Voracious - Cara Nicoletti

When I first saw Voracious' description, I thought it would be love at first read.  "A Hungry Reader Cooks Her Way Through Great Books."  What more could a hungry reader who reads her way through great books want?  Well, the answer is apparently something other than Voracious, because while this book had nice parts, it wasn't really what I wanted.

Cara Nicoletti is a woman with a career in the food industry and a love of books.  Our love of books doesn't always overlap--I've only read a few of the books she covers in Voracious--but that didn't really matter to me.  What mattered to me was that she is also the author of the blog Yummy Books (last updated in 2015) and a blog is exactly what this book reads like.  This was my issue with What If? as well; it didn't read like new material, but like material that was just recycled into book form from the blog.  And here's the other thing: I like blogs, I like food, but I generally don't like food blogs.

Yes.  I said it.  Here's the thing.  For some reason, food blogs seem to have this thing about them that no other type of blog I've encountered has, and that's that food bloggers seem to feel the need to put deep and personal stories in front of all of their posts, when what I really want is just the recipe.  My favorite food blog, Budget Bytes, falls into this pitfall as well, though maybe not to the same degree as other ones.  As you've probably gathered from the preceding sentence, I don't particularly care about these personal stories.  And that was exactly the case here.  I really liked the parts of this book where Nicoletti dug into the books she talked about, showed how food played into them and how the characters in the books used food in their lives, or abhorred it.  But I didn't particularly like the stories about Nicoletti's life.  While her life in the food industry and in New York in general was no doubt interesting in its own way, it was the very last thing I was looking for in a book about food and other books, and consequently it did not hit the right note here.  I think this book might actually be aimed at people who already read and liked Nicoletti's blog, and were just looking for some new material in the book, other than an entirely new audience.

Overall, I'm just not convinced that blogs made into books are a good market.  They just seem to lack something that books actually conceived as books seem to have, and I haven't yet found one that's really worked.  So, while I liked the actually bookish parts of this and some of the recipes definitely seemed intriguing, the book as a whole didn't really agree with me.

2 stars out of 5.

Tender at the Bone - Ruth Reichl

I live in a magic neighborhood where people leave books out on their yard walls for passerby to take.  While heading to the convenience store for a sugar fix this weekend, I stumbled across a house that had so many books out!  Among them were a bunch of food memoirs, including this one.  I love books, I love food, I love books about food, so of course it found its way into my bag, along with about fifteen other ones.  How lucky that I took the bag with me!

I've come to the decision that I really like Ruth Reichl.  While her memoir about her time as a food critic at the New York Times, Garlic and Sapphires, wasn't a home run, it was still good, and her novel Delicious! was, in fact, delicious.  Now, I've moved on to Tender at the Bone, which is basically a memoir (albeit an embroidered one) about how Reichl grew up to love food and managed her crazy family.  Born in New York City, Reichl's mother suffered from bipolar disorder (though they didn't know this when Reichl was young) and went through manic stages that turned Reichl's life upside down.  Her mother was also a terrible cook.  However, Reichl loved food and found good food in plenty of other places, and came to learn to cook first as a necessity and then as a passion.  Watching this journey as she grows was fascinating, and I would have never thought that Reichl had such a tumultuous past!  From being shipped off to a boarding school in Montreal because of a passing comment about how she wished she spoke French to essentially living on her own when she was in high school to living in what was basically a hippie commune, it was all fascinating.

Was it all true?  Well... Reichl states in the preface to the book that embroidering, reordering, and sometimes just making up stories is a family tradition, and that she's done some altering to this memoir in order to make it flow better as a solid narrative.  I do appreciate that this one was in chronological order; if I recall correctly, Garlic and Sapphires jumped around a bit, which was disorientating.  But embroidered or not, I think this is a good memoir that makes the author more of a real person.  She suffered from imposter syndrome at various points, feeling like she was a fake, which is something I think we all struggle with sometimes.  And while I appreciated that her mother had a mental illness, I could also empathize with Reichl's yearning to sometimes just slap her mother upside the head and tell her to get over it; no matter how much you tell yourself it's not their fault, sometimes it just grates on your nerves.  The memoir is also interspersed with recipes that Reichl encountered for developed throughout her life.  These are at the beginnings of chapters, which is a little weird and led to some whacky formatting in the book, but I still appreciated them.  I might even try my hand at a lemon souffle someday.

Overall, this was a poignant and mouth-watering memoir, even embroidered as it is--and honestly, I don't mind a little embroidering as long as the author owns up to it, which Reichl did before she even got started.  I can't wait to read her other memoir, Comfort Me With Apples.

4 stars out of 5.

Stealing Buddha's Dinner - Bich Minh Nguyen

Stealing Buddha's Dinner has been on my "to read" list for a while, and when I needed a book written by or about an immigrant for my 2017 reading challenge, it seemed like the perfect time to finally get to it.

Nguyen, her father, sister, grandmother, two uncles, and an uncle's friend all fled Vietnam when she was eight months old in 1975, when the American were clearing out their embassy and Saigon was being bombed.  Arriving as refugees in the United States, they settled in Grand Rapids, Michigan.  Nugyen grew up as essentially American, not really being able to speak Vietnamese and wanting more than anything to be one of the "real" people she saw in commercials and TV shows and in books.  But as one of few Vietnamese or other minority people in "a sea of blond," things weren't as easy as she wanted them to be.  Nguyen wanted to assimilate, deeply, but still cherished the Vietnamese parts of her life.  Sitting with her grandmother in meditation, having fruit from the shrine in her house, the foods that her grandmother would make--Nguyen might have craved Tollhouse cookies and Otter Pops and 7UP and all manner of other "American" foods, but there was still a big Vietnamese part of her life, and she struggled with balancing it with her desperate need to fit in.

Nguyen has a way of making the most junky of all junk foods sound absolutely tantalizing, and she's easy to empathize with.  I didn't grow up an immigrant, but Nguyen manages to draw on the ostracism that most kids face at some point or another.  I was also the kid with glasses who wanted to read more than anything else, who didn't really have a lot of friends and felt like the parents of the friends I did have were always looking down on me.  By drawing on these experiences, Nguyen manages to build a bridge so that even those of us who don't share her exact background can understand her isolation and longing to belong.

