50. One of the problems of biography is that women’s lives are so often written so badly. Whereas the telling of men’s lives emphasizes adventure, in the lives of women biographers tend to emphasize relationships and romance. Not so Dearie. From the outset, Spitz contends that Child led a life of adventure and, while her relationships play a role in the story, they are not at its center. Rather, Child is the star from page 1. Thus, Dearie is an unconventional story of an unconventional woman who made unconventional decisions. Which is to say, biographically speaking, it is a brea

With elegant and accessible prose, Catherine Higgs takes us on a journey in Chocolate Islands: Cocoa, Slavery, and Colonial Africa (Ohio University Press, 2012). It is a fascinating voyage fueled by the correspondence of Joseph Burtt, a man who had helped found a utopian commune before being sent by the chocolate magnate William Cadbury in the early 1900s to investigate labor conditions on cocoa plantations in Africa. For almost two years, Burtt observed and wrote and fevered his way to the large Portuguese colony of Angola, to Mozambique in Portuguese East Africa, and finally to Transvaal in British southern Africa. Higgs’s wonderfully evocative account uses Burtt’s journey to tell a much larger story about competing British and Portuguese colonial interests in Africa that was fueled, in part, by tensions over very different notions of “labor” and “slavery.” It is a story of the co-creation of two vital commodities of the twentieth century – chocolate and human being

Did Proust have it right? Does food, whether it’s a madeleine from an aristocratic childhood or the Velveeta mac-and-cheese my mom used to make, have a special significance for our memory, perhaps even our very being? In his new book, The Omnivorous Mind: Our Evolving Relationship to Food (Harvard University Press, 2012), neuroanthropologist John. S. Allen takes up this question by guiding us into the inner structures of the brain, into the hippocampus and amygdala, where memories and emotions mix and where food plays a surprising role. But Allen’s book doesn’t just journey into the brain. It travels back in time, to the origins of modern humanity, showing us how our evolutionary past shapes our eating present. Along the way, we learn about the eating habits of Neanderthals and chimpanzees; we discover the benefits of being omnivores and even superomnivores; and we investigate why a food quality as seemingly straightforward as crispiness makes our mouths water. Here’s a hint: the exosk

Restaurants almost feel indigenous to American landscape, whether you're weaving past them by the thousands when you're driving through a metropolis on the East or West Coast or whether, like me, you find yourself in a small town in the middle of the Midwest, which still manages to boast one Indian restaurant, two Middle Eastern restaurants, and a handful of Mexican and Chinese restaurants. But did you ever wonder just how someone living in Athens, Ohio, could end up eating seaweed egg drop soup on a Tuesday night in September? How exactly did we, as Americans, come to embrace such a rich and ethnically diverse restaurant culture? This is one of the many fascinating questions that Andrew P. Haley explores in Turning the Tables: Restaurants and the Rise of the American Middle Class, 1880-1920 (University of North Carolina Press, 2011). Haley's book tells the story of a middle-class revolution, one that changed American restaurants from aristocratic establishments in the thrall of French culture and French food

Roel Sterckx‘s book Food, Sacrifice, and Sagehood in Early China (Cambridge University Press, 2011) had me at drunken seances. (Drunken seances! Do you really need another excuse to read it?) It is a compelling and engaging read, and a wonderful resource for anyone interested in early China, the history of food, ritual studies, or the history of sensation. Sterckx’s work explores the culture, philosophies, and practices of sacrificial religion in early China, focusing on the ways that food and consumption at the dinner table and ritual altar helped shape ways of thinking about human sagehood and the relationships between the human and spirit worlds. The book ranges from the practices and language of cooking to the spiritual sensorium, from sacrificial procedure as a search and a multimedia event to the portrayal of Confucius in early texts about dining and sacrifice, from lively butchers to bland stews. In a particularly fascinating chapter on the economy of religious sacrifice, Sterckx considers

