Geoff Dyer Got a Bottle of Beer

He wrote about it.

14 Books Every Food Lover Should Read

The list, care of Buzzfeed.

Paula Deen...the Comic Book?

Indeed.

50 Best Food Memoirs

The list, care of AbeBooks.

Hotel and Restaurant Menus of the 1850s and 60s

Bon appetit!

Mmmm....pie

We hold this truth to be self-evident: America loves pie. We, the people, a nation of bakers and eaters, value the art of creating that crispy, gooey, fluffy, fruity dessert — and each region reserves the right to bake the treat in its own individual style.

Listen to a story about pie on NPR, here.

Responses to “Kitchen Wall, Alabama Farmstead"

Gastronomica invited authors Ruth Reichl, Francine Prose, Elizabeth Graver, Ellen Dore Watson and Patty Crane to reflect on Evans' photograph, to imagine the lives beyond the kitchen wall.

From the piece...

In the summer of 1936 the photographer Walker Evans collaborated with the writer James Agee on an article about cotton farmers in the American South. The article was never published, but the material they gathered eventually became the book Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, published in 1941. For four weeks in July, Evans photographed three sharecropper families and their environment. Agee noted the significance of “bareness and space” in these homes: “general odds and ends are set very plainly and squarely discrete from one another. . . [giving] each object a full strength it would not otherwise have.” These objects only hint at the lives of the inhabitants of this house, which remain essentially unknown to us.

Will Read for Food

Trust any fiction with no scenes of meals? Of course not. Pâté, Turkish delight, and venison pies don’t just appeal but also reveal, notes the Boston Globe.

From the article...

“Island of the Blue Dolphins’’ makes us think of harvesting abalone, “Heidi’’ of the goats’ milk that helped cure Klara, “The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe’’ of Turkish delight, the world’s most disappointing candy. What I imagined as a child to be some sort of intoxicating nougat is instead a powdery gumdrop that tastes like a urinal mint smells. This confection aside, one wonders how much the food we read about in childhood shapes what we want to eat today. In “Little House on the Prairie,’’ for a special dinner the family eats “stewed jack rabbit with white-flour dumplings and plenty of gravy. There was a steaming-hot, thick cornbread flavored with bacon fat.’’ Rabbit with dumplings and bacon cornbread sounds like something that might appear in any of today’s crop of farm-to-table, nose-to-tail restaurants. Is the craze for urban foraging a product of children who read “My Side of the Mountain’’ one too many times?

Food is no less important an illustration in books for adults, of course. In Jhumpa Lahiri’s work, for instance, it connects characters to their homeland and each other. Perhaps no one has written so grimly of food as Jonathan Franzen, whose “Corrections’’ is full of miserable meals that limn one family’s dysfunction. (No one who reads it will ever hear the phrase “mixed grill’’ again without feeling simultaneously depressed and hysterical.) Everything we need to know about the dandy Eugene Onegin is revealed when he dines at a restaurant on “roast beef, red and gory, / and truffles, which have ever been / youth’s choice, the flower of French cuisine: / and pâté, Strasbourg’s deathless glory, / sits with Limburg’s vivacious cheese / and ananas, the gold of trees.’’ Likewise the Cratchit clan in Charles Dickens’s “A Christmas Carol’’ when they exclaim with delight over a dinner of goose “eked out by apple-sauce and mashed potatoes’’ so that it feeds the whole family. Food reveals all - class, character, culture.

Eight Great Foodie Adventures

The reading list, care of the Daily Beast.

The Diets of the Romantic Poets

An interesting story about one of the most fabled dinner parties in literary history, and about, yes, the diets of the Romantic poets, is in Lapham's Quarterly.

From the piece...

Two decades of opium addiction wreaked havoc on Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s digestion (one of its chief side-effects was an awful, binding constipation). Subject to frequent and recurring “bowel attacks” that made him “weep and sweat and moan and scream,” he was off solid food for weeks at a time, and accordingly ate a lot of broth. He even dabbled in vegetarianism for a while, but believed it gave him insomnia. When he was well, Coleridge loved to go out to dinner, and his hosts never failed to find him the consummate companion—witty, erudite, able to recite long poems by heart, and with more natural intelligence than any writer of his generation—although he could also be a handful. At one dinner party, encouraged by the host, he smashed a window and several wine glasses, and started pitched the cutlery at the tumblers. Coleridge particularly loved apple dumplings.

