Julie & Julia: My Year of Cooking Dangerously, by Julie Powell. Little, Brown & Company, 2005

I never thought I’d have any interest in this book or movie, but one day it was on TV and I watched it and really liked it. So when I found the book, I figured, well, the book is always better than the movie, I grabbed it. Sadly, my presumption turned out to be wrong. I did not like the book better. I liked it considerably less.



In the movie, I much preferred the sections on Julia Child, who was considerably more interesting that I would have ever thought from just watching her TV show a few times. A lot of time was given to her story. In the book, Julie, quite naturally, gives more time to her own story- that she would undertake making every single recipe in Julia’s foundational cookbook in the space of one year. She starts a blog to tell the world about this project, and it becomes a huge hit. A book deal appears, and it’s optioned for a movie. This book isn’t just a collection of her blog entries; she’s looking back from the end of the project and going through the memories.



I should have liked it. She can be witty, with the kind of self-deprecating humor that grabs me. She swears almost as much as I do. I get obsessed with food at times. But I disliked her continual complaining about the same things over and over again (note to self: stop doing that! I’m sure NO one likes that!), given that she was living a fairly privileged life. The things she says and thinks about her perfectly good, supportive husband are nasty. Her story telling is not linear in the least. I just got tired of her, and wanted the book to end.

Hungry: Eating, Road-Tripping, and Risking It All with the Greatest Chef in the World, by Jeff Gordinier. Tim Duggin Books, 2019

Author Gordinier, Esquire food and drink editor, was having a bit of a mid-life crisis. His marriage had just ended, and he was restless and depressed. Then Rene Redzepi, owner of world famous (but I’m not enough of a foodie-or at least, not a rich enough foodie, to have heard of it) Noma restaurant in Copenhagen. It was 2014 and Redzepi was burnt out, looking for new inspirations, and scared of losing his status as the world’s greatest chef. He decided it was time for a road trip, and Gordinier was invited. The multi-year road trip was hectic, strange, and it pulled him out of his slump.



There were three main stops on the tour: Sydney, arctic Norway, and Mexico. Redzepi wanted to get into what the natives of these places ate, to try and bring something new to the elite world’s palates. He went with the natives of the areas to dig deep into their cuisines, dining on blood sausage, chicken hearts, prickly pears, avocado leaves, tropical fruits, chiles, nuts, palm sugar, tamarind paste, kelp, seawort, ant eggs, and grasshoppers. Then he planned a popup, and gathered his crew of fellow chefs. They tried the things the people brought them, they made new combinations, and they tried cooking them in various ways. Redzepi seems to have a hyperactive energy that he transmits to his crew. The popup runs into troubles, of course, and it ends up costing the select clientele $600 a plate. Which they happily pay, because they revere Redzepi in almost a cult like state.



I found it interesting, but choppy to read. The saga takes place over a couple of years, so Gordinier necessarily jumps in and out of Redzepi’s adventures and his own life. I loved the parts about the food itself. I’m enough of a foodie that it made me hungry to try new foods and make up new combinations, to taste all these great things- minus the ant eggs. I’m not *that* much of a food adventurer. Four stars.

Burn the Place: A Memoir, by Iliana Regan. Midway Books, 2019

Iliana Regan is the owner of the Michelin Star restaurant “Elizabeth”, named for her sister who died in a jail holding cell. She was exposed to food a lot as a child- they lived on a farm and grew, foraged, baked, and preserved most of their food, but until the point her mother rebelled at having to do all that and they moved to a city. Oh, and they also helped out in Regan’s grandmother’s restaurant, too. Little wonder her mother got exhausted! But Regan loved working with food. When she grew up, she worked for other restaurant and worked in every station, learning the ropes inside and out. For a while, she ran a small restaurant out of her home, foraging the daily ingredients right in the city.



But the book isn’t all about her incredible food talent. As a child she struggled with gender identity. She also had a problem with alcoholism and addiction. She could not sustain a relationship. She was working in a male dominated profession. Being a lesbian didn’t make her any more acceptable. She battled all these things and came out a winner. She’s been married to Anna for several years now, and running a restaurant and a Japanese inspired pub.



The book was a little hard to read. While divided into four parts, the story is all over the place, in the present at one point and then skewing into the past. The writing is raw and blunt- descriptions of slaughtering animals, rampant drug taking, and alcohol binges. But it has something that held me. I do wish I’d learned some about her process of recipe creation; one of the most compelling things is that even as a small child she had a connection with food- when it was ripe, how to combine it, how to serve it up. She has an almost mystical connection with the earth and its edibles. Four stars.

The Flavor Thesaurus: Pairings, Recipes and Ideas for the Creative Cook, by Niki Segnit. Bloomsbury, 2010

This is a book about food, and has recipes in it, but it’s not a cookbook as one usually thinks of it. The author set out to classify all the possible flavor elements, describe them, and list the foods that contained them. She lists flavors such as roasted, meaty, mustardy, green & grassy, spicy, woodland, fresh fruity, citrusy, floral fruity, marine, and sulfurous- there are a huge number of possible flavors. Some I already knew; a few surprised me- I would have never guessed ginger root went under ‘citrusy’! The recipes are right in the thesaurus, put down as one would tell a friend how to create the dish rather than as a list of ingredients & quantities followed by instructions. The book includes an extensive bibliography, recipe index, ingredient index, and a regular index, so you can find anything easily. I wouldn’t recommend reading it straight through like I did (I was getting a bit restless by the ‘T’s, but what can I say, it was a library book) but rather to keep around for inspiration when faced with an ingredient and no ideas. It’s a fun read, though- it’s like listening to a friend describe what she’s eaten in places and how those things were made.

