Review by Booklist Review
Summer's approach means that trees and bushes will soon sprout with all manner of fruits and berries. That not a one of these gifts goes to waste is a goal of Waters' Chez Panisse Fruit. The doyenne of California cuisine has long recognized the key role of fruits in her quest for the best, freshest foods. Here she presents a listing of common and uncommon fruits that have passed through her restaurant's kitchen. Recipes accompany a description of each fruit's cultivation and culinary uses. Figs, cherries, grapes, lemons, raspberries, all turn into tantalizing dishes, both sweet and savory. Grapefruit and wine combine for a bracing aperitif. Pomegranates make a great salad with arugula and hazelnuts. This is a reliable and comprehensive book that belongs in every cookery reference collection. The cooking of Provence clearly inspired Waters and a host of other successful contemporary chefs. Geography and human ingenuity meet here to produce the highest quality meats, vegetables, cheeses, and wines. Yet the cuisine of this tiny part of southern France is known chiefly for its aromatic herbs. In Herbes de Provence, Gardiner has asked six of the region's most notable young chefs to prepare recipes featuring one of seven herbs: thyme, rosemary, bay, sage, marjoram, fennel, and winter savory. Robert Lalleman, third-generation chef at the fabulous Auberge de Noves, uses thyme to flavor lobster and sweetens poached pears with thyme honey. Just to the south in spectacular Les Baux, Jean-AndreCharial scents coconut soup with rosemary and uses it again in a stew of chestnuts and Jerusalem artichokes. John Freeman's photographs capture the region's unique light and intense colors as well as the chefs' creativity. Jones spent the first part of the turbulent decades of the nineties in Russia where she witnessed the collapse of Soviet Communism. There she began to appreciate the old Russia, which resurfaced in public religious and cultural expression. In A Year of Russian Feasts, Jones explains to Western readers the regularly recurring Russian Orthodox feasts, those traditional dishes associated with them, and the holidays' significance in the life of the church and the people. In Orthodoxy, prior to feasting comes fasting, so Jones' first recipes exemplify ascetic vegetarian dishes. Then it's on to the celebrations. There are simple and hearty beet soups, meat-stuffed dumplings, sweetly spiced and aromatic Easter bread, and many variations on potatoes. Rich and hearty, the recipes evoke a strong sense of the Russian landscape. Recipes require only generally available ingredients, so they are readily duplicated. Only a careful statistician could actually say which chain has more successfully come to conquer a market: Starbucks or McDonald's. Each started from humble single-outlet origins to become dominant in its own industry. And each in its own way wrought revolutionary change in the way Americans consume food. Antol sets out not just to tell the story of Starbucks, but to talk about the role of coffee throughout its relatively brief history in the world. Confessions of a Coffee Bean covers vast ground as Antol moves from the bean's origins to its spread throughout Europe. She addresses the physiological and cultural effects the bean has exerted over all segments of humanity. Recipes to supplement the text include both coffee-flavored items and assorted accompaniments to a cup of coffee. An index helps make all this information accessible for school reports on one of the world's most desired commodities. Ever since Raichlen published his paean to the "world's best chicken" in the New York Times, the barbecue world has taken to heart his technique of roasting a whole chicken with an open beer can indelicately shoved up its behind. Raichlen assures cooks that this method, outrageous though it may appear, produces a bird with both crisp skin and startlingly moist meat. Now Raichlen devotes an entire book, Beer-Can Chicken, to this unseemly cooking method, expanding it to duck, turkey, and other fowl. As if that weren't enough to keep backyard grills sizzling, Raichlen presents a grilled sausage fattened up with cheese and bacon and aptly named Cardiologist's Nightmare. He even has a breakfast in which scrambled eggs are grilled and biscuits baked in orange rind halves. Keep the Weber fired up for dessert items including grilled pound cake and barbecued peaches. Beer-Can Chicken will prove very popular with backyard cooks. Back in the 1950s, every smart hostess had her own recipe for icebox pie to wow bridge-club ladies or dinner guests. Chattman has resurrected Icebox Pies, crumb crusts filled with ice creams or chilled mousses, and brought them into the twenty-first century. These pies make ideal summer desserts because they can be made well ahead and provide a pleasant, cooling end to dinner. Chattman encourages every cook to express individual creativity by varying the type of crust and combining different fillings into