P R O C R A S T I N A T O R S ’
G I F T
G U I D E
Forget Fruitcake
This year’s food books are much tastier
BY MOLLY TEMPLETON
C
hances are good either you or someone
near and dear has at least some interest
in food and related literature. Someone
has to make dinner, right? Someone has
a beaten-up copy of Mastering the Art of French
Cooking lovingly placed on a shelf. And someone
else secretly dreams of being a chef. From Scotland
to Italy, the Northwest to Japan, here are a few
foodie books that just beg to be drooled over.
One place to start is with the master: Julia
Child’s My Life in France (written with Alex
Prud’homme) explores Child’s awakening to
French food. “What’s a shallot?” the young Julia
asks early on; a hundred pages later, she’s “eager
to put the finishing touches on my own recipes
and to start teaching.” Full of photos and memo-
ries, it’s a lovely companion to Child’s cookbooks.
For something with a wandering spirit, try
Alex Kapranos’ Sound Bites: Eating on Tour
with Franz Ferdinand . No, not the dead duke,
the Scottish dance-rock band, of which Kapranos
is the singer. He’s
also a contributor
to
the
U.K.
Guardian, where
some of these
snippets were pre-
viously published.
Kapranos’ stories
are as much about
the company and
the setting as the
food. They’re com-
pact, observant
narratives about eating all over the world, as
much fun for travelers as rock fans.
Speaking of traveling, one of the best-
reviewed nonfiction titles of the year is Bill
Buford’s Heat: An Amateur’s Adventures as
Kitchen Slave, Line Cook, Pasta-Maker and
Apprentice to a Dante-Quoting Butcher in
Tuscany . That’s a mouthful. Buford, a former fic-
tion editor at The New Yorker, found himself won-
dering what life would be like if he worked in a
professional kitchen. So he went to work in the
Manhattan kitcken of Babbo, owned by name-
brand chef Mario Batali. But the restaurant was-
n’t enough, and eventually Buford headed to Italy,
learning from the source. “There is something
here for every-
one,” said The
New York Times
Book Review,
noting that the
plot “clips along”
but includes a
wealth of infor-
mation on the
way.
If you’d like to
go a bit slower,
perhaps James
and Kay Salter’s
Life is Meals: A Book of Days is the right
tempo. This thick-paged, exquisite little book has
a story for every day, from a commentary on
peanut butter to a list of a kitchen’s barest
necessities to the menu on the Titanic on that
fateful April 14. A reader could sample one piece
a day, or gulp them down all at once — it’d taste
good either way.
Things that a lot of folks might not think taste
good are among the subjects in the always-enter-
22 DECEMBER 21, 2006
taining Anthony Bourdain’s The Nasty Bits ,
which collects short pieces of the author-chef-
adventurer’s writing, including a wild ride through
the Las Vegas outposts of various celebrity chefs.
For those who would rather cook than read
about cooking — well, how about both? Kathy
Casey’s Northwest Table offers 100 recipes mixed
in with tales from the author’s culinary adventures
and notes on some of the region’s particular edible
offerings. Just browsing this gorgeously pho-
tographed book is enough to start a person drool-
ing. The same goes for Claudia Rosen’s Arabesque:
A Taste of Morocco, Turkey, and Lebanon .
Surprisingly
simple recipes
for flavorful
Middle Eastern
dishes from
the familiar
(couscous,
hummus) to
the somewhat
more challeng-
ing (tagine of
knuckle
of
veal) abound. Get this one for that friend who
always wants to go to Iraila or Casablanca.
Also gorgeous and glossy is the Esalen
Cookbook , the product of California’s Esalen
Institute (“devoted to the exploration of human
potential”), which offers “healthy and organic
recipes from Big Sur.” On the more casual side,
Margaret S. Fox and John B. Bear’s Morning
Food: Breakfasts, Brunches and More for
Savoring the Best Part of the Day is awfully
perky about morning, but irresistably so. “The
simplest breakfast dish comes out tasting like
nothing you’ve ever experienced before,” the San
Francisco Chronicle raved.
And then there’s Hiroko Shimbo’s The Sushi
Experience . Hefty and bursting with informa-
tion, this is a veritable bible of sushi. It’s not as
pretty as some of the other books (pastel
pages?) but it includes everything: the history
of sushi, female sushi chefs, sushi today, sushi
etiquette and (of course) sushi recipes, many of
which have their own backstories. Just the
ingredient lists can be intimidating, but hey, if
you’ve got sushi lovers on your shopping list,
they’re bound to find something new in this
massive tome.
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