Food reading on holiday
Americans and Brits in particular are good at it: books about food and/or cooking that aren’t cookbooks. There’s little more relaxing than reading about your favorite thing at your holiday destination, without having to dash to the kitchen right away. New summer 2018 releases.
Eugène Briffault: Paris à Table: 1846 (translated into English)
Oxford University Press, ISBN 978-0190842031.
This book by the theater critic and writer Briffault, published for the first time in 1846, offers an intimate glimpse into the Parisian kitchen of that era. In the first-ever English reissue, nineteenth-century Parisian high society and its eating habits are described in a critically humorous way, in language that appeals to today’s audience. The Parisian custom of déjeuner dinatoire in particular comes in for criticism. Exactly what we now call ‘brunch’. Even then, Briffault described it as an excuse for men to start drinking first thing in the morning. Men? Indeed, women weren’t supposed to brunch.
Mark Kurlansky: Milk! A 10,000-Year Food Fracas
Bloomsbury Publishing, ISBN: 978-1632863829.
American journalist Mark Kurlansky is the author of the historical non-fiction books Salt, Oysters and Cod (cod). Haven’t read them? Get to it quickly! Even if it may sound a little dull, learning how milk, cheese, ice cream and other dairy products have largely shaped our lives culturally and economically, as well as socially, for thousands of years is utterly fascinating. Breast milk isn’t overlooked either.
Alice Waters: Coming to My Senses: The Making of a Countercultural Cook
Penguin Random House, ISBN 978-0307718297.
Alice Waters is a heroine for every culinary enthusiast. Not least for Amsterdam chefs Sander Overeinder of restaurant As and Kees Elfring of Marius, both of whom have cooked at her legendary Californian restaurant Chez Panisse. Now, at last, there is the long-awaited autobiography of the now 74-year-old chef who popularized the concept of farm-to-table in 1971 and began explicitly listing the farmers and producers of her ingredients on the menu.
The tastiest street food from South Korea
Waters tells her life story from her birth in New Jersey, through her student years and her discovery of real food in Paris, to the opening of Chez Panisse. The pilgrimage restaurant in Berkeley began as a little place for friends, because art student Waters missed the food in France so much. Photos, letters, recipes—it’s all included.
Dave Eggers: The monk of Mokha.
Penguin random house, ISBN 978-1101947319.
An incredible but true story from very recent history. A 24-year-old man from Yemen living in America searches for his roots through San Francisco’s coffee culture, and for good coffee, with the aim of starting his own specialty coffee brand in his homeland. In Yemen, he meets courageous coffee farmers, but finds himself caught up in the war raging there. He must then save his own skin without abandoning the coffee farmers or his dream of creating the best coffee brand in the world. Our own Dutch coffee guru Willem Boot, who lives in San Francisco and helped launch the Port of Mokha brand, plays a key role in this non-fiction novel.
And if you still haven’t had enough food reading, consider an oldie by the recently deceased food guru Anthony Bourdain, such as Kitchen Confidential, translated into Dutch as Keuken confessies.
