May 14, 2007
Monday Night Reading List - The Foodie Edition
Play
"Such a Beautiful Girl Like You"
by Pizzicato Five
• There really is art everywhere.
• Whoever carmelized the sugar on my dessert is a food perfectionist in the best sense of the word.
• The only reason I remember the names of the accents over the 'E's in "crème brûlée" is because of my seventh-grade French teacher. Merci beaucoup, Mlle. Cooper!
• I'm going to have to exercise a lot to burn off tonight's dinner.
And so without further ado...
On the nightstand:
• Heat: An Amateur's Adventures as Kitchen Slave, Line Cook, Pasta-Maker, and Apprentice to a Dante-Quoting Butcher in Tuscany by Bill Buford
(Amazon|BN|Powell's)
Every once in a while, I entertain the idea of chucking it all and cooking for a living, but I'm not sure I'd survive in the macho world of restaurant kitchens. Instead, I pick books like this one, and live vicariously.
Bill Buford was the founding editor of the literary magazine, Granta. He also wrote for the New Yorker and this book was an extension of a story about "Molto" Mario Battali.
In it, Buford describes his own journey from writing about food to making food, and the seemingly consistent motivation of all who love cooking: to pour emotion into food that brings pleasure to those who eat it.
• "Bread and Chocolate: My Food Life in and Around San Francisco" by Fran Gage
(Amazon|BN|Powell's)
Though I'm always trying to get my stovetop skills up, I'm really more a baker than a cook. I like the exactness and precision of recipes, the physicality of working with dough, the sculptor's art in a perfectly turned crust, cookie or cake, the way you can weigh the finished work with all your senses.
This is a reread — I ripped through the book when I first bought it in 1999.
At the time I thought I was buying a cookbook. Really, it's a memoir with recipes, written by baker and pastry chef Fran Gage, who ran the wildly successful Pâtisserie Française (there go those crazy accent marks again) in SF before closing shop and becoming a full-time food writer.
• Olive magazine
(Website)
I have become such a devotee of this magazine that I bought my first (and hopefully only) food scale earlier this year.
Like most food magazines, there are a collection of recipes around a monthly theme — May was the British issue — but there are also essays, travel tips, and the sheer joy of food running throughout.
Right-o. Guess I'll do a couple laps between the kitchen and my computer desk now.