multiple layers of flavors. Who can resist Black Bottom Butterscotch Pie, layers of chocolate and butterscotch puddings in a graham-cracker and nut crust? These pies make good use of seasonal fruits and berries as well, blueberries and raspberries combining with enough jam to bind them atop an amaretto-cookie crust. Chattman's cookbook will undoubtedly convert a new generation of cooks to a retro dessert. Melons figure rarely in cooking, since most of them are eaten raw with little garnishing. Americans adore their watermelons, and they frequently consume honeydew melons as part of mixed-fruit plates. But if Goldman has her way, the American palate will soon learn what the rest of the world already seems to know: melons exist in dozens of varieties and are among the premier gastronomic delights. In Melons: A Passionate Grower's Guide, Goldman outlines her search for uncommon, heirloom varieties of melons that have threatened to disappear into banal supermarket hybrids. These distinctive melons, illustrated in full-color photographs, also bear singular names such as Noir Des Carmes, Hero of Lockinge, and Petit Gris de Rennes. Goldman describes this last one's merits so voluptuously that any gourmet who's not tasted it will spend the summer searching for one. Goldman offers advice on picking a market's best, perfectly ripe melons and notes the exacting Japanese have turned to MRI technology to find their prime specimens at their peak ripeness. The uninitiated also learn the differences between cantaloupes and muskmelons. A few recipes guide cooks to showing off melons' best characteristics. Goldman provides an exhaustive list of sources for seeds and a bibliography to help her readers locate more melon lore. If it's true that there's nothing more genuinely American than pie, then Pascale Le Draoulec is the gastronomic version of Alexis de Tocqueville. Cruising the U.S. in her Volvo, food critic Le Draoulec searched for the best pies, both homemade and commercially produced, and for the histories of those who make them. Collecting her memoirs of these trips in American Pie, she found a lot of truths about America's diversity. She sampled huckleberry pie in Montana and cherry pie in Michigan. Pies from the South abound, many of them old family recipes rarely seen outside the places they originated. Oddly enough, Le Draoulec doesn't record any expeditions to New England, reputedly home to some of the country's best pies. Nevertheless, the pie recipes she has collected make for a good cross section of contemporary pastry making in America. Americans living far away from the seashore chow down on clam chowder, unaware of the labor and skill that go into catching these well-camouflaged bivalves for their bowl of soup. Badger's Clams: How to Find, Catch, and Cook Them tells the story of the skill and experience required for successful
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
There's more to the world of melons than just the cantaloupe and honeydew, but this may not be true for long: many varieties are "on the brink of extinction," according to cultivator and collector Goldman. This handsome volume documents unusual types of melon like the Collective Farm Woman (originally from Ukraine) and the serpent-shaped Snake melon with lavish color photos and playful descriptions. Goldman also instructs readers on how to pollinate, grow and harvest these plants; includes a list of commercial sources; and throws in a few recipes and plenty of trivia ("the Chinese grow more watermelons than anyone else but... they eat the seeds and often discard the melons"). (May) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
Goldman is an acclaimed gardener with a special interest in promoting and preserving heirloom varieties, non-hybrids whose seeds have been saved and handed down from one generation to the next. In Melons, she writes about seed-saving and preservation, growing, pollination, harvesting, and how to determine when a melon is ripe. She even includes several recipes. The heart of the book, however, consists of descriptions and illustrations of the melons themselves: Charentais, Emerald Gem, Santa Claus, Collective Farm Woman, Cob, Queen Anne's Pocket Melon, Blacktail Mountain (watermelon), and nearly 100 others. The many outstanding color photos are by photographer Schrager, whose other works include The Bird Hand Book. Browsers enticed by the eye-catching photos should also enjoy reading about melon history and lore, while serious gardeners will be motivated to try their luck at growing some of these exotic and nearly forgotten heirlooms. A resource list identifies sources for purchasing seeds of many of the melons described. Recommended for public libraries and for horticultural collections in academic and special libraries. (Index not seen.) William H. Wiese, Iowa State Univ. Lib., Ames (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Booklist Review
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Review by Library Journal Review