The book is written in a non-linear style, which I don't mind, but it does seem a bit scattered in the beginning.  After the first few chapters, the parts of the book become more thematic, but the first few seem to flit from topic to topic with little cohesion.  Things come up and are dropped, never to be seen again or only to be seen at the very end of the book--a mention that her stepmother (who she really does view as her mother, not remembering her mother from Vietnam and not meeting her until she's in college) drew away and left the family, when in fact she didn't, and then the mention of her biological mother being left in Vietnam, which only comes up again much, much later.  It feels like these things were brought up for no reason at the time they were first mentioned, and could easily have been better woven in later, near where the actual exposition regarding them ended up.

Overall, this was a very enjoyable and poignant memoir about wanting to belong and not quite managing to do so.  Despite being born a quarter of a century after Nugyen, I could see a lot of parallels in our childhoods, and that really helped draw me into the narrative.  I've never had to balance two halves of myself like she did, but by evoking those parallels, she made the understanding easier, and that is a real accomplishment.

4 stars out of 5.

Garlic and Sapphires - Ruth Reichl

I read Ruth Reichl's novel, Delicous! a couple of years ago, and really enjoyed it.  Following a young woman who takes a job at a food magazine, only to find it shut down and that she's been left on as the only employee to uphold its "Delicious Guarantee," it's filled with the wonderful food scene of New York City to a woman who hasn't lived there her entire life.  Now, reading Reichl's nonfiction Garlic and Sapphire, I can see where so much of that book came from.

Garlic and Sapphires follows Reichl through her time as the food critic for the New York Times.  Coming from the Los Angeles Times, Reichl is stunned to realize that the restaurateurs of New York are prepared for her arrival, and decides that the only way she'll get a genuine eating experience is to don disguises.  And so begins a string of alter-egos that Reichl draws up, from the happy and flamboyant Brenda to the downright mean Emily to the semblance of her own mother, and more.  Of course, she doesn't do all of her dining anonymously, and the differences in treatment as her very own self and her alternate personas becomes evident pretty much immediately.  When she dines as herself, she's showered with good service, the raspberries on her tarts get bigger, she's showered with a wealth of deserts and tasting dishes.  When she dines anonymously, she gets the experience that pretty much any other diner would get, which varies wildly from place to place.

What I disliked about this book is that, while Reichl revels in her alternate identities, they seem to become an excuse for engaging in bad behavior more often than not.  She sends every dish in a meal back to the kitchen because it's what her mother would have done.  She's unnecessarily cruel to a young couple sitting at the next table over.  She does realize this, in the end, but only because a friend points it out, and she never really takes responsibility for the things that she does while in disguise.  She acts like, when she puts on a wig, fake makeup, and clothes from the thrift store, she actually becomes another person, with no control over her own actions, when in fact that isn't the case.  She never really owns up to this, just decides to put the whole thing behind her, and it made me really not like Reichl as much as a person.  Yes, the anecdotes she relates are entertaining, but underlying most of them is this subtle menace of bad behavior that will never be acknowledged or apologized for.

But one thing is certainly true: Reichl can write about food.  This shouldn't come as a surprise, given her stints as restaurant credit and editor of Gourmet magazine (now defunct), but the descriptions of food absolutely shine in this book.  She can make any meal seem appealing, even, strangely, the ones that she didn't actually enjoy.  It's the specter of good food, maybe, more than the actuality of it that does the trick.  It all comes back to something Reichl says early in the book: that restaurant reviews aren't written for the people that will eat at the restaurants, but for those who never will.  As someone who will definitely never eat at any of the restaurants Reichl describes (if they're still even open; she was the NYT critic in the early 90s) I can appreciate the luscious descriptions she puts down on the page, drawing out every experience as if I were actually there.

There was one more downfall to this book: it's repetitive.  Reichl follows her narrative experiences of restaurants with actual reviews of some of them, which usually tend to rehash a lot of the same stuff she just related.  She does intersperse the reviews and narratives with recipes, her own takes on some of the things that she ate, which helps to break this up, but not enough to completely save the book from its repetitive feel.

Overall, an enjoyable reading experience, but I have some reservations about the repetitiveness and the way that Reichl never really seems to own up to her bad behavior.  I'm interested in reading her other works--Delicious! was just so good--but while I liked this, I couldn't bring myself to love it.

3 stars out of 5.

Animal, Vegetable, Miracle - Barbara Kingsolver

This was the January 2017 pick for the Deliberate Reader Book Club.  I was a little leery of this book because of the title.  Animal, Vegetable, Miracle... It sounds like it's going to be preachy, doesn't it?  I've read some other Kingsolver books, though, and they weren't preachy, so I went for it.  What I didn't realize before starting it was that this is a nonfiction book!  Gasp!  The other Kingsolver books I've read were The Poisonwood Bible and The Bean Trees, which were both fiction, so I wasn't entirely sure what to expect with this.  (Clearly, I did not read the description beforehand.)

Well, it turns out that this is a book about Kingsolver and her family's year of eating locally--or at least as locally as possible.  Moving to southern Virginia from the deserts of Tucson, the family takes up a life of heavy-duty gardening, prowling farmer's markets, and canning every vegetable they can get their hands on.

The book is a bit preachy, with the first chapter probably being the worst.  Or maybe I just got used to it.  Either way, I almost didn't read this one because I didn't really want Kingsolver sneering down her nose at my non-local-food-eating ways for the duration.  But it's not preachy in a religious sense, and there's actually a lot of good information in here about why eating locally is good not just for you, but for your community and the environment.  The book is also partially authored by Steven Hopp, Kingsolver's husband, and Camille Kingsolver, her daughter.  Hopp contributes mini-essays about various topics, and always includes some additional resources at the end in case you'd like to look up more information on a particular topic.  Camille writes about her experiences with the "locavore" experiment and also includes recipes and meal plans that go with what's typically available seasonally.