Merry (Corky) White‘s new book Coffee Life in Japan (University of California Press, 2012) opens with a memory of stripping naked and being painted blue in an underground coffeehouse, and closes with a guide to some of the author’s favorite cafes in Japan. This framing alone is worth the price of admission. In addition to being an extraordinarily spirited, witty, and enjoyable book, however, Coffee Life in Japan is also a thoughtfully argued and exhaustively researched account of the history and ethnography of coffee and cafes in modern Japan. This wide-ranging and trans-disciplinary work explores the spaces of the modern cafe, be they social, solitary, or occasionally silent and sprinkled with stuffed animals. White introduces readers to chapters-ful of fascinating characters, including passionate coffee experts who train like dancers to learn to create the perfect cup. This is a surprising book, a pleasure to read, and a treasure for anyone interested in the history of drink, of global commoditi

When was the last time you ate some chocolate? If you live in the developed world there’s a strong chance that you’ve been munching on some fairly recently. At the basic level chocolate is an everyday treat and at the top end it is a seriously indulgent luxury product. But how much thought have you ever put into where that chocolate comes from and how it touches the lives of those involved in making it – and the countries in which they live? If you live in the parts of Africa at the centre of the world’s cocoa crop it is unlikely that you’ve ever tasted chocolate in its final, consumer form. In places like Cote d’Ivoire and Ghana cocoa is a crop, a commodity and a mainstay of the economy. Orla Ryan‘s Chocolate Nations: Living and Dying for Cocoa in West Africa (Zed Books, 2011) is an attempt to tease out the complex interplay between cocoa, the farmers who grow it and the fortunes of the wider societies. She examines issues like child slavery (a favourite campaign sub

Hobson-Jobson was not just about administration and geopolitics- the language of Empire extended to its culinary endeavours as well. Thus chota hazri, tiffin,and curry puffs at Peliti’s were the things that sustained an army of civil servants as they went about registering land records in the United Provinces, negotiating with Malay sultans or checking out logging operations in Sabah. Cecilia Leong-Salobir’s book, Food Culture in Colonial Asia: A Taste of Empire (Routledge, 2011), looks at the gastronomic side of things in Britain’s tropical, Asiatic Empire -India, Malaya and Singapore. It looks at the things administrators, soldiers and commercial workers ate on various occasions- in the dak bungalow, on camping tours, at grand dinner parties – and how they went about preparing their victuals- mostly with the help of domestic staff, Muslim, Goan, Malay and Chinese, cooks of whom they had criticisms aplenty to make, yet in the end trusted with the task of cooking for their families. An

Cuisine in early modern Japan was experienced and negotiated through literature and ritual, and the uneaten or inedible was often as important as what was actually consumed. Eric Rath‘s recent book Food and Fantasy in Early Modern Japan (University of California Press, 2010) is a rich study of the culture, practices, performance, and literature of food in early modern Japan. Rath takes us from medieval culinary manuscripts penned by men of the knife, all the way to sukiyaki recipes clipped from newspapers in 1950s America. Focusing on late medieval culinary manuscripts and early modern printed cookbooks, Rath shows that cuisine in pre-modern Japan blended the edible with the uneaten, puns with pickles, and rituals with rice cakes. This is a wonderfully written account of the history of food in its many spaces: on the page, on the cutting board, on the tray, in the kitchen, and in transit. In the course of our interview we talked about the practical challenges of researching the history of cuisine in ear

Danyelle Freeman, better known as “Restaurant Girl” and a judge on Top Chef Masters, is single. But if you are considering asking out the petite and spunky brunette, you are going to have to compete with some stiff competition. “I prefer a great steak over a great man,” Danyelle said during an interview I did with her at a Borders bookstore in New York on the occasion of the release of her new book Try This: Traveling the Globe without Leaving the Table (Ecco, 2011) The book is a memoir of Danyelle’s appetite, blending a trip through her experiences with different ethnic foods with some very detailed information about each cuisine. For instance: pick up a piece of nigiri sushi with your fingers – not chopsticks – by the rice and dip only the fish into soy sauce, and only a little, and don’t add wasabi to the sauce but only onto the fish directly in a small amount. Not because this is the proper way, but because this proper way enhances the experience. The interv