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Food
Food good enough to read
By COLETTE BANCROFT
Published May 24, 2006
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THE NASTY BITS |
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HEAT |
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MY LIFE IN FRANCE |
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INSATIABLE |
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MOSTLY TRUE |
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TWO FOR THE ROAD |
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All of us eat to live, but some wonderful writers have lived to eat and then write about it. n If you love great food and great writing, you can savor both in such classic memoirs as George Orwell's Down and Out in Paris and London, M.F.K. Fisher's The Art of Eating and Jim Harrison's The Raw and the Cooked. This month and in June, the list of culinary memoirs, both sour and sweet, expands with these half-dozen entries. THE NASTY BITS: COLLECTED VARIETAL CUTS, USEABLE TRIM, SCRAPS, AND BONES by Anthony Bourdain (Bloomsbury, $24.95) Bourdain made his literary bones with his smash memoir, Kitchen Confidential, and several novels (not to mention last year's Les Halles Cookbook, one of the funniest cookbooks ever written). This book collects about three dozen essays and articles (and one short story) on a wide range of subjects, most of them food-related, all rendered in Bourdain's muscular wise guy prose. Although he is deliciously, profanely snarky about many of his subjects (the ill effects of the celebrity chef phenomenon, the raw food fad and Woody Harrelson), he most often writes generously about things he loves: the $350 dinner at Masa in New York City that is "worth every dime"; the tough, tattooed Mexicans who do the cooking in many elegant restaurants; his astonished discovery of great food in Las Vegas. And he's perhaps hardest on his own "Keith Richards of chefs" image, calling himself a "loudmouth professional utility chef and obnoxious memoir author"; the book ends with a chapter of his ruthless commentaries on his own work: "Oooh. I'm so bad. I'm so street." HEAT: AN AMATEUR'S ADVENTURES AS KITCHEN SLAVE, LINE COOK, PASTA-MAKER AND APPRENTICE TO A DANTE-QUOTING BUTCHER IN TUSCANY by Bill Buford (Knopf, $24.95) This rollicking, joyous book began as a New Yorker profile of protean chef Mario Batali. But when Buford went to work as an unpaid apprentice in the kitchen of Batali's flagship restaurant, the fabulous Babbo, he discovered that the chef, restaurateur and TV star was indeed Molto Mario - too large, various and Dionysian to be contained in a single article. For anyone who loves great restaurants, this is an irresistible look behind the scenes; for anyone who thinks running a restaurant is easy, it's a revelation. Buford does everything from bleed in the sauce to set himself on fire, but it sounds like he had the time of his life. MY LIFE IN FRANCE by Julia Child with Alex Prud'homme (Knopf, $25.95) La Grande Dame Child was working on this delicious book with her grandnephew Prud'homme when she died in 2004; he has done a delightful job of finishing it. When Paul Child swept Julia away to Paris in 1948, she spoke no French and could barely cook. But she fell in love with him, France and French cooking, earned a degree from the Cordon Bleu and teamed with Simone Beck and Louisette Nertholle to produce the book that would revolutionize the way Americans eat, Mastering the Art of French Cooking. This memoir is the evocative story of a marvelous place and time, a remarkable marriage and a unique woman. INSATIABLE: TALES FROM A LIFE OF DELICIOUS EXCESS by Gael Greene (Warner Books, $25.95) The longtime food columnist for New York magazine recounts the rise of contemporary foodie culture here, but mainly she dishes about her own appetites for food, fashion and sex, kicking it off with an account of her tryst with a young Elvis Presley, which ends with him asking her to order him a fried egg sandwich. Over the past four decades, she apparently has dined at every chic restaurant, been a confidant of every famous chef and most celebrities, and traveled every place worth going to, although it seems to have left her little time for self-reflection. Yes, it's all about Gael, but when a book features recipes like Infidelity Soup and Chocolate Wickedness, you know you're in for at least some fun. MOSTLY TRUE: A MEMOIR OF FAMILY, FOOD, AND BASEBALL by Molly O'Neill (Scribner, $25) The former food columnist for the New York Times and host of PBS' Great Food has cooked up a charming tale about her Midwestern upbringing in the turbulent 1960s, her family's obsession with baseball (her youngest brother is former Yankees star Paul O'Neill), and her unlikely route to becoming first a chef and then a food writer: a Weight Watchers group leader gives her a copy of Julia Child's Mastering the Art of French Cooking, a handsome anarchist bacteriology professor teaches her how to make vinegar, her male dentist assumes not one but four different drag personas to serve as O'Neill's cover during her first restaurant reviewing job. A dash of celebrity dish adds spice. TWO FOR THE ROAD: OUR LOVE AFFAIR WITH AMERICAN FOOD by Jane and Michael Stern (Houghton Mifflin, $24) More than 30 years ago, when they graduated from art school and couldn't figure out what to do next, the Sterns made up one of the coolest jobs imaginable - and made it work. In this entertaining memoir, the couple recall researching and writing their "Roadfood" column for Gourmet magazine, as well as several books, about regional American food. When they started, they were so innocent of the culinary world outside their native Connecticut they couldn't figure out what a Southern server meant when she offered them "bald okra" (it was "boiled"); now, after having consumed approximately 72,000 meals - on the road 200 days a year, they average 12 meals a day, including what sounds like several tons of barbecue - they're the pros on what America used to eat before fast food stamped out the cozy cafes and homey diners. Forty recipes, from Hoppel Poppel to Red Beer, included.
[Last modified May 23, 2006, 16:15:34]
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