New Books in Food

William KerriganView on AmazonNot many of us, not even the most ardent foodies, think of the crab apple as a fruit worth eating, much less extolling, but Henry David Thoreau saw something like the American pioneer spirit in this hard, gnarled, sour hunk of fruit.  In his essay "Wild Apples," he celebrates the apple because it "emulates man's independence and enterprise."  Like America's first settlers, he goes on, "it has migrated to this New World, and is even, here and there, making its way amid the aboriginal trees."  He claims that "[e]ven the sourest and crabbedest apple, growing in the most unfavorable position, suggests such thoughts as these, it is so noble a fruit." William Kerrigan quotes from this passage at the start of his fascinating book, Johnny Appleseed and the American Orchard: A Cultural History (The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2012) and he shows us the man behind the myth, a man very different from the one we might expect, but a man who nonetheless seems like the real-world embodiment of Thoreau's thoughts on the apple.  Born in 1774, John Chapman is the planter who would eventually become Johnny Appleseed.  Kerrigan not only tells us the story of his life and afterlife, but also the story of the American apple, which begins, surprisingly enough, in Kazakhstan and goes on to our moment of genetically modified fruits and heritage varietals. At the center of this story, Kerrigan shows us the journey of an unusual American for his time and then the creation of an unusual–and perhaps timeless–American myth. (Here, by the way, is a link to Kerrigan's blog.)

Bob SpitzView on Amazon[Cross-posted from New Books in Biography] I confess I knew nothing about Julia Child prior to reading Bob Spitz's new book. And yet, from the dramatic opening passages through its 500+ pages, Dearie: The Remarkable Life of Julia Child (Knopf, 2012) held me captive. How many people, much less women, change our attitudes, beliefs, and culture? Julia Child did. Perhaps even more impressive is the fact that she did so by becoming a television star at the age of 50. One of the problems of biography is that women's lives are so often written so badly. Whereas the telling of men's lives emphasizes adventure, in the lives of women biographers tend to emphasize relationships and romance. Not so Dearie. From the outset, Spitz contends that Child led a life of adventure and, while her relationships play a role in the story, they are not at its center. Rather, Child is the star from page 1. Thus, Dearie is an unconventional story of an unconventional woman who made unconventional decisions. Which is to say, biographically speaking, it is a breath of fresh air.

John S. AllenView on AmazonDid Proust have it right?  Does food, whether it's a madeleine from an aristocratic childhood or the Velveeta mac-and-cheese my mom used to make, have a special significance for our memory, perhaps even our very being? In his new book, The Omnivorous Mind: Our Evolving Relationship to Food (Harvard University Press, 2012), neuroanthropologist John. S. Allen takes up this question by guiding us into the inner structures of the brain, into the hippocampus and amygdala, where memories and emotions mix and where food plays a surprising role. But Allen's book doesn't just journey into the brain.  It travels back in time, to the origins of modern humanity, showing us how our evolutionary past shapes our eating present.  Along the way, we learn about the eating habits of Neanderthals and chimpanzees; we discover the benefits of being omnivores and even superomnivores; and we investigate why a food quality as seemingly straightforward as crispiness makes our mouths water.  Here's a hint: the exoskeletons of insects might have something to do with our love of Colonel Sanders' extra crispy recipe. Please join us for a discussion of how and why we eat that begins millions of years ago and ends every time we sit down at the table with our 1,400 cc of human brain.

Andrew P. HaleyView on AmazonRestaurants almost feel indigenous to American landscape, whether you're weaving past them by the thousands when you're driving through a metropolis on the East or West Coast or whether, like me, you find yourself in a small town in the middle of the Midwest, which still manages to boast one Indian restaurant, two Middle Eastern restaurants, and a handful of Mexican and Chinese restaurants. But did you ever wonder just how someone living in Athens, Ohio, could end up eating seaweed egg drop soup on a Tuesday night in September? How exactly did we, as Americans, come to embrace such a rich and ethnically diverse restaurant culture? This is one of the many fascinating questions that Andrew P. Haley explores in Turning the Tables: Restaurants and the Rise of the American Middle Class, 1880-1920 (University of North Carolina Press, 2011). Haley's book tells the story of a middle-class revolution, one that changed American restaurants from aristocratic establishments in the thrall of French culture and French food to democratic places where middle-class Americans with a few extra dollars could enjoy a night out without worrying about whether they had on the right evening gown or knew the correct pronunciation of "menu." Along the way, Haley makes insightful observations about subjects that range from the rise of middlebrow culture in America to the practice of tipping. A winner of this year's James Beard Award for scholarly work, Turning the Tables is that rare book that's satisfying to read if you're interested in academic ideas like the history and origins of class consciousness or if you're just curious about why that stereotype of the snooty French waiter remains with us.

Merry WhiteView on Amazon[Cross-posted from New Books in East Asian Studies] Merry (Corky) White's new book Coffee Life in Japan (University of California Press, 2012) opens with a memory of stripping naked and being painted blue in an underground coffeehouse, and closes with a guide to some of the author's favorite cafes in Japan. This framing alone is worth the price of admission. In addition to being an extraordinarily spirited, witty, and enjoyable book, however, Coffee Life in Japan is also a thoughtfully argued and exhaustively researched account of the history and ethnography of coffee and cafes in modern Japan. This wide-ranging and trans-disciplinary work explores the spaces of the modern café, be they social, solitary, or occasionally silent and sprinkled with stuffed animals. White introduces readers to chaptersful of fascinating characters, including passionate coffee experts who train like dancers to learn to create the perfect cup. This is a surprising book, a pleasure to read, and a treasure for anyone interested in the history of drink, of global commodities, and of Japan.