If the first generation of Romantic poets had an unhappy relationship with food, the second were little better. Lord Byron, scarred by being a “fat school-boy,” had transformed himself into a “leguminous-eating Ascetic” by the time he went up to Cambridge in 1805. But the fat wanted him, and he spent his entire life dieting, caught up in a vomitous cycle of binge and purge, fasting all week and then gorging himself on “a pint of bucelles [Portuguese wine] and fish.” While convinced that he always felt better when he was a bit heavier, he was similarly certain that the extra weight caused him to misbehave, and that it was his duty to “starve the devil out.” Byron rarely accepted dinner invitations and claimed to be especially repulsed by the sight of women eating, although at least some of this can be attributed to the creation of his own myth. When Byron went to Samuel Rogers’ house for dinner, he refused soup, fish, mutton, and wine, and when asked what he did eat, replied, “nothing but hard biscuits and soda-water” (Rogers eventually served him potatoes, “bruised down on his plate and drenched with vinegar.”) A few days later, Rogers met Byron’s best friend John Cam Hobhouse, and asked him how long Byron intended to continue with his diet. “Just as long as you continue to notice it,” was the reply.

McSweeney's Food Mag Coming Your Way

Lucky Peach is profiled on the Wall Street Journal.

From the story...

Messrs. Chang and Meehan opted to add the print component to expand on some of the ideas they first had with the "Momofuku" cookbook. In effect, they reversed the modern trend and created an iPad app with an accompanying magazine, rather than vice versa. "We wanted to capture things in writing that wouldn't be able to make it on an iPad five-minute video and basically that was the impetus and catalyst for the magazine," Mr. Chang said.

To launch the magazine, they turned to McSweeney's co-publisher Chris Ying, with whom they had worked on the food section of McSweeney's 2009 one-off newspaper, the San Francisco Panaroma. "[It's about] appealing to people who generally like food but like other things as well, such as writing and art," Mr Ying said. "Lots of people who care about food also care about other things."

The first issue of Lucky Peach includes a noodle-driven Japanese travelogue by Messrs. Chang and Meehan; essays by Ruth Reichl, Anthony Bourdain and John T. Edge (on "Seventh-Ward Ramen"); and the 1919 Jun'ichirō Tanizaki short story "The Gourmet Club." There's also a recipe for the famous caviar-in-a-soft-boiled-egg that Mr. Chang serves at Ko, Momofuku's reservations-only prix-fixe restaurant on First Avenue. And while the magazine features an as-told-to essay by chef Harold McGee, with illustrations, about alkaline noodles—the kinky yellow noodles used in ramen—and alkalinity in food, the app offers an appearance by Mr. McGee explaining the subject while sitting at a teacher's desk that appears to be flying through space.

A Preview of McSweeney's New Quarterly Food Journal, Lucky Peach

Enjoy!

Greg Boehm's Cocktail Library

Showcased recently in Fine Books & Collections Magazine, take a video tour of Greg Boehm's collection of rare and antique cocktail books on Oh Gosh TV.

From the post...

Join Greg Boehm at the Mud Puddle Books offices in Manhattan for a tour around his extensive cocktail library. Featuring some of the very first books about cocktails and bartending, and spanning four centuries, this collection is one of the most extensive in the entire world. See the books, learn about the history behind them, and find out about the reproductions now available.

Ten Delicious Memoirs from Chefs

The list, care of Flavorwire.

Gwyneth Paltrow Food Magazine?

Quite possibly, notes the New York Post.

From the article...

Academy Award-winning actress Gwyneth Paltrow has been remaking herself in recent years as a food expert with strong ties to celebrity chef Mario Batali -- and now, according to a reliable source, she is trying to expand her empire outside of the Hollywood realm with a magazine project.

One source insisted Hearst -- which has a hit on its hands with the Food Network Magazine and which helped turn Oprah Winfrey's celebrity buzz into O, the Oprah Magazine, now the second most profitable magazine in the entire company after Cosmopolitan, is intrigued.

"It's a super-secret project," said one source. Hearst is insisting speculation is not true.

Our Meals, Ourselves

The Millions gives us a short history of food writing.

From the piece...

In fact, food writers have taken that advice to heart since Brillat-Savarin’s time. They have felt free to recall, meditate, and describe, from Marcel Proust’s tea-soaked madeleine to Julia Child’s sole meunière, but they never connected food with morality, only competing tastes. The topic even blunted the sharpest pens of the nineteenth century. H.L. Mencken reminisced about oyster fritters and soft-shell crabs in “The Baltimore of The Eighties,” but made only a passing mention of the pollution that would later render the Patapsco River one of the first identified marine dead zones in the world. Likewise, Mark Twain wrote enough about food to fill a book, though it’s probably too much of a stretch to call him a “locavore,”, since it sounds like Twain’s preference for local food was more of a logistical rather than a moral issue.