Now, clearly eating entirely locally isn't possible for everyone.  It's not possible for me.  I live in a city and while there are farmer's markets, they're not present year-round, and I certainly don't have access to a garden plot.  (There is a community garden near my apartment but there's a two-year waiting list to get a spot in it; I might not even be here in two years!)  Even if I stocked up during the summer, I don't know where I would put all the food needed to get me through winter in my city-sized apartment.  It's not even strictly possible for the Kingsolver family to eat locally; she notes that they still have to buy some things, such as flour, olive oil, and pasta, from the store.  But there are some good points here that are applicable to a lot of people.  The one thing that struck me the most was that, if everyone at one meal per week that consisted of local foods, it would drastically lower the carbon emissions produced by transporting food across the country and across the world.  With global warming looming large, this is a huge thing to consider, and it's a very small change of habit to do.  I also found some of the insights about eating free-range and grass-fed meats (cows, chickens, pigs, etc.) to be very interesting; in addition to the animals themselves being healthier and (presumably) happier, the products are much better for us overall, too.  More good fats, less bad fats, lower cholesterol, etc.  And yes, those products are more expensive, but maybe it's something to keep in mind?

This book also presents something of an idyll.  "Oh, look how healthy and happy we are!" says Kingsolver.  Yes, she says there are still arguments, demands to get stuff off the table before it gets thrown out, but there are relatively few conflicts that actually seem to come from the locavore experiment itself, which seems strange and maybe not entirely honest.  All problems encountered here are easily solved and no great inconveniences presented.  But Kingsolver has such an eminently readable style that it almost made me forget about this.  Still, I have to eye it a little suspiciously, because hey, surely something must have gone horribly wrong over the course of this year-long experiment?

Overall, though, this was a much more enjoyable read than I anticipated.  I'm not sure how much of it will carry through into my life, but it definitely presents things to think about, and I'll try to keep some of them in mind while perusing the grocery store next time I'm there.

4 stars out of 5.

And a Bottle of Rum - Wayne Curtis

Let me put this out there to begin with: I am not a big drinker.  I can nurse a cocktail all night long, and beer and wine?  No, thank you.  That said, I don't mind reading about drinking.  And a Bottle of Rum: A History of the New World in Ten Cocktails seemed like an interesting title, so I tossed it into my Amazon cart a while back when I needed something to push me over the limit for my add on items to ship.  It's a food history, and I love those, and also seemed like a fun spin on American (and Caribbean) history, which is a field I'm normally not too fond of because I find it boring compared to history in the rest of the world.

Curtis' book does focus exclusively on rum, though a few other types of alcohol are mentioned in passing.  The portions of the book are all named after a cocktail, though the section sometimes only bears a loose connection to the cocktail it's named for and "themed" to.  And this isn't a very comprehensive history, to be sure.  It focuses mostly on the United States, with maybe two chapters looking more at the Caribbean.  And because this book is rum-focused, it doesn't really touch on "New World" history until rum production began, which is significantly after the New World was "discovered" by Europeans, and obviously far, far after the history of people living in the Americas began.  (Remember, there were people in all of these places before the Europeans sailed onto the scene and began killing and enslaving people.)

Curtis keeps his history brief and high-level, glossing over a lot of the messier aspects of history such as slavery (vital to rum production in the Caribbean because of the labor commitments required to grow and process sugarcane, the byproduct of which is molasses and is what rum is based on), war, and even rum production itself.  For example, he talks about producers throwing in things like dung or the contents of a chamber pot to assist with fermentation, but doesn't really go into what this would do or the potential health consequences it might have.  He breezes over a lot of things, focusing on the romantic and patriotic instead of dirtier side of history that is always there, only really lingering on how awful the original rum must have tasted.

This book is basically the cocktail of the history genre: light and fun without a lot of depth.  True, some of this might be attributable to the checkered history that alcohol in general and rum in particular has; with periods of dry states and countries, rum running, and smuggling rampant in the various periods Curtis touches on, there's a lot of documentation on rum that just doesn't exist to be drawn on.  It's a historian's nightmare, and I think probably is a big reason why this is as surface-level as it is.  Still, it did make me want a tiki drink!

3.5 stars out of 5.

Hot Sauce Nation - Denver Nicks

Hot Sauce Nation showed up on a Buzzfeed list of gifts for hot sauce lovers.  My stepfather is a hot sauce lover, so I clicked into it, and being a book lover myself, the book jumped out at me.  So I bought it for some light weekend reading.  After slogging through Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell, the light non-fiction of Hot Sauce Nation was refreshing, and it was a pretty decent book overall.

In this book, Nicks endeavors to explain how hot sauce became such a national phenomenon.  To this end, I'm not entirely sure he succeeds, but I do believe that he provides a lot of fun information about hot sauce, the people who make it, and the people who love it along the way.  He talks about self-proclaimed "chiliheads," who love all things spicy, and a number of small hot sauce making operations, as well as short looks at two of the larger ones, Huy Fong Foods' sriracha or rooster sauce and the ever-present Tabasco.  He even talks about the Washington, DC region for a good portion of time in two different places.  First, he talks about the fish pepper, a type of chili that was grown in the Chesapeake Bay area and is now on the verge of extinction because people haven't seen a continuing use for it, but which is still grown and used in a sauce by a small operation in Baltimore.  It had me Googling away, looking for where I could find a bottle of this mysterious sauce, but to no avail.  And later in the book he talks about mumbo sauce!  This is a sauce that's very popular in the less-affluent areas of DC, though there appears to be debate of whether it's actually native to the area of not.  It's more of a sweet sauce than a spicy one, which makes its inclusion in this book somewhat puzzling, but still.

Nicks has a way of talking about food and people that is deeply inviting, though his asides and his own narrative format, at times, tend to the "frat boy" end of the spectrum.  He is also easily distracted.  One chapter of the book talks more about an interesting character by the name of Baron Ambrosia than about hot sauce or chilies.  Nicks tries to integrate this by saying how Ambrosia was trying to get a hot sauce certification system up and running, complete with member cards to show that you really, really love spicy food, as hot as it can be, but this never actually got up and running so it's a rather poor sort of inclusion.  He also makes some questionable decisions about places to praise; for example, he lauds the Anchor Bar in Buffalo, NY, the ostensible birthplace of the buffalo wing (like with mumbo sauce, this appears to be up for some debate) but anyone from that region knows that, while the buffalo wing might have originated at the Anchor Bar (maybe), it certainly wasn't perfected there, and going to the Anchor Bar for buffalo wings (or just "wings," as they are known locally) is one of the surest ways to mark yourself as a tourist rather than a serious wing eater.

