Last Chance to Eat The world needs another food dirge like it needs more genetically modified soybeans. Anyone halfway sentient knows the situation is dire and getting grimmer as the mad cows and microwave pizzas and breakfast Whoppers keep coming. But Gina Mallet’s first book is nothing like its ominous title. More memoir than sermon, less a wake than a celebration, it’s a rich and evocative ode to a wondrous food supply that once was and could be again.
World on a Plate My most literary friend, a novelist who puts his advances into tangibles, once asked me, after yet another inflated check for yet another mediocre meal in still another trendy restaurant: “Don’t you ever eat in a dive?” I recall getting rather huffy but then conceding, “No, not in the alleged First World.” Let’s be serious. I was toilet-trained in an outhouse; I was weaned on beans and cornbread off a wood-burning stove -- I need a certain level of comfort with my food anymore. But clearly I’m much less choosy with books, since I thoroughly enjoyed one most creme brulee eaters would write off as so much Colombo frozen yogurt.
Eating Crow If you think a high-profile restaurant critic should know how to cook, know how to eat, know how to articulate with some wit what makes a dish good and a restaurant worth trying, you’ll be sorry when you read “Eating Crow.” Nothing makes all those points more clearly than this sharply written, quite funny and immensely entertaining novel by a reviewer from the highest caste in the profession: British. And knowing such a character exists makes the absence here more obvious.
The Pedant in the Kitchen Anyone doubting that the Brits are different from you and me has only to flip open Julian Barnes’ foray into food, a collection of columns from the Guardian, the newspaper that has become the must-read for Americans stranded with an apparently enslaved press. Not only does the prolific novelist (and translator of “In the Land of Pain”) get away with words like prelapsarian and pertinacity, words editors here would dumb down for a Food Network audience. But he also has more ideas per chapter than any six Americans.
The Breakaway Japanese Kitchen Japanese and fusion are two cuisines that make me nervous. One is daunting and the other usually a disaster. But the best new book I’ve cooked from in months dabbles in both -- edamame in mint pesto; shiso with corn -- and nothing is lost in translation.
Coming Home to Eat The idea of a “food diary” has lately been touted as the brightest innovation in literature since the illuminated text. But any reader looking for more meat than froth can find it in Gary Paul Nabhan’s deep, witty and very self-aware account of the year he devoted to food “grown, fished or gathered” within 200 miles of his Arizona kitchen. Fat Land Until I read Greg Critser’s scarifying “Fat Land,” I thought I had pegged all the vices behind the Macy’s ballooning of America, from fast-food gluttony to TV-remote sloth. Who knew I was part of the problem . . .
Kitchen Essays |
