Getting panicky about Christmas shopping? What would you say if I promised you you can cover it all off in one place — your local book store?
I’ve culled my shelves and those of the local library with an eagle eye and have come up with some ideas that will suit just about anyone on your list, from the science aficionado who couldn’t care less about what kind of stuffing you put in the turkey, but really wants to know why the gravy is always lumpy, to your hip young son leaving home next year who may want a few recipes up his sleeve to impress his new pals with, to your new best friend who is trying to go sustainable (or should be).
Besides, if you aren’t eating rum balls or sticky caramel corn at the same time, you can probably leaf through most of them before you wrap them up and have a feast yourself. And if you blow it and it has to be re-gifted, it can even go to your favourite local library.
Happy shopping and Seasoned Greetings!
On Food and Cooking: The Science and Lore of the Kitchen . Harold McGee. Even people who hate to cook find this book fascinating. At $58, it’s a bit pricey, but worth every dollar. Anyone who wanders into my messy office and picks it up can’t put it down. McGee studied both science and literature and the result is a fascinating, readable wander through the latest science (this is a revised edition of the 1984 one, which took him some 20 years to research and write). You — I mean, the lucky person on your list will learn about everything from how cows produce milk to old varieties of winter pears. As for the mystery of the eternally lumpy gravy, it’s because when you add flour or starch directly to hot liquid, the moment they hit, the clumps of starch granules develop a partly gelated, sticky surface that seals the dry granules inside and prevents them from dispersing. Share that at the holiday table.
Hungry Planet: What the World Eats . Peter Menzel and Faith D’Aluisio. This fabulous print panorama is a delight for the traveller, the environmentalist/activist, the food-curious and the just plain curious. Menzel and D’Aluisio visited 30 families in 24 countries and asked them to lay out what they would eat in a week. In front of their refugee tent, the Aboubakar family from the Sudan displays their US$1.23 worth of one week’s supplies, which includes 4.6 lb of corn-soy ration, 39.3 lb of sorghum, 9 oz of dried goat meat and 7 oz of dried fish. Then there’s the Al Haggans of Kuwait City with their week’s worth of food (US$221.45) and the Aymes of Ecuador (US$31.55). Menzel did the beautiful photographs, while D’Aluisio rendered the anecdotes and careful statistics that make the documentation come alive. Add in the family recipes from around the world, provocative essays and quirky facts (each Mexican eats 228 lb of tortillas a year; 26 per cent of the population lives on less than $2 a day compared to 46 per cent of Filipinos, who smoke an average of 1,849 cigarettes per person per year) and you’ve got a book you can’t put down.
rebar modern food cook book
.
Audrey Alsterberg and Wanda Urbanowicz. If you’re looking for the ultimate hip
CANADIAN cookbook, this is it. Alsterberg and Urbanowicz have run the very
successful rebar restaurant in Victoria for years, and this delivers all the
goods right off the menu in spades. Most of the recipes are vegetarian (with
mega-wow factors), so it’s good for what ails the Mother Ship, too.
Claudia Roden Arabesque: A Taste of Morocco, Turkey & Lebanon . We couldn’t get away without at least one classic cookbook, and Roden’s, with its stories and descriptions — like how you arrive at a traditional Moroccan home — is a triple crown winner. This book is a redux of her classic 1960s A Book of Middle Eastern Food, and many of the recipes are the same, but some are updated versions. I am not a patient person with complicated, time-consuming recipes, and this book has lots that are not — the lamb tagine (stew) with quince or the chicken with plums, for instance. But even the ones that are more challenging are worth the exquisite results. They also make you realize that, other than the ubiquitous falafel or hummus, how seldom we cross food-paths with this part of the world, and how much the poorer we are for it.
Near a Thousand Tables: A History of Food . Felipe Fernandez-Armesto. Take a brilliant historian who is also a died-in-the-wool iconoclast and sensualist and the result is a page-turner as compelling as any sex-charged thriller. Fernandez-Armesto is a member of the Modern History Faculty at Oxford University so his research is impeccable, but also he manages to make amazing the history of, say, how we got pots (the earliest ones, really, were the stomachs and intestines of the killed animals), and bain-maries (the small intestine was stuffed with meat and what have you and placed inside a large intestine filled with water).
Fast Food Nation . Eric Schlosser. It’s been five years since Fast Food Nation came out and eviscerated fast-food culture, but the content is just as timely as ever. America continues to top global fast food sales at nearly $150 billion annually or about 65 per cent of all fast food sold around the world. But don’t feel too smug — Canada ranks third world wide, after Japan. Fast Food Nation is about far more than fatty diets. You’ll learn about John Simplot in Aberdeen, Idaho and how dried potatoes made him the Potato King, and you’ll follow a river of blood, literally, to peek inside the methamphetamine world of a meat-packing house that processes 5,000 cattle a day. Greg Critser’s Fat Land makes a perfect companion, describing how Americans became the fattest people in the world — soon followed by everyone else, when it isn’t even Christmas.
Glenda Bartosh is an award-winning freelance writer who
wishes everyone Happy Holidays with enough time to curl up with a good book.
