Julie D. has posted her summer culinary reading list. Here are some of mine.
- Heat : An Amateur’s Adventures as Kitchen Slave, Line Cook, Pasta-Maker, and Apprentice to a Dante-Quoting Butcher in Tuscany. The book is receiving a lot of favorable reviews. Here’s a snippet from a review by Anthony Bourdain:
First, watching the author, an untrained, inexperienced and middle-aged desk jockey slowly transform into not just a useful line cook–but an extraordinarily knowledgeable one is pure pleasure. That he chooses to do so primarily in the notoriously difficult, cramped kitchens of New York’s three star Babbo provides further sado-masochistic fun. Buford not only accurately and hilariously describes the painfully acquired techniques of the professional cook (and his own humiliations), but chronicles as well the mental changes–the “kitchen awareness” and peculiar world view necessary to the kitchen dweller. By end of book, he’s even talking like a line cook.
- The Omnivore’s Dilemma : A Natural History of Four Meals. Author Michael Pollan looks at our “national eating disorder.”
- How to Be a Domestic Goddess: Baking and the Art of Comfort Cooking, by Nigella Lawson. A gift from my sister in law a couple Christmases ago, I’m finally sitting down and marking recipes to try. There are many, confound it! One thing I really like is Lawson’s low-stress approach to cooking.
- Falling Cloudberries, by Tessa Kiros. I commented on the book in a previous post. I think the first recipe that I try will be those cinnamon-cardamom buns.
- The Making of a Chef: Mastering Heat at the Culinary Institute, by Michael Ruhlman. I worked in restaurants for a number of years, and I enjoy books that go behind the scenes. Also, Julie D. recommended it!
- The Cooking of Southwest France : Recipes from France’s Magnificent Rustic Cuisine, by Paula Wolfert. The book is considered a classic on the cuisine of the region. No doubt Master Chow will be thrilled by the book’s prodigious use of pork and duck fat. I don’t know that I’ll be cooking much from it in the summer, but I will use it to prepare for my fall culinary experiments.
- The Breath of a Wok : Unlocking the Spirit of Chinese Wok Cooking Through Recipes and Lore, by Grace Young. With a name like “Madam Chow,” are you surprised?
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