Food Books

[neadods]

I realize that this icon is probably going to turn off anyone who doesn't know what it's from, but it's the perfect illustration of this post. Which is, on the basis that my flist encompasses foodies, cooks, and readers, a list of all the history-of-food books in my To Read queue. (I seem to be troping to them this year.) This is not an endorsement of any of them, but simply a list of some of the more interesting-looking ones out there, for anyone who might want to dig up their own copies.

FOOD OF A YOUNGER LAND by Mark Kurlansky. Writer discovers treasure trove of WPA writings about American regional food before the Eisenhower highways and megacorporations homogenized everything. Some recipes, some opinion, some discussion of behind-the-scenes attitudes, esp. racial ones.

SOMETHING FROM THE OVEN: Reinventing Dinner in 1950s America by Laura Shapiro. About the shift from homemade to ready-made & frozen and then the bombshell that was Julia Child telling everyone to put down the powders, pick up the butter, and cook real food. (To show the other side of the equation, Peg Bracken gets a chapter too.)

SWEETS: A History of Candy by Rim Richardson. Exactly what it says on the label.

MILK: The Surprising Story of Milk Through the Ages by Anne Medelson. Half history, half multicultural dairy cookbook.

A THOUSAND YEARS OVER A HOT STOVE: A History of American Women Told Through Food, Recipes, and Remembrances by Laura Schenone. "American Women" are defined as any women in the US, including native tribes and all the successive waves of immigrants.

97 ORCHARD: An Edible History of Five Immigrant Families in One New York Tenament by Jane Ziegelman. Taking the census info from 97 Orchard, NYC, Ziegelman builds a foundation on how successive waves of immigration have changed American attitudes towards food. The general thesis is that immigrants may give up home, language, and native dress, but they don't drop their comfort foods ever - and this is how German, Irish, Italian, and multiple groups of Jewish food were mixed into the melting pot.


To display the full range of the melting pot, particularly in a port town like NYC, there are these cookbooks:
- The NEW YORK TIMES COOKBOOK (get the latest, it's always the most wide-ranging)
- NEW YORK COOKBOOK by Molly O'Neill
- IT'S ALL AMERICAN FOOD: The Food We Really Eat by David Rosengarten (the point being that we really eat -- and find readily available -- everything from fried chicken to fried rice, with stops at spaghetti, quacamole, & gumbo)


And then there are two cookbooks that I'm going to recommend less for the recipes than for the pleasure of the authors' gloriously opinionated voices:

THE FRENCH-KOSHER COOKBOOK by Ruth and Bob Grossman (all recipes authenticated by Rabbi Norman Siegel) "From French food you can get heartburn too... For your sauces you should have a big wire whisk. You could maybe live without one, but this looks very French in the kitchen. But what you can't live without is a good sieve."

FRENCH COOKING IN TEN MINUTES by Eduard Du Pomaine (I rush to explain this was written in the 20s - before much processed food, but not before working people wanted a fast, hot meal.) "First of all, let me tell you that this is a beautiful book. I can say that because this is its first page... [on white sauce] This is a horrible sauce. Fortunately, you can add whatever you like to it and transform it into a very nice one."

Comments

[redpanda13.livejournal.com]

I'm reminded of Bill Bryson writing about midwest food in the Fifties, when almost everything was white or brown and pretty much tasteless. Not a lot of difference in PA in the Sixties, though we had Italian food because we were near Philly. But chow mein was considered really exotic. All the stuff we'd never seen-- guacamole, pad thai, samosas, masala, gallo pinto, (veggie) sushi, Ethiopian food....

Excuse me, got to go help make the tacos.

[neadods.livejournal.com]

I offended the hell out of the first person to take mini-me to a Chinese restaurant because I asked for a hamburger.