Still, I think this was a worthy read.  It's short, less than 300 pages and with only about 75% of it being actual book content rather than a bibliography and other end content, but it was enjoyable.  It even inspired me to make my own hot sauce--no recipes are included here, but a bit of searching on the internet ultimately led me to an easily-customized one that is now aging away in my fridge as a homemade Christmas present.  (It has to sit for 2 weeks before use).  If you like spicy foods, even if you're not a self-proclaimed "chilihead" (I am certainly not.) this is a good, light nonfiction book to add to your shelf.

4 stars out of 5.

Blood, Bones & Butter - Gabrielle Hamilton

This book was on sale recently, so I picked it up and decided to use it as a sort of twist on a category for my reading challenge for 2016.  The challenge category was "a book with a protagonist who has your occupation," but, as a mid-level university bureaucrat (essentially) main characters with my occupation aren't exactly easy to come by.  So I decided to read a book with a protagonist (in this case, the author, as this is a memoir) who has an occupation I would like to have.  Gabrielle Hamilton is a chef and the owner of the restaurant Prune in New York City.  She is also, as I established from reading this memoir, a very confusing and not very nice person.  Well, at least as she portrays herself here.  But then that's the risk of putting out the story of your life for anyone to pick up, isn't it?  Total randos like me, who've never met you, can totally judge you.  And judge I did.

This book is divided into three different parts, following the title: Blood, Bones, and Butter.  Blood follows Hamilton's childhood, the first chapter of which seems to be happy, and the rest of which is about her rather misspent use doing drugs and wandering Europe.  Are there wonderful, heartwarming moments scattered throughout?  Yes, there are.  Her time spent in France sounds lovely, as does her time in Greece.  But then you balance that about the coke-snorting waitress who maintains she earned $90,000 in a year and spent it all on drugs, and you have to wonder a little bit, now don't you?  But still.  She was young.  Life moves on.  She apparently got over her drug problems, decided to further her education in a more traditional sense.  We move on to Bones.

Bones follows her as she goes to Michigan to get her master's degree and also through several different stages of her professional career, from working as the cook at a summer camp to being a high-energy catering champ to opening and running Prune.  This is probably the most diverse portion of the book, and it's also where I started really raising my eyebrows.  The affair, with a man who she apparently finds relatively attractive given that she references making out with him, having sex with him one every available surface, etc. despite her professions that she's a lesbian.  The fact that she married a man, and stayed married to him for ten years (they are now divorced, FYI; thank you, Wikipedia) looking for a deep and meaningful relationship when she apparently knew from the beginning it wouldn't be that way and that the marriage was really for a green card; the way that she portrayed her mother so flatteringly and then as such a raving bitch and then as a wonderful person once again; the way that she acts so superior to everyone else, says that she got over that, and then continues on with it... All of this made me not like Hamilton very much at all.  Here's the thing: I felt like I couldn't trust her.

I know, I know.  People are complicated creatures.  We have many facets.  This also applies to both Hamilton and all of the people she portrays.  But at the same time, when you write a memoir, you're really going through a reflection process and, one would think, clarifying some things not only for yourself but for others.  The things that come out in memoirs tend to be a bit more focused than thoughts running around our heads every day of our lives because of the time and process of writing and focusing them.  That doesn't seem to have been the case here, and also makes me side-eye the memoir as a whole.

Then there's the third part, Butter, which deals mostly with her in-laws and children and the time that she spent with them (and her husband) in Italy, where her husband is from.  This was a lovely part, overall, other than the continuing issues Hamilton as a person that I just couldn't bring myself to get over.  She has a terrible relationship with her husband, and go figure; they live apart, they don't communicate, and yet she seems completely baffled that this marriage, which was formulated on very flimsy pretexts to begin with, isn't a fairy tale.  And she seems to think that all of this is her husband's fault.  I can't even go into this any further, because the amount of justifications that she offers for as to why none of her terrible relationships are her fault, but rather entirely due to other people, are just so mind-boggling that I really can't even.

This is a wonderfully written book--Hamilton has a way of describing food, and places, and even people in a way that makes them seem to live and breathe.  Her way of writing food is mouth-watering and made me crave foods that I have, actually, tried, and didn't like, which is a real talent.  And I could practically see the places she went and the things she did.  The writing at various places is absolutely beautiful.  But there's also the part where this book is apparently about "The inadvertent education of a reluctant chef," and it's debatable whether that's really the case.  There are episodes that contribute to this, of course.  Her time working in Michigan definitely falls into this category, as do her travels.  I think this all really comes out when she's looking at opening Prune.  But beyond that, this seems like an angry dump about, again, all of those terrible relationships that aren't even a little bit due to her participation in them.

This was such a mixed bag of a book for me.  The parts about food and growing professionally were wonderful.  The few parts where she seemed to look honestly at her relationships were good.  But then she would backtrack and start angrily building up a case for why all of her relationships are all crap and it's not her fault that they are, because everyone else is terrible and she's not.  I just don't buy it, and it really tarnished the book as a whole for me, because these parts took up so much room that I think could have been put to better purpose.  Overall, as far as memoirs, and particularly "food" marketed memoirs, go, I think that there are better ones than this.

2 stars out of 5.

Picnic in Provence - Elizabeth Bard (Lunch in Paris #1)

The Popular Reading section strikes again!  I haven't actually read Bard's Lunch in Paris, though I certainly intend to now, which should tell you something about my attitude toward this one.  And I'll be honest--it was the combination of "Provence" and that little sub-title, "A memoir with recipes" that got my attention, because I fricking love food and there's no secret about it.

In this book, Bard talks about her experiences moving to the small town of Cereste in Provence, France, with her husband and small child.  Consequently, the book follows several themes: living in a new place, food, and the struggles of motherhood.  Two of these appealed to me.  One of them did not.  Can you guess which two I liked?

You got it, new places (I long to travel freely; someday I might actually make enough money to do it) and food.  Motherhood strikes no chord for me because I am not, and never intend to be, a mother.  Children are not my cup of tea, to put things politely.  That said, the sections about Bard's struggles with her son, Alexandre, didn't alienate me.  Bard has a warm way of writing and while I certainly don't envy her status as a mom, let alone a mom in a foreign land, I never felt like I needed to skip portions or roll my eyes in exasperation.  She also had a good way of interspersing the different themes so that they balanced each other out, not leaving one portion of the book more "top heavy" than the others.  Toward the middle/end, Bard and her husband decide to open an ice cream shop, which largely devours their lives and hence the narrative, but I suppose that's to be expected for a memoir.

