World Cheese Book

Juliet Harbutt

(DK; US: Oct 2009)

 Amazon

Once you’ve tasted eight-year-old Gouda, turned deep orange with brownish edges, almost crunchy hard it’s so dry, and with that distinct flavor of tangy almond, you’ll never go back to the pale, soft, ‘baby’ Gouda stuff again. Well, you might, but you’ve learned to love old mold, and you’re now ripe for a book like this. If you’re reading this, you probably live in a time and place of relative abundance, wherein the world comes to your grocery store or to that specialty shop just a few miles away. Before you head out the door, credit card in hand, use this book as your guide. Between these pages lay the wisdom from experts in their regions on cheese produced throughout the world. The descriptions will evoke mouth-watering flavors. The suggestions on how to best enjoy a cheese (nibbled with a sip of fruity wine or eaten robustly and washed down with a hearty Belgian ale, spread on a cracker, or best melted in a pot to pour on vegetables) will make you want to make a party of your discoveries. The historical, regional, technological and other practical trivia of cheese production will feed the geeky side. Pity the poor sod who can’t appreciate the bacterium that renders Limburger so (a moment for a deep inhale) absolutely delicious!

—Karen Zarker

Gourmet Today: More than 1000 All-New Recipes for the Contemporary Kitchen

Ruth Reichel

(Houghton Mifflin Harcourt; US: Sep 2009)

 Amazon

The shelves of Borders, Barnes and Noble, Waterstones, Chapters and the virtual ones of Amazon are stocked to the gills with cookbooks of every stripe and persuasion. Honestly, it can be quite overwhelming, even for the foodie. The greatest thing about Gourmet Today is the focus on pure fundamentals from drinks and appetizers through to main courses and desserts. This book doesn’t feature gimmicks or high tech wizardry, it focuses on the classics in a modern context. So you can learn to concoct the perfect Gin Rickey before serving up a beautiful Wiener Schnitzel (as I did recently) or crawfish etouffee for dinner and bangers and mash for breakfast. It has many world cuisine classics and it’s perfectly edited to provide the real cook with practical information about what she needs in her repertoire. These are all easily achievable recipes for the home cook with a good sense of flavor and taste. Better yet, buy the book and you can also get a free one-year subscription to the highly regarded Bon Appetit magazine. Now that makes for a good gift that’s quite unlike so many others.

AMAZON

—Sarah Zupko

The Food of a Younger Land

Mark Kurlansky

(Riverhead Books; US: May 2009)

 Amazon

• Review [23.Jul.2009]

In this era of factory produced food, mammoth corporate chain restaurants, and the overall reliance on poor quality fast and frozen food, a counter food movement focused on the local, organic and sustainable has been gaining more steam every day. That’s hardly surprising. Many of us seem to realize something vital is missing in our basic culinary lives and much of that boils down to simplicity, tradition and uniqueness. There was actually a time in the recent past when Americans enjoyed locally grown vegetables, filled their tables with meat from animals raised according to ethical traditions, and shopped each day for the fresh items needed for the day’s meals.

Mark Kurlansky , who previously wrote the fabulous food histories Cod: A Biography of the Fish That Changed the World and Salt: A World History, now offers up a portrait of the US “before the national highway system, before the chain restaurants, and before frozen food, when the nation’s food was seasonal, and traditional.” You see, back during the Depression, FDR’s Works Progress Administration employed scores of writers and a number of those writers were sent out into the field to record American cooking and eating habits. The result is a documentary time capsule, capturing this moment of social history right before it was about to change forever in the period of post-war prosperity that saw the birth of mass food production and the TV dinner. Kurlansky brings together many of these writings to paint a portrait of a gloriously un-homogenized America.

AMAZON

—Sarah Zupko

Top Chef: The Quickfire Cookbook

(Chronicle; US: Sep 2009)

 Amazon

This ain’t your grandma’s recipe book. Following the success of the New York Times bestselling Top Chef: The Cookbook, the brainchildren behind Bravo’s hit show for foodies is back with Top Chef: The Quickfire Cookbook. This Top Chef sequel challenges the home cook to tackle a myriad of fine dining and street dishes from the winning quickfire recipes of the chef’testants over the first five seasons. Not only that, food lovers anywhere can bring the culinary smackdown to home kitchens with guides to classic quickfire challenges including the Mise-en-Place Relay race or the Blind Taste Test. Like any good book on food, the Top Chef Quickfire Cookbook features sidebars on techniques, ingredients, and menu ideas all in the flash-in-the-pan fashion that is Top Chef.  There’s even a short intro to molecular gastronomy if you wanna get really fancy. Top Chef: The Quickfire Cookbook is the perfect gift for the Top Chef wannabes in your life.

—Eleanore Catolico

NPR’s Cake Lady Melissa Gray offers her delectable cake recipes in her new cookbook All Cakes Considered. Gray’s recipes are easily read and practical for anyone who loves to bake. The book is divided according to each genre of baking and recipes according to techniques, ingredients, and supplies in order to make treats for the office, a party, or your family. With sensuously luscious illustrations of over 50 cakes including Brown Sugar Pound Cake, Peppermint and Chocolate Rum Marble Cake, Lord and Lady Baltimore Cakes, Dark-Chocolate Red Velvet Cake, just to name a few, this book is an essential for friends with a dessert fetish. All Cakes Considered is mmm mmm good and then some.

—Eleanore Catolico

“Holiday spirits. High spirits. Alcoholic spirits. ‘Tis the season for much spiritedness! In the spirit of extending the rest-of-the-year happy hour into a happy, oh, week or two with the help of some delicious, chemical-aided happiness PopMatters highly recommends these two books for the holiday season and for many, many days beyond, as the spirit (tee hee) moves you. Start with a classy selection of cocktail classics with The Essential Cocktail. Here you’ll find none of that overly sweet, headache-inducing stuff found in every-bar, America, but rather time-tested cocktails replete with anecdotal history lessons right next to the recipes that are in themselves far more informative than just ““2 parts xx to 1 part xx”“. I eagerly await my first foray into mixing Angostura bitters ‘just right’ with this book to guide me. 

‘Tis not good to drink on an empty stomach. Best to sop up the above cocktails with booze-infused foods from Peterson’s Holiday Helper.  Pumpkin pie with Amaretto? Why not? Chicken broth with vodka? I’ll give it a shot. Funny little vignettes about scenarios at office parties and scenes of house-bound, wound-up hyper kids on school holiday blink like Christmas lights from page to page. Whomever hosts parties inspired by these books, be prepared to have guests stay the night on the couch, in the bathtub, on the kitchen floor…”

The Essential Cocktail: The Art of Mixing Perfect Drinks
Peterson’s Holiday Helper: Festive Pick-Me-Ups, Calm-Me-Downs, and Handy Hints to Keep You in Good Spirits

—Karen Zarker