Showing titles in Gastronomy

A collection of the year’s best food and travel writing, selected by renowned chef and humanitarian José Andrés. The Best American series, launched in 1915, is the premier annual showcase for the country’s finest short fiction and nonfiction, and it is the most respected—and most...

Thirteen chapters evoke the joy and discovery of reading a menu dotted with the sharp-eyed annotations of a linguist. Jurafsky points out the subtle meanings hidden in filler words like "rich" and "crispy," zeroes in on the metaphors and storytelling tropes we rely on in restaurant reviews, and charts a micro-universe of marketing language on the back of a bag of potato chips.

Michael Ruhlman, author of best-selling books about professional cooking and chefs and best-selling cookbooks with such chefs as Thomas Keller, Eric Ripert, and Michael Symon, turns his reporter's eye and engaging style on himself to answer the question "how on earth did I get here?" In an unlikely and unplanned series of chance connections, and work often motivated primarily by fear of poverty, he managed to carve a unique place for himself in the increasingly obsessive world of restaurants, chefs, and writers.

The characters in Tasting the Past include a young Swiss scientist who set out to decode the DNA of every single wine grape in the world; Middle Eastern researchers who seek to discover the wines that King David drank; and a University of Pennsylvania academic who has spent decades analyzing wine remains. The science illuminates wine in ways no critic can, and demolishes some of the most sacred dogmas of the industry: well-known French grapes aren't especially noble. 

Goose Island opened as a family-owned Chicago brewpub in the late 1980s, and it soon became one of the most inventive breweries in the world. In the golden age of light and cheap beers, John Hall and his son Greg brought European flavors to America. With distribution in two dozen states, two brewpubs and status as one of the twenty biggest breweries in the United States, Goose Island became an American success story and was a champion of craft beer. Then, on March 28, 2011, the Halls sold the brewery to Anheuser-Busch InBev, maker of Budweiser, the least craft-like beer imaginable.

Erewhon began as a ten-by-twenty-foot basement on Newbury Street in 1960s Boston: planks on cinder blocks, barrels of brown rice and miso, and a macrobiotic couple convinced that changing what people eat could change how they live. Half a century later, the same name has become global shorthand for twenty-dollar smoothies, paparazzi-stalked parking lots, leather grocery totes on a Balenciaga runway, and a Tribeca gourmet market instantly christened “the Erewhon of New York.

America is more than just a fast food nation. Food Americana is the inside story of how generations of Americans have formed a national cuisine with tastes from all over the world. Fried chicken was a distinctly Southern dish - now it's the Sunday night special at the Chateau Marmont Hotel in Hollywood. A Utah restaurant won Maine's annual Best Lobster Roll competition. And perhaps the ultimate all-American dish, pizza, is served up in 30 different styles, a total of three billion pies a year, an average of 23 pounds for each of us.

Farmers in some of the world's oldest agricultural areas were toiling year after year, only to find that modern industrial agriculture was turning on itself. Industrial agriculture's effects on our climate and environment were multiplying and worsening, until the very families growing the world's food were starving.

Join New York Times bestselling author Shauna Niequist as she offers an enchanting mix of funny and vulnerable storytelling in this collection of recipes and essays about the surprising and sacred things that happen when people gather around the table. Bread & Wine is a literary feast about the...

At the age of 47, when he was a successful publishing executive and living with his wife and four children in an affluent Chicago suburb, John Shafer made the surprise announcement that he had purchased a vineyard in the Napa Valley. In 1973, he moved his family to California and, with no knowledge of winemaking, began the journey that would lead him, 30 years later, to own and operate what distinguished wine critic Robert M. Parker, Jr. called "one of the world’s greatest wineries".

'A beautifully written celebration of food, home, and above all, family' - Jamie Oliver 'So charming and beautiful' - Gwyneth Paltrow 'The most delicious kind of memoir' - The Times Stories and recipes from growing up as the daughter of revered chef/restaurateur Alice Waters: food, family, and...

Ella Baker, Alice B. Toklas, Hannah Arendt, Octavia Butler, Agnes Varda, Elizabeth David, Edna Lewis, Maya Angelou, Laurie Colwin: these smart, engaging, revolutionary, and creative twentieth-century women were all profoundly influenced by their own relationships to food, drink, and other elements of sustenance.

Recounting the fairy-tale-like rise of Antonin Carême from Parisian orphan to a household name synonymous with culinary luxury, Carême offers a unique conflation of historical biography, social history and cookery guide. Kelly lifts the veil on one of the most momentous and sensuous periods in European history: First Empire Paris, Georgian England and the tsarist Russia of War and Peace, depicting Carême’s entanglements with the social and political elite of his age, from King George IV to Napoleon, the Romanovs to the Rothschilds.

Ten Restaurants That Changed America reveals how the history of our restaurants reflects nothing less than the history of America itself. Whether charting the rise of our love affair with Chinese food through San Francisco's the Mandarin, evoking the richness of Italian food through Mamma Leone's, or chronicling French haute cuisine through Henri Soulé's Le Pavillon, Paul Freedman uses each restaurant to tell a story of race and class, immigration and assimilation.

We’ve all got a friend who claims to know where you can get the best pint of Guinness. From the pub to the pour, it’s an experience. And if anyone knows this best, it’s London-based Corkman Ian Ryan – founder of Sh*t London Guinness and Beautiful Pints. From the all-important different elements of a Guinness pour to what to look for (and what to run a mile from) when sourcing beautiful pints, as well as a crème de la crème list of pubs around the world to visit, Ian shares his expertise from many a pint of plain sank and enjoyed.

Der gemmer sig meget historie og kultur i mad, uanset hvor i verden man sætter sig til bords. Det er imidlertid svært at finde noget sted, der er lige så rigt på både, kultur, historie og skøn mad som Rom. Madskribent og kulturhistoriker Andreas Viestad inviterer på middag i Rom og fortæller samtidig byens vidunderlige historie med stikord fra det italienske køkken. Bogen er en herlig måde at lære om Italiens historie på en flydende og hyggelig måde.

When we humans love foods, we love them a lot. In fact, we have often eaten them into extinction, whether it is the megafauna of the Paleolithic world or the passenger pigeon of the last century. In Lost Feast, food expert Lenore Newman sets out to look at the history of the foods we have loved to death and what that means for the culinary paths we choose for the future.

Written and read by food writer and New York Times contributor Besha Rodell—(formerly) one of the world’s last anonymous restaurant critics—comes this this witty and lively memoir. When Besha Rodell moved from Australia to the United States with her mother at fourteen, she was a foreigner...

Its history stretches back almost to the founding of the nation and includes many colorful characters, both well known and obscure, from the hatchet-wielding prohibitionist Carry Nation to George Garvin Brown, who in 1872 created Old Forester, the first bourbon to be sold only by the bottle.

In this follow-up book to A Natural History of Wine and A Natural History of Beer, authors Rob DeSalle and Ian Tattersall yet again use alcoholic beverages as a lens through which to gain a greater appreciation of natural history.