The recipes sounded scrumptious, and there are even a few I think I might make.  Ice cream recipes do me no good, because I do not own an ice cream machine and have little inclination toward buying one, but there seemed to be a few good, hearty recipes in here that anyone could use, ice cream machine owners or no.  White beans with tomatoes and herbs sounded scrumptious, and while I'm pretty sure that the folks at Safeway would look at me like I was crazy if I asked for a butchered rabbit, zucchini soup, zucchini gratin, and many other recipes might need to make an appearance in my kitchen.  I'll have to hold on to the book a day or two longer to glean out the ones I want before returning to the library.  Bard has a way of describing food that just makes it sound delicious, and while I'm pretty sure I'll never roast a whole lamb, no part of me would object to eating such a thing if it's as good as she says it is.  She even made me want to give blood sausage a try, and let me tell you, that's an accomplishment.

There were a few things that did bother me, though.  First, Bard switches between present and past-tense a lot, which drives me absolutely crazy.  I am a very firm believer in writing entirely in past tense, especially for things like memoirs.  Very rarely is present tense necessary, even when what you're discussing might technically still be true--yes, Bard loves her husband and child, but the tense switching wasn't necessary.  She could have left it in past tense and I wouldn't have found her feelings suspect.  And there's this string of logic through it that I just can't quite seem to get my head around.  Bard talks about taking her son to day care, about working full-time and not being around him, and yet, for the life of me, I can't figure out what she actually does.  She talks about writing, but it's in a way that makes it seem like she puts off writing (as all writers do!) and that getting a few hours to write is a blessing, so I have no idea what all of this "full time work" she talked about actually was.  Her cover bio says she's a journalist, but given that she can't drive, I don't exactly see her roaming all over the countryside looking for stories, and I'm not sure how much Cereste has to offer--it's beautiful and charming, I'm sure, but even that can be exhausted at a point.

Still, I definitely want to pick up Lunch in Paris, Bard's first book.  It's another memoir with recipes, but it seems like it will focus more on her early relationship and experiences in France, before her wedding and subsequent move.  Given where I am in my life, that seems like it'll be more up my alley.

3.5 stars out of 5.

Delicious! - Ruth Reichl

When Billie Breslin moves to New York after dropping out of college, she interviews for the position of executive assistant to the editor of Delicous! which is one of the oldest food magazines in the business.  She's ecstatic to get the job and move into the world of food writing, because it's common knowledge that the editor gives his assistants writing assignments.  However, her dream comes crashing down all too soon when Delicious! is shut down.  Everyone is let go--everyone except Billie, who's left behind to maintain the Delicious! Guarantee, which is that every recipe works or your money back.  Alone in the massive Timbers Manor, Billie answers letters and phone calls relating to the guarantee and explores the long-locked library, where she and a former coworker discover a store of letters from WWII that open a whole new world of knowledge.  Meanwhile, Billie works weekends at an Italian specialty food store and interacts with a host of other colorful characters.

I really, really liked this book.  I'm not normally a huge fan of first-person narratives, but I found Billie very personable and thought it was easy to connect with her.  Figuring out the whole Genie thing was an intriguing little side mystery--you can tell something's up there, but there are a few possibilities and it's not glaringly obvious which one is the real answer until it's actually brought up.  I was able to piece together some of it, but not all of it.  I enjoyed the side characters, too.  Sal, Rosalie, Mr. Complainer/Mitch, Sammy...all of them were great.  They all had distinct personalities and roles, and while they were all supporting characters, they really did lend support instead of just being there for no apparent reason.

There's a mystery here, but it's not a murder/suspense mystery.  Instead, it's a quirky little historical mystery, one that's cute instead of nerve-wracking.  I don't really enjoy reading letters in novels, but most of the ones included in Delicious! were short enough to not be trying on the nerves.  The letter-mystery plot did feel like it was originally intended to go in a different direction, but didn't, which left me feeling a little disjointed.  And I wish that more of the recipes that had been mentioned were included!  The recipe for Billie's gingerbread cake, which features throughout the book, is included in the back, but none of the other delicious-sounding (Delicious.  Hahahaha.) recipes were listed.  Still, this was a book that I couldn't put down, because it was just good.  Wholesome, enjoyable, with a great cast of characters, a minor love story (nothing to impede the plot, just to boost it) and a little bit of mystery--just enough to keep it intriguing.

4 solid stars out of 5!

American Catch - Paul Greenberg

I've said it before, and I'll say it again: I love food.  And of all the foods I love, seafood is at the very top of that list.  When I was in high school, if I got straight As, my dad would take me out for all-you-can-eat snow crab legs at one of our favorite restaurants.  In more recent times, I've dragged my boyfriend out on a quest for fried clams because I decided I had to have them right now, and then spent a week in Maine eating sea food at literally every meal.  Fish and chips (cod), fish tacos with a cilantro-lime crema (tilapia), lobster pots, crab cakes, steamed mussels, grilled trout, spicy crunchy yellowtail rolls, broiled scallops, blackened catfish...the list goes on and on.  If it dwells in water, I'll eat it.  I trace much of this back to growing up in Erie, Pennsylvania, which was once the largest fresh-water fishing port in the world, mainly for one item: Lake Erie perch.  When I visit home these days, I make a point of ordering up some fried perch, one of the most delectable fried fish you can ever consume and one that came right out of the waters I grew up by.  Until now, it never occurred to me that eating Lake Erie perch--a fish that was caught within miles of where I ate it--was unusual.  But guess what?  It is.  It's very unusual.  And that's a very, very bad thing.