It took socialists to first convince people that food issues extended well beyond the dinner plate. Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle famously exposed the near-complete lack of concern for food safety in the meatpacking industry, and George Orwell spent a surprising amount of his literary life defending roast beef, bread-and-drippings, and the English way of making tea from the encroachment of margarine and tin cans. “We may find in the long run that tinned food is a deadlier weapon than the machine-gun,” he wrote in The Road to Wigan Pier, without any irony whatsoever: he believed that industrialism meant the decline of man’s moral, intellectual, and physical health, and nowhere was this decline more apparent than in the English kitchen.

The Secret Weapon Against Childhood Obesity - A Magazine

The Atlantic has a piece about the new magazine ChopChop.

From the piece...

Over the next few months, an idea took shape that matched my skills to my goals: I would give recipes to pediatricians to distribute during well-child visits. Kids would learn to cook and take some responsibility for their own health. They would have fun, bond with their parents or caregivers, and stop eating so much damn junk. They would achieve nutritional literacy. This could be my own "little red wagon" project.

I called Barry Zuckerman, chief of pediatrics at Boston Children's Hospital. I knew Barry because when other hospital administrators seemed more worried about whether wheeling toys through hospital corridors violated arcane regulations, he wholeheartedly supported it. I knew that not only did Barry think outside the box, he barely knew there was a box. He loved the idea of ChopChop and pushed me to get more feedback from other doctors. Literally every single pediatrician said, "Bring it on!"

My son's pediatrician, Dan Slater at Harvard Vanguard Medical Associates, actually asked, "Can you get it to me in two weeks?" In spite of my excitement, I challenged him: Would he really have time to talk about cooking with a patient when he had only 30 minutes to cover an endless array of topics, among them seat belts, bike safety, oral hygiene, physical hygiene, physical activity (including the dictum to learn to swim), boundary setting and rules, sleep habits, school, growth and development, strangers, sport safety, safety at home, healthy friendships, and bullying?

His unequivocal response was yes. He told me he talked about healthy eating all day long with his patients. "But I have no tools. If you give me healthy recipes, then I'm not just talking about it; I'm giving my patients something they can really use."

It became obvious that there was a need for ChopChop, and that to get to doctors I needed to be a non-profit (I re-started Kid2Kid) and raise money. The first one into the money pool was Boston Medical Center, Barry's hospital, of course. When other hospitals heard that Barry was in, that got their competitive juices flowing, and they followed as well.

Gourmet Slaughterfest

The great Anthony Bourdain has something to add to his resume: graphic novelist.

From the piece in the Guardian...

"It's about ultraviolent food nerds. It's a gourmet slaughterfest, sort of like Fistful of Dollars meets Eat Drink Man Woman," he told the Omaha World Herald. In another interview, he described the comic as a combination of Kurosawa's 19th-century Japanese gangster film Yojimbo, Big Night, the story of two Italian brothers starting a restaurant in New Jersey in the 1950s, and Danish film Babette's Feast, in which a Parisian refugee plans a culinary banquet to thank the twin sisters who took her in. "[Get Gyro is] an ultraviolent slaughterfest over culinary arcana," said Bourdain.

The move isn't Bourdain's first foray into fiction: he is also the author of a handful of crime novels, including Gone Bamboo, "a feast of murder, hitmen, and the hitwomen they love", Bone in the Throat, about a junior chef who "unwittingly finds himself a partner in big-time crime", and The Bobby Gold Stories, as well as his non-fiction books. "The next book will be a crime novel, just to take a break from writing and talking about myself. I think that will be a healthy departure," he told the Omaha World Herald. "It's displaced New Yorkers in the Caribbean doing bad things to each other. Food will be involved."

Here's some of Bourdain traveling to Istanbul on "No Reservations":

Jon's Writing in Diner Journal

Have you picked up the most recent copy of the Diner Journal at your independent bookshop yet? You should, and not just because I'm in it. It's, issue after issue, a pretty great collection of writing and images. I had the good fortune of doing a profile on New Hampshire's Landaff Creamery, makers of fine Caerphilly cheese.

Delicious Reads

Online Education Database serves up their list of 50 fabulous food novels.