The Gannet’s Gastronomic Miscellany, by Killian Fox. Hachette Book Group, 2018

This is an enjoyable little book about food. It’s trivia that spans the millenniums as well as the world. There is no organization (and no table of contents or index); you can open it anywhere and read a bit anywhere. It’s just little tidbits of info. A great bathroom/waiting room/guest room book. It is mostly a nice presentation- nice cover, sewn in bookmark- but the paper is very thin and cheap looking! It would still make a decent little hostess gift, though. Four stars out of five. 

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Baking Powder Wars: The Cutthroat Food Fight That Revolutionized Cooking, by Linda Civitello. Heartland FoodWays, 2017

Before there baking powder was invented, there were no fluffy cakes, no cookies, no muffins, no biscuits, and no quick breads. Everything had to be leavened with yeast, and since there was no dried yeast available at the grocery store, the baker had to capture and store their own live yeast, as one does sour dough starter these days. It was a lot of work- building up a starter, kneading, and allowing bread two or three rises took a day and a half. There were yeast raised pancakes and biscuits, just like there are sour dough versions of those today, but they weren’t fast and no one baked something on the spur of the moment. Baking powder- even those made at home- changed all that. Now you could bake something in an hour- and the texture was totally different.

This book- which actually reads like a thesis and I do wonder if that was its first incarnation- shows the history of the various mixtures used as baking powder. It also shows us the war between the various large sellers of baking powder- it was surprisingly nasty. Today, with all the mixes on the shelves and all the pre-made baked goods available, one wouldn’t think there would be big money in simple baking powder, but there was.

The first baking powders were homemade, where the home baker combined various ingredients to create a leavener. Some formulations had to be done immediately before baking because moisture caused them to go off right away. Some formulations were double acting- they started giving off gas when mixed with moisture, and were triggered again by the heat of the oven (or the griddle, if making pancakes). Some had aluminum- something many of us cringe at today. Because there were several formulations, cookbooks had to include tables showing what changes had to be made for the different types and brands. All of this experimentation was made in people’s homes, not in labs.

This is a great social history book. Baking powder really did change the way we eat. It didn’t change bread, but it did make a whole new world of baked goods available. And one could make quick breads with it, even though those don’t make great sandwiches- the crumbly texture of baking powder breads makes them fall apart easily whereas yeast breads stay together because of the springy texture of gluten.

There was a lot about the wars between the companies manufacturing the various baking powders that I found myself skipping. The book is incredibly detailed; the author did a lot of research in original records, in both the economic field and the social. If you’re interested in how life was lived in the past, it’s a great book, albeit over long at times. Four stars out of five.



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The Devil’s Feast, by M.J. Carter. Putnam, 2017

In 1842 London, Captain William Avery finds himself inadvertently drawn into a possible murder investigation. At the end of a fantastic meal by celebrity chef Alexis Soyer at the Reform Club in the chef’s own rooms, one man sickens and dies. At first glance it looks like cholera, but a closer look at the symptoms proves it to be poison. And it turns out not to be the only incident; another death follows, and investigation turns up some possible non-lethal cases of poison before the first death.

Normally Avery’s friend Jeremiah Blake would be leading the investigation, but he’s vanished from the debtor’s prison where he was being detained. Avery worries that he doesn’t have what it takes to solve the case before more deaths occur. And he’s under the gun; in just a few days, the club will be hosting the son of the ruler of Egypt in a fantastic dinner with heavy political ramifications.

This is the third in a series of Avery and Blake mysteries.  Blake is the brainy Holmes of this detective duo; Avery is the Watson who tells the tale. And it’s a fun tale to read if you’re a foodie. Soyer was a real historical person. He was the first chef who become a celebrity; he was not only a brilliant chef, but quite an inventor of kitchen gear and an innovator; he created tools and methods that are still used today. He was a fiend for cleanliness in the kitchen, promoted the use of natural gas for cooking, and encouraged women to become chefs. He also had an oversize personality that made him the center of attention at a time when chefs were becoming stars rather than just unseen food makers. Soyer is the heart of this novel, even more than the murders are.

I loved reading this book, in large part because of Soyer and the research that went into the descriptions of the food and the way it was made. The murder investigation itself seems to take the back seat to the food, however, and I’m not sure if this is desirable in a mystery? I was fine with it, but not sure if every reader will be. There is a lot of time spent questioning everyone from meat suppliers to waiters; there is a surfeit of suspects in these crimes and it becomes a little scattered. I started having trouble remembering who was who in the kitchen. I’ve not read the first two books in this series but this seems like a fun series. 

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100 Vegetables and Where They Came From, by William Woys Weaver. Algonquin Books, 2000

The title pretty much says it all; the book tells us about 100 vegetables, what they taste like, where they are from, and how they are prepared. What the title doesn’t tell us is that these vegetables are special; they are some of the tastiest plants on the planet. Consider golden corn salad from Italy, whose large leaves make a salad beautiful; or the Petaluma Gold Rush bean, which when used dried keeps a marvelous meaty taste and texture. The Re Umberto tomato is a paste tomato that is incredibly productive and has an unmatched flavor. Some plants are included mainly because they are different and pretty, but most are included because of flavor. Being both gardener and foodie, I found myself looking up seed sources and bookmarking them numerous times while reading.

The prose is chatty and an easy, fast read. Nice line drawings illustrate the veggies. My only problem with the book is that an awful lot of these wonderful plants won’t grow in my short season area! 

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