Greenberg uses American Catch to dig into all the problems with how Americans use and view seafood.  The US controls more fishing grounds than any other country, and we have an extremely long coast line, and yet the vast majority of our seafood is shipped off to countries like China--and most of the seafood we eat is imported from those same countries, which doesn't seem to make a lot of sense.  Using three examples--New York oysters, Gulf shrimp, and Alaskan sockeye salmon--Greenberg illustrates how this came about and what the implications for it are.  We constantly decimate our coastlines and the salt marshes that comprise them in order to create more land for agriculture and more desirable places for the rich to vacation, all the while destroying the habitats and breeding grounds of local sea food; we did this to such a degree in New York City that it's actually illegal to eat the New York oysters that survive there, because the water is so polluted that eating said oysters can make people sick.  And we do this even though creating an environment that can sustain oysters is good for the city: oysters filter water and create reefs that can help lessen the effects of of storm surges, like the one that decimated so much of the city in Hurricane Sandy.  On the shrimp front, we allow industry, such as big oil, to pollute the Gulf of Mexico and destroy our coast and the shrimp that live and breed there, and mess with the Mississippi River until it's basically just shooting washed-off fertilizers from big agriculture into the Gulf and creating a deoxygenated dead zone where nothing can live.  And in Alaska, on Bristol Bay, the largest salmon run in the world with some of the best salmon there is, we ponder letting a huge mine destroy the area because it offers a faster payout than fishing does.  And for some reason, we don't see most of this as a problem.

Greenberg really digs into why this is; why we're blind to the problem of seafood because it doesn't present itself as a problem.  After all, I can still grab as many pounds of shrimp as I want from the grocery store, so why should the problem of the Gulf come to my mind?  Does it really matter that the shrimp I'm buying come from farms that are wreaking similar havoc in Asia, and that the shrimp are likely heavily dosed with antibiotics to avoid the diseases that can decimate harvests?  Well...it probably does.  And if it doesn't, it should.  I can very easily see this book being painted as a tool of the "liberal media" by conservatives, who, as Greenberg points out, tend to see any attempt at regulation as an interference with their god-given rights to do whatever the hell they want, and screw anyone who disagrees.  But the fact of the matter is, the way that we treat seafood isn't sustainable, and if I want to be able to enjoy a big piece of salmon years down the road, our attitudes toward it have to change.  This isn't really a new idea, but it is an important one that nonetheless seems to get lost in the shuffle, and the more it's brought up, the more potential there is for people to listen and enact change.

This is a great book, one that uses a few solid examples in conjunction to make a much larger and powerful point, and one that brings in a lot of the people who are actually, personally affected in order to illustrate how the issues in the industry can drag us down.  It doesn't focus on just one geographic area, instead showing that our abuse of seafood truly is a national problem, from New York to Louisiana to Alaska, and that we need to consider the bigger picture of how we view seafood if we're going to fix it.  Because of the subject matter, it's a book that can come across a little preachy at times, which is typical for books like this and somewhat unavoidable, and Greenberg gets all cheery at the end in what I think was an attempt to avoid blatant fearmongering.  Still, after reading this one, I know one thing: I'll probably be looking into where my seafood comes from a little more closely from now on.

4 stars out of 5.

The Tastemakers - David Sax

My name is Chelsea, and I'm crazy about cupcakes.  It's true.  As a resident of Washington, DC, I am one of the people absolutely mad for Georgetown Cupcakes, one of the many cupcakeries mentioned in The Tastemakers.  On the other hand, I'm not "fed up with fondue," as the rest of the subtitle would insinuate.  Granted, I don't think I've had fondue on many occasions, but I'm not fed up with it.  It's fun.  We should call it fundue!  Haha.  I am 100% positive no one has ever made that joke before.  However, apparently a lot of people are fed up with fondue, and The Tastemakers tries to explain why.

Sax dives into a lot of the reasons foods become trends, from pop-culture appeal (cupcakes appearing on Sex and the City) to money (bacon is a huge industry) to health appeals, true or not (acai and chia, anyone?).  While the concepts are interesting, the book itself didn't really capture my interest.  I thought Sax's writing could trend purple and a lot of the time he lost my attention as he wandered off on philosophical bents that weren't exactly on-topic.  While anecdotes about the author's childhood can add to some aspects of a book, I thought Sax went overboard, feeling the need to shoehorn mini-memoirs into every aspect of Tastemakers.  I also thought this book would dive more into why people like foods for the foods themselves, but instead it's completely about how we are manipulated into liking certain foods by different industries.  I understand that industries do manipulate us into liking different foods (I read Salt, Sugar, Fat a couple of winters ago, and a finer example of food-industry manipulation there cannot be) but I though Tastemakers would be a little different.  The diverse focus of foods was good, but overall I found that Sax couldn't hold my attention.  I put this book down almost constantly to read other things, which never happens with food books.  An intriguing concept this was, but I found it just didn't live up to my tastes or expectations.

2 stars out of 5.

The Third Plate - Dan Barber

Dan Barber is a chef, known for farm-to-table cooking at his restaurants Blue Hill in NYC and Blue Hill at Stone Barns outside the city in a slightly more rural part of New York state.  He was also the subject of one episode of Chef's Table, a recent documentary mini-series produced by Netflix.  The episode, as far as I can remember, didn't mention this book at all, but it left enough of an impression that when I saw the book chilling out in the waiting area of local DC restaurant Founding Farmers (delicious, simply delicious; if  you're ever in Washington, DC, you should make this a stop, but I would suggest a reservation) I was interested.  I didn't have enough time to pick the book up at the restaurant, but it was at the library the next time I stopped by, and so home it came.  I then had to share it with one of my coworkers, who is also a food fanatic, and so when she went out of town I took my chance and devoured it.  (Devoured.  Haha.)

Let me put one thing out there about Dan Barber: I don't know him personally, but in the documentary...he's a jerk.  A real asshole.  He has a tendency to be verbally abusive towards his staff, with a terrible temper, which he freely admits; he also says it's a problem, but admitting it doesn't make it better.  He came off so poorly that when a contestant on Chopped mentioned having interned at Blue Hill, my only thought was, "Oh, that poor kid."  So I was a little leery about the book at first; would he be as much of an ass on the page as he was on the screen?  The answer is, resoundingly, no.  On the page, Barber comes across as charming and a little naive but willing to learn, which is a weird juxtaposition with his documentary persona and I'm not quite sure how I feel about that.