Silvia LehrerView on AmazonIt's not that Silvia Lehrer dislikes the rich people who flock to the Hamptons every July and August. It's just that she prefers to celebrate those who have more blood and history invested in the land and sea on the East End of Long Island. "The local farmers, the families, all of these people have committed to generations of working the farms." she says in this interview with New Books in Food. I interviewed Silvia on the back patio of her house in Water Mill, New York. The conversation is like a gentle journey taken on a warm July morning, a pleasant tour through a fertile land where sea foam and tractors meet, where fishermen bring in a catch that potato farmers might eat for dinner. Her new book,  Savoring the Hamptons: Discovering the Food and Wine of Long Island's East End, contains recipes Silvia developed from decades of writing about the food people of the North and South forks of Long Island, and brief profiles of many of the salty and sweet characters there.  

Danyelle FreemanView on AmazonDanyelle Freeman, better known as "Restaurant Girl" and a judge on Top Chef Masters, is single. But if you are considering asking out the petite and spunky brunette, you are going to have to compete with some stiff competition. "I prefer a great steak over a great man," Danyelle said during an interview I did with her at a Borders bookstore in New York on the occasion of the release of her new book Try This: Traveling the Globe without Leaving the Table (Ecco, 2011) The book is a memoir of Danyelle's appetite, blending a trip through her experiences with different ethnic foods with some very detailed information about each cuisine. For instance: pick up a piece of nigiri sushi with your fingers – not chopsticks – by the rice and dip only the fish into soy sauce, and only a little, and don't add wasabi to the sauce but only onto the fish directly in a small amount. Not because this is the proper way, but because this proper way enhances the experience. The interview contains personal stories, behind-the-scenes anecdotes about Top Chef and lots of talk about delicious things.

View on AmazonThe men, women and beasts aboard Noah's Ark almost certainly were drunk a lot of those 40 days and 40 nights, according to Thomas R. Sinclair, a professor of Crop Science at North Carolina State University, and his wife Carol Janas Sinclair, a researcher, the authors of Bread, Beer & the Seeds of Change (CABI, 2010). "Noah was a beer trader on the Euphrates River," Professor Sinclair said. The book manages to link man's thirst for beer with nearly every important moment in history, from the invention of democracy in ancient Greece to the advent of the industrial revolution. As to Noah, the Sinclairs argue as do many historians that the Biblical story of a man in a boat surviving a great flood probably stems from an earlier Sumerian tale. Because good clean water was very hard to find in ancient civilizations, many people regularly drank a form of beer made from grain soaked in water and fermented. The alcohol killed the pathogens in the water. (Hops were a later addition in the middle ages). Noah was most likely selling kegs of beer from his boat in ancient Sumeria, the Sinclairs told me in the hourlong interview posted here. "His boat was caught was in one of those flash floods and taken out to the Persian Gulf and there he floated for 40 days. And of course he had to have some animals in there and some family members and barrels of beer, critically, so they could survive those 40 days. The classical story never does tell you what they drank for those 40 days. They had to have that beer. The people of the time wouldn't drink water." Noah? Original Noah, the guy from the Bible who built an ark and floated around for 40 days with lots of animals — was a really a beer trader? "Yes," Ms. Sinclair said. "The precursor of that story probably was a beer trader in Sumeria." The book also contains a recipe George Washington used for beer, and a Sumerian drinking song from the Third Millennium B.C.E. Add your own music and you might just be singing what Noah sang to his pairs of sheep and goats. What makes your heart feel wonderful Makes (also) our heart feel wonderful Our liver is happy, our heart is joyful I will make cupbearers, boys (and) brewers stand by, While I turn around an abundance of beer, Drinking beer, in a blissful mood, Drinking liquor, feeling exhilarated With joy in the heart (and) a happy liver. Modern medical science would quibble with how happy beer makes the liver, but the Sinclairs don't mind. Since their book has come out, they have become a strange pair of crossover academic stars, being asked to appear at beer festivals across the country. The only place they've met trouble is Harvard, where students who now idealize the farming lifestyle do not cotton to the book's portrayal of the farming life as much duller and less fulfilling than the lives lived by early hunter-gatherers. The only thing that broke up the drudgery of farming, the authors say, is the very stuff that caused man to give up the relatively carefree hunter-gather lifestyle in the first place, the desire to brew mood-altering substances. Farming made the widespread production of beer possible and beer made farming tolerable.

Gabrielle HamiltonView on AmazonGabrielle Hamilton has a hard time admitting she wrote a memoir. "It's like admitting you wrote a power love ballad," she told me. But her new book, Blood, Bones & Butter: The Inadvertent Education of a Reluctant Chef (Random House, 2011), has been garnering strong reviews, a blurb from Anthony Bourdain calling it "Simply the best memoir by a chef ever," and  debut sales that landed it at #2 on the New York Times bestseller list. Just as Gabrielle did not set out to open a groundbreaking restaurant when she signed a lease for a decrepit property on East First Street in Manhattan and called it Prune 11 years ago, she did not intend to write a book that was so much about love, chance and fractured families. It was supposed to be "more food-centric and light-hearted." Like Prune, which was a hit from the word go and, with what has come to be known as "nose-t0-tail" cooking,  established her as an important chef, the book is establishing Gabrielle as a noteworthy writer. In this, the debut interview of New Books in Food, Gabrielle, who spent years working for catering companies, talks about why you should always avoid hor d'oeuvres that are served in shot glasses, and why almost all restaurants in Brooklyn New York are basically awful — "I personally cannot be called 'dude' or 'bro' by my server." She also discusses her literary process — and having sex inside her restaurant.