Category: books

The Words “Author” and “Great Cook” are not Synonymous

Note to self – check the publication date on books you borrow from the library. Sometimes you just don’t want to go there.

This note to self is provoked by a recent library acquisition that wasn’t exactly what I was expecting. The Great Canadian Literary Cookbook, while definitely Canadian, in a way only Canadians can be, is unfortunately, not Great. Not by a long shot.

I grabbed this book originally because I thought it would be a bit more… literary, in its content. I’ve had an idea to create an anthology of food memoirs by Canadian authors and sort of expected this would be along those lines. And certainly, there are some great food-related books by Canadian authors out there – Austin Clarke, for instance.

Let me start from the beginning. Every year in Sechelt, British Columbia, Canadian writers and readers come together for The Festival of the Written Arts. It’s now called the Sunshine Coast Festival of the Written Arts, and no, I don’t know where Sechelt, BC, is exactly, although somewhere along the BC coast is my best guess. After one festival the organizers came up with the idea to do a cookbook with contributions from festival participants. In 1994, they published the cookbook.

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The Making of a Chef

First, a disclaimer. The content of this post is not intended to sound pretentious or condescending. It is not my intention to look down on the home cook (I am one myself), or to sneer at people who have not gone through a culinary arts programme. I’ve always hated when people with university degrees look down on tradespeople, and it’s very easy for people with professional training to look down on home cooks.

Which is why I’m not recommending Michael Ruhlman’s The Making of a Chef to anyone.

Oh, it’s not that it isn’t a great book – it is. But it would be like me trying to sit down and real a programmer’s handbook. Or a book of Latin. Most of what Ruhlman discusses in this book about his time at the Culinary Institute of America would appear to anyone who hasn’t trained professionally or worked in a professional kitchen to be in a completely different language.

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That’s Just Nasty

I have a great deal of respect for Anthony Bourdain. Not for his ex-junkie, drinking, smoking, vegetarian-hating, pig-killing, squeasel-eating antics, but because he tells it like it is. He’s one of those folks who talk first and think later, someone who regularly gets pegged as being the guy who says what everyone else is thinking but are too afraid to say out loud. And most importantly, someone who puts his honest opinion out there and is willing to take the heat when it doesn’t go over favourably.

I also respect Bourdain for being a real guy who’d rather eat pho on a streetcorner in Vietnam than put on a suit and tie and go to an upscale hot new restaurant just because it’s the thing to do.

The Nasty Bits is a collection of Bourdain’s writing from the past few years since he left his gig at Les Halles in NYC to become the punk rock version of a food celebrity, with shows first on The Food Network and then with the Travel Channel. Published in a variety of magazines and newspapers, The Nasty Bits touches on anything and everything that touches Bourdain – from being seated on a plane next to an obese woman on his way home from a conference where he took on the heads of McDonald’s, to the interview with molecular gastronomy chef Adria Ferran of El Bulli which ultimately led to the decision to leave The Food Network (they were against spending the money to send him to Spain and instead were trying to force him to into the more traditional celebrity chef niche).

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Candy Freak

One of the cool things about writing a book about a particular food item is that, whether you consider yourself to be or not, other people will look to you as an expert on that topic, and will heap free samples upon you in the hope that you will write about them. I met author Steve Almond as he was being gifted with container after container of free organic cotton candy. Despite his polite insistence that he couldn’t possibly carry six tubs of cotton candy home on a plane, the manufacturer wanted him to try every flavor.

Almond was in Toronto this past spring to give what he thought was a reading at the unfortunately named Canadian Sweets Expo (www.sweetsexpo.ca). Badly promoted and equally poorly organized, what was meant to be on par with the big candy shows in the US turned out to be a sad collection of local vendors of mostly waxy chocolate, oddly flavored jellybeans and some crazy chocolate-flavoured energy balls that made me extremely ill. Also present were a few Canadian Food Network celebrities, a face-painter (for the kids) and a circus troupe. Not exactly the type of forum where a well-known author and creative writing professor is going to be known for his non-fiction work on rare US candy bars.

Which is too bad, because CandyFreak is a sugar-laced tour of the rare, the wonderful and the delicious. It’s Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, minus Johnny Depp. A self-defined candy freak, Almond traveled far and wide to learn the story of some rare and wondrous local favorites. From the southern icon the GooGoo Cluster, to the darling of Boise, the Idaho Spud (which yours truly has never tried but desperately wants to – readers in Idaho, help a poor Canadian gal out, won’t you?), Almond tours factories, talks to chocolatiers, and waxes poetic about enrobers.

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Cooking For Dummies

It’s pretty much been determined that The Food Network has been dumbed down to make it more “entertaining” as opposed to educational. Cooking shows never give you the recipe for things anymore, and viewers choose their programming based on pretty hair, big boobs and which TV celebrity chef has the most gadgets for sale.

Apparently this desire to want to cook but not really put the effort into the process has created a whole new (lowered) standard in cookbooks. As today’s cooks are bewildered by basic techniques and standardized cooking terms, recipes get longer and more detailed in an effort to explain the process enough so that the inexperienced home cook can turn out a halfway decent product.