The book is divided into four sections: Soil, Land, Sea, and Seed, and each one focuses on a different aspect of food and relies heavily on Barber's interactions with different farmers who specialize in each section.  Soil revolves around just that: a farmer in New York who switched his farm to organic and uses different crop rotations to enrich the soil and improve the quality of the food he grows, a process that Barber considers vital to the future of good, sustainable food.  Land and Sea both take place mostly in Spain, where Barber looks at sustainable foie gras made without force feeding ("freedom gras") and at a sustainable fish farm that's smack dab in the middle of a national park, both of which produce superior products on a smaller scale.  Seed moves back to the United States and talks about breeding different varieties of vegetables and grains (the focus is mostly on wheat, though a few other things are mentioned) without genetically modifying them.  Overall, the message is one of encouraging diversity of foods, supporting smaller-scale production on a wider scale (more small farms instead of a few big farms, less farms with monocrops, etc.) and generally shifting the way we eat and view food to make the future of cuisine more sustainable.  It's a movement that has to take place at every level, because if one level doesn't change, the others are stuck in the same loop.

Barber's writing (or did he have a ghostwriter?  I don't know; I'm never sure about these things...) is easily readable and very engaging, with a literary nonfiction feel; he tells the stories of the people he works with in the book, so this doesn't feel like a textbook read at all.  I think this is really how nonfiction needs to be written, so that it is enjoyable and educational at the same time, a balance with which some nonfiction writers struggle.  He's clear in explaining his ideas and doesn't repeat himself over and over again, which can be onerous.  The farmers he works with and the locales he visits are note-worthy enough that you might have heard of them in passing at some point, but small enough that learning about them is enjoyable and doesn't feel like a rehashing of something that's been covered time and time again.  And, perhaps most refreshingly, Barber has a positive outlook on the future of food.  As he points out in the introduction, opinions on food's future often tend toward the dystopian, with pills and drinks providing necessary nutrition while food itself becomes scarcer and scarcer and a thing of the past.  This isn't Barber's opinion at all; he belongs to a school of thought that believes yes, food is headed in a bad direction on the large scale, but positive change isn't impossible, and will benefit everyone involved (except, perhaps, Monsanto).

Despite the book's hefty page count (it clocks in at about 450 pages) I found this a quick and easy read, not bogged down by chapters the length of short novels, sensible transitions, good writing, and a logical progression.  This one will probably have to find a permanent place on my bookshelf.

5 stars!

Vanilla: Travels in Search of the Ice Cream Orchid - Tim Ecott

So, I have a thing about food.  It's no secret.  I have a fabulous metabolism now, but let me tell you, when I get older, I am going to be so fat because I love to eat.  A lot.  Vanilla was just my latest foray into the world of books about food.  And let me tell you, if you're looking for a book about food to read on vacation, this is a great one.  I took it with me to Maine, which was lovely but was nonetheless a far cry from the tropical areas where vanilla is grown, and I spent the entire time pining after after the perfect scoop of vanilla ice cream.

That said...this isn't much of a history of vanilla.  I mean, there's a history of vanilla there, but it's interspersed with all kinds of other stuff.  There's an entire chapter about life on the island of Bourbon/Reunion that doesn't touch on vanilla at all.  Really, it does come across as Ecott traveling a lot and writing a book about vanilla to justify it.  Not that it's a bad thing--I loved reading his descriptions of Mexico, Tahiti, Madagascar, and all the other stops along the way, and his interactions with the people who make up the vanilla industry.  My biggest complaint was that the narrative had a weird sort of organization.  While I would have liked to see vanilla go from the vine to the processing and then onwards, in order, it bounced around a lot, going from vine to processing back to vine to the food it goes into and all around in a manner that wasn't confusing, per se, but certainly seemed a bit discordant.

This book wasn't a really "dense" history, if that makes sense; the history is really just glazed over, for the most part, with a few more in-depth pieces about individuals who made a real impact.  But, like I said before, that made it a great, easy vacation read.  and it made me want to travel, too, and eat vanilla ice cream all the while.  The book barely went into the modern industry at all--apparently the modern vanilla industry is full of deep, dark secrets that no one is willing to disclose--but I still found it thoroughly enjoyable.  Overall, it reminded me a great deal of Rachel Louise Snyder's Fugitive Denim, which deals with the modern denim industry and travels about in a manner similar to Ecott's.  I really enjoyed Fugitive Denim, so it's not really a surprise that I liked Vanilla, too.  This isn't a book for someone looking for a detailed, scientific look at vanilla, but it is a book for someone like me who likes food and travel and good writing, and I would definitely recommend it on those aspects.

4 stars out 5.

Around the Roman Table - Patrick Faas

Food and history are two of the great loves of my life.  I thought Around the Roman Table would fit nicely into those categories.  Well...it did, but I didn't really like it.  Don't get me wrong--it was okay.  It was just a more boring than I expected it to be.  It includes a lot of descriptions about what people ate, how they ate it, and how food tied into culture in Rome.  That part was interesting.  But there was also an entire second part that included recipes from Roman times.  I thought this was going to be pretty interesting, too...but I wasn't really impressed.  Reading the recipes requires you to pound down some Roman terms for food that Faas explains earlier in the book, or else keep flipping back to those pages to figure out what he's talking about.  Additionally, Roman recipes weren't really "recipes" in the same sense as we have "recipes."  There often weren't fixed amounts, and I'm skeptical as to how accurate Faas' interpretations of them are.  It seems like he might have just guessed at the amounts of ingredients to best suit modern readers' tastes.  That said, I'm really not sure how many people would be putting copious amounts of fish sauce in every dish they make.  Some of the ingredients I've never even heard of; for example, what the hell is lovage?  That was explained, but not very well.  Some ingredients are actually extinct, like laser, a plant that the Romans loved so much they actually drove it to extinction.  And then there are other ingredients that, while technically still around, aren't exactly easy to get.  For example, where would I find half a kilo of minced dolphin?  The writing style wasn't all that fabulous, either; there were multiple cases of sentences that didn't make sense, and the recipes Faas included were also included in Latin, in their entirety.  Really, I don't care about a quarter of a page of Latin that I can't read.  More quoting often meant that, in the first half of the book, Faas quoted more than he actually wrote.  Some of the clumsiness in writing may be because the book is translated (I believe it was originally in Dutch) but that doesn't really excuse it.  Overall, interesting topic, but not the best book.

2 stars out of 5.

The School of Essential Ingredients - Erica Bauermeister

It's not a secret, to anyone who knows me, that I love food and cooking.  Indeed, I stated in my review of Consider the Fork that I would be perfectly content to be a housewife if it meant that I could stay at home and cook (and, consequently, eat) all day long.  This will, however, probably seem less appealing as my metabolism slows down.  It keeps the pounds off now, but in the future... Oh, boy, I'm going to be fat.

