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.

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.