In today’s Toronto Star, Susan Sampson explores the difficulties faced by both cookbook publishers and food writers.

We don’t sauté. We cook, stirring.

We don’t combine. We toss gently. Or stir in. Or whisk.

And we never, ever julienne. We cut in matchstick strips.

It’s our way of speaking very s-l-o-w-l-y and enunciating as home cooking skills continue to slide downhill.

We are not alone. Cookbook editor Rux Martin, for example, also tries to avoid terms readers may not know, like blanch or baste.

The catch? “If you can’t use those terms, how do we educate cooks?” wonders Martin, an executive editor at Houghton Mifflin in Boston.

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Eat Like a Canadian

Canadians at Table – A Culinary History of Canada
Dorothy Duncan

When I was in junior high school, I was very excited about taking history class. That was until I got to that class and realized “history” was really all about who won what war, and not about how people really lived. Feminists would interject here and mention that what I really was interested in was “HERstory”, and I guess to some degree, that would be right. Because what really turned my crank was learning about how people lived, and most of that centred around women. How did the pilgrims keep their teeth clean? What did the Egyptians use in place of pads or tampons? How did cooks make all of the things we cook today without the convenient appliances we take for granted?

This interest was so intense that it almost led me to become an archaeologist, until I learned that archaeologists spend an awful lot of time digging in the dirt under the hot sun. Turns out what I really wanted to be was an anthropologist, but by the time I figured that out, I had moved on to wanting to be a fashion designer, and my interest in history got set aside until I got into the study of food.

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That’s Not Healthy

I came across a cooking magazine a couple of weeks ago that I’d never seen before. Healthy Cooking Magazine has a tagline of “simple solutions, healthy alternatives”. I don’t buy a lot of cooking magazines, to be truthful, and grabbed this one only because it was on a shelf next to Eating Well and I was at a friend’s shop and wanted to be a good customer.

It sat around for a few weeks after I brought it home – I’ve been crazy busy the last little while and never really had time to sit down with it. On the weekend I started flipping through the pages as I was eating lunch and noticed something rather peculiar.

Now, maybe it’s just because I’ve been thinking about ethical policies lately; I’ve been drafting up guidelines for writers at TasteTO, as well as the framework for an info package for advertisers. But what I noticed about Healthy Cooking was that the majority of ads within the magazine were for products created by the writers themselves.

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The End of Food

I first heard about Thomas F. Pawlick’s The End of Food, when my editor at Gremolata interviewed him last year. I had forgotten that interview when I finally got around to reading the book, and ended up not liking the book very much, mostly for reasons that had nothing to do with Pawlick’s message and more with his writing style. Having just re-read the interview again, Pawlick’s message is more on point.

Offering a Canadian take on the current dire food production issues we’re facing in North America, Pawlick has a unique perspective in that he is both a scientist and a farmer and has worked with the United Nations Food and Agriculture Association. If anyone knows exactly where their food comes from, it’s him.

Starting with a tough rubbery tomato that Pawlick tosses at the fence in his yard only to have it bounce back like a tennis ball, he beings to research exactly why our food doesn’t seem like food anymore. The results are downright terrifying, particularly the statistics he gives indicating how nutritionally deficient our fruits and vegetables are compared to the same product grown twenty or fifty years ago. Modern agriculture is focussed on marketability, not taste or nutrition, and the process of growing just about any food is now highly mechanized and chemically-intensive.

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Chefs!

I’m working my way through a stack of books received as Christmas presents, and while different both topically and stylistically, all seem to have one underlying theme; They’re all about chefs.

The United States of Arugula – How We Became a Gourmet Nation by David Kamp is less the history of gourmet food as it relates to the home cook, and more the evolution of fine dining in the US. Kamp traces the progression of the modern restaurant from the first Escoffier-trained French chefs brought to the US to the current trend towards Food Network “celebrity” chefs and the debate over their validity in the kitchen. Touching on every 20th century food icon from Julia Child to Alice Waters (about whom Kamp seems to have little good to say), he intertwines the history with the development of the careers of two major food writers, James Beard and Craig Claiborne. The book gets more than a little dishy at times (oh, those crazy kids at Chez Panisse!), but that’s part of its charm.

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Julie & Julia – a Review

First up, I should make it clear that I’m not a fan of French food – either cooking it or eating it. I find it excessively meaty, saucy, heavy and especially fussy. Give me a nice spicy curry or some Ethiopian stewed collard greens any day of the week.

That’s not to say I haven’t cooked and eaten French food, as my year of cooking school was based almost entirely around classic French cuisine, it being the supposed basis and benchmark for all other cuisines (which is complete and utter bullshit, but French chefs, and especially French cooking instructors insist it’s true). So when I first heard about the Julie/Julia Project in which one NYC woman sets herself a goal of working her way through Julia Child’s first volume of Mastering the Art of French Cooking (in a year, no less), my first thought was “Why the hell would anyone do THAT???” Then my second thought was that the only other person I had heard of who worked their way right through that book was Martha Stewart, which to me typifies the type of personality you’d need not to go completely nuts in the process.

Turns out Julia Powell doesn’t have that Martha Stewart perfectionist personality, though, and it works against her significantly during the course of her project.

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