When I started reading this book, I expected a book about cooking and learning to cook.  Not a cookbook; I knew it was a novel, about an ensemble cast with their own backgrounds and wants and needs, but I expected there to be more focus on the actual "learning to cook" process than there actually was.  Bauermeister's cooking pro, Lillian, doesn't believe in recipes due to an aversion to the written word (HOW COULD ANYONE HAVE AN AVERSION TO THE WRITTEN WORD?!?!) so there aren't any recipes included.  Mildly disappointing, but I guess  beyond the point of the book itself.

What the book actually is, is a collection of back stories for people who happen to meet in a cooking class and may or may not become involved in each other's lives.  They were good stories--engaging, well-written, and often poetic; Bauermeister is a very good writer in that respect--but there wasn't a lot of forward motion.  Of course, there didn't really need to be, since it wasn't a plot-centered novel, but...  But, well, of the nine stories (eight students and one teacher), six of them take place entirely in the past.  Lillian, Helen, Carl, Isabelle, Tom, and Claire all have stories that abruptly cease when we reach the present day.  We never learn what Claire does that makes her happy, or why Carl and Helen are taking a cooking class and what they gain from it.  They're just there.  Lillian and Tom have a bit of interaction at the very end, but it's still not really integrated in the sense that the class isn't woven into their lives; it's just the place they met.  As for Isabelle...it seemed that her story was centered around the idea of being "edgy," and just came across as kind of random.

On the flip side, Antonia, Ian, and Chloe all have stories with forward motion in them, and those were really more enjoyable to me.  Antonia is from Italy and is adjusting to life in the US while trying to convince a couple that they don't really need an industrial kitchen in their Victorian-era home.  Ian is trying to woo Antonia.  And Chloe is struggling with life after high school and living with a boyfriend who isn't exactly the cream of the crop.  Throughout the story, all of these characters actually grew as people and left the class much more "full" than when they started.

When the writing did focus on the class, however, I loved Lillian's voice in how she treats food.  I'm not sure I actually agree with everything Bauermeister put in her mouth, but I want to agree with it.  On some level, it probably is true that people are shaped by the way they eat, but I'm not sure it's to quite the degree that it's made out to be in the book.  And I'm also not sure that, even though I love cooking, cooking is as magical as it's made out to be in the book.  Restaurants, and more specifically restaurant kitchens, are not places where people have cozy chats.  They are hot, sweaty places of work, and while there is certainly something magical about raw ingredients turning into fully-prepared dishes, there is rarely something magical about the attitude that goes into them.

Still, this was a highly enjoyable read with some really great writing and very human characters, all of them with their own quirks and flaws.  While there wasn't as much "motion" as I would have liked, this was a great book to curl up with on a rainy evening and thoroughly devour.  (Devour.  Get it?  Because food.)

3.5 out of 5 stars.

Consider the Fork - Bee Wilson

Confession: I would be perfectly content to be housewife for the rest of my life.  I'm a traitor to my gender, I know.  I should be trying to make myself respected as a working woman in a corporate world dominated by men and all that jazz, but really, I would be perfectly content to stay at home and cook all day long.  Okay, so I'm not such a huge fan of doing dishes or laundry, but I could get past that.  Being left alone all day to do some quick cleaning, read a good book, and whip up a cappuccino fudge cheesecake (recipe from Smitten Kitchen) sounds like absolute heaven.  I would probably become morbidly obese in short order, because even a fast metabolism can't cope with delicacies like that every day, but hey, my apartment building has a gym in it.  I could totally start running on the treadmill with all the time I'd have on my hands!

How does all of this connect with Consider the Fork?  Well, Consider the Fork is "A History of How We Cook and Eat," and that cooking part has largely been the work of women for centuries.  Millenia, even.  Which didn't work so well when women wore long skirts and sleeves that easily caught on fire, but hey, we're past that now in my part of the world, and I can feel safe whipping up some deep-fried ravioli on a gas stove while wearing a T-shirt.  Anyway, the book is broken up into different topics such as "Knife," "Fire," Ice," "Grind," and "Eat," with each focusing on a different area of the kitchen and how it has evolved.  For example, "Fire" is not only about how people have cooked over fires in different parts of the world, but also how the stove evolved and how cultural wants and needs changed that, and how the stove itself changed how we cook and eat.  "Eat" is about silverware, chopsticks, and other eating utensils, and how they fit into our culture of food.  Each chapter is also followed by a one or two-page snippet about something more specific, like the Italian mezzaluna knife or the nutmeg grinder.

The book is full of little anecdotes to focus different parts, and it is immensely readable, especially for a foodie like myself.  Wilson's writing portrays vivid images of meals from all periods of cooking, and makes every single one of them sound appetizing, even when they really weren't.  But what's so different about the book isn't about how humans shaped cooking; it's more about how cooking shaped humanity.  For example, that ever-so-slight overbite that I spent three years in braces to obtain?  That overbite that's supposedly the "perfect" smile for those of my generation?  Yeah, that wouldn't exist without the adaptation of using knives and forks to eat, rather than just ripping stuff up with our teeth.  And the invention of pots and pans completely changed how we eat!  Isn't that awesome?  I think so.  The book also appears to be pretty well-researched in the areas it covers, though there aren't footnotes so I can't confirm that entirely.  There is a "Notes" section, but honestly, I didn't read it, and it's not very long.

My only complaint--and it is a fairly large one--is that Wilson focuses on the USA and UK for her history of food and eating.  Coming in third place would probably be China.  I would have liked to learn more about how people ate all over the world.  What about in Polynesia?  What about in India, or Iran?  What about the Eskimos?  What kind of stuff did they eat, invent, or adopt, and how did it change their cultural evolution?  There's probably, to some degree, a problem with sources in these areas (and language barriers are a bitch) but I would have been very interested to see a more globally-comprehensive history.  Oh, and another, smaller one--the "ye olden days" portions focus mainly on the upper classes.  More "recent" accounts focus more on the middle class.  I would have liked to see more class, as well as geological, diversity.  Still a good, easy read, though, and it might just change the way you look at what goes into your mouth, and how that stuff gets there!

3 stars out of 5.