Eating Architecture by Horowitz and Singley

Academic foodwriting enters a space where food becomes an idea, not something to cook or something to eat or smell. This idea of food then intersects with other ideas of other things the scholar wants to try to figure out on a grander scale or alternately, to write theses the scholar has in their mind as being the correct theses then have everyone else believe them too.

‘Eating Architecture’ is one of the best books linking food as idea to something else as idea.

For more of “Eating Architecture” please go to the MIT Press page for the book where the full introduction can be read.

Food Porn by Molly O’Neill

Originator of the term ‘food porn’, Molly O’Neill describes the world of food as it stands today. This article was written in 2003 in the Columbia Journalism Review, but it clearly is as thorough and as true as it was on the day it was written.

 

On a balmy May evening in 1997, I was at a bookstore in Santa Barbara, California, signing copies of my third cookbook. It wasn’t my best book, and nearly every chapter of it had previously appeared in my food column in The New York Times Magazine. Nevertheless, nearly two hundred people waited to pay me homage — as well as $26.95 for the book.

The magazine was one of the most powerful platforms for food writing in the nation and, to the people in line, I was a rock star. My mother, a sensible Ohioan, was with me that night and she was appalled. She stood near as fans gushed admiration for my prose and recipes.

Finally, as if unable to contain herself another second, my mother interrupted one woman’s compliments and asked: “Do you actually cook that stuff?”

“Of course not,” replied the customer, who looked like my mother, tall, lean, with a white cap of stylishly coiffed hair. “Every week I cut them out of the magazine and promise myself I will cook them. Don’t we all?”

 

Continue reading this story at alternet

Picnics from Summer Cooking by Elizabeth David

On picnic addicts and warm-weather food . . . with Elizabeth David, there’s always a story and the recipes . . . . well, you’ll have to know how to cook because her recipes are narratives and she has no intention of coddling anyone!

To read more, go to google books, Elizabeth David’s “Summer Cooking”, here.

Critics in the World of the Rising Souffle by Nora Ephron

The food world can be a terribly gossipy place, particularly when the people in it start to look at themselves as Players. Before “foodies” there was “The Food Establishment”, way back in 1968, and here’s Nora Ephron to tell us all about it.

To continue reading, please go to New York Magazine for September 30, 1968

Woman Warrior by Maxine Hong Kingston

“Once in a young lifetime one should be allowed to have as much sweetness as one can possibly want and hold.” – Judith Olney

But sometimes things which taste sweet offer unexpected challenges – depending on who you are, where you come from, your history and culture . . . as we read in this excerpt from “Woman Warrior”:

Read more here . . .

 

The I Hate to Cook Book by Peg Bracken

Peg Bracken. My mother had her book. My mother did not cook. Or at the least, she didn’t like to cook. Peg Bracken was one of a kind, and definitely worth reading.

 

Some women, it is said, like to cook.

This book is not for them.

This book is for those of us who hate to, who have learned, through hard experience, that some activities become no less painful through repetition: childbearing, paying taxes, cooking. This book is for those of us who want to fold our big dishwater hands around a dry Martini instead of a wet flounder, come the end of a long day.

When you hate to cook, life is full of jolts: for instance, those ubiquitous full-color double-page spreads picturing what to serve on those little evenings when you want to take it easy. You’re flabbergasted. You wouldn’t cook that much food for a combination Thanksgiving and Irish wake. (Equally discouraging is the way the china always matches the food. You wonder what you’re doing wrong; because whether you’re serving fried oysters or baked beans, your plates always have the same old blue rims.)

And you’re flattened by articles that begin “Of course you know that basil and tomatoes are soulmates, but did you know…” They can stop right there, because the fact is, you didn’t know any such thing. It is a still sadder fact that, having been told, you won’t remember. When you hate to cook, your mind doesn’t retain items of this nature.

Oh, you keep on buying cookbooks, the way a homely woman buys hat after hat in the vain hope that this one will do it.

 

Read more at the Hachette Publishing Group page here: http://bit.ly/1nM49Ey

Corn: Our Mother, Our Life by Margaret Visser

One-ingredient histories have become an important part of our current reading and writing of food. Here’s one on corn – that ingredient both loved and hated – written way back in 1986.

 

To continue reading go to Much Depends on Dinner by Margaret Visser, Chapter One.

 

The Garlic War by Annie Proulx

“It is not really an exaggeration to say that peace and happiness begin, geographically, where garlic is used in cooking.” This is Marcel Boulestin’s claim. We’ll see about that – in this early story by Pulitzer-Prize winning author Annie Proulx.

Sometime back in the early ’30s my uncle Hubert finished his internship at one of the smaller hospitals in Poughkeepsie, New York, took a pretty young wife, Sophia, and set up practice in his mother-in-law’s rambling house on Garvin Street. His mother-in-law, whom everybody called Auntie Bella, was a formidable woman. She was, in the first place, large—not merely plump, not fat only, but tall, large-boned, and heavy-fleshed. She had a booming bass voice with which she sounded all her opinions to anyone who would listen. If no one would, she told her marvelous tales of the evil eye and of the time her cousin Giuseppe was robbed by bandits to the four cats who were constantly stalking in and out of the kitchen. The cats were swollen with pride and with tasty tidbits that Auntie Bella was always feeding them—a little dab of chicken cooked in a red sauce, for instance. “Here, cat … good, no?” And the cat would purr, gobble down the last shred, and stare greedily into the empty dish.

Continue reading ‘The Garlic War’ in Gourmet Magazine, 1964.

Omelette Roulee by Julia Child

 

Julia Child tops the list of ‘favorite chefs’ and ‘favorite cookbook authors’ among foodies of all ilks. Recipe-writing and cooking instruction are inarguably foodwriting. As a matter of fact, there are those who believe that *only* recipe-writing and cooking instruction are true foodwriting. Julia did it impeccably well.

 

Julia’s seven-page recipe for omelettes is from the site JC100- Julia Child on tumblr. Click here to go to the site and read the full version.

 

Flesh in the Valley by Sudha Koul

Kitchen hierarchy, tradition, religion and how things taste inform and flavor this memoir of life in Kashmir.

We might have a modern kitchen now, but I look forward to the formal occasions when our old cook, Sudarshan, now a venerable grandfather, comes back to cook for us. He will never touch a gas range if his life depends on it, and within moments of his arrival the old hearth fires are ablaze once again, crackling as they joyously send fountains of red and yellow embers into the chimney. The flames remember and find their way to the base of an entombed man-tall vessel, heating up the water inside. We now use the hot water from the old bathroom only for doing the dishes in the kitchen, but it feels good to have the medieval water-heater called up from retirement once in a while.

Continue reading this memoir here at ‘A Matter of Taste’.