Renewing America's Food Traditions

A casual look around our country’s food supply reveals little more than a mix of sprawling, commercialized monocultures. Plants are grown and animals are raised with an eye to efficiency and profit. The nation’s highways swarm with worker-ant trucks that shuttle our agricultural products 1400 miles, on average, between the farm and the plate.

But take a close look, and you’ll see something different on the edges: The last remnants of America’s native foodstuffs and our pre-factory-farm agriculture. These are foods with real flavor, not the stripped-down blandness of food raised more for shippability than taste. Heritage turkeys have enjoyed the spotlight of the food press, but these are only the beginning if you know where to look.

If you don't know where to look, however, Renewing America’s Food Traditions is a good place to start. The book divides the United States into “food nations” (a practice already in place at Renewing America’s Food Traditions (RAFT) the organization, which birthed the book). A large swatch of California, for instance, is Acorn Nation — a name that rings true to someone like me who learned about acorn grinding holes at summer camp in the Sierra Nevada foothills. Alaska, not surprisingly, is Salmon Nation. The southeastern coast is Crab Nation. And so on. The names evoke the food patterns of the cultures who lived off the native bounty long before semis and trains connected every point in the U.S. with every other point.

Each of the book’s small and well-written vignettes focuses on one particular “heritage” food from the food nation that defines each section, focusing on one or two people deeply involved in preserving that food. Some, such as Honey Drip Cane Sorghum, I had never heard of. Some, such as the Olympia Oyster, are treats that I already seek out. Lovely photos and simple recipes accompany each piece. And — you other research-happy food writers will appreciate this — each two-page essay gives a list of resources where you can learn more about the food.

But not where to buy it. This is my only complaint about this book, which could live on your reference shelf or your coffee table with equal ease. I can understand why there aren’t instructions for poaching leatherback sea turtles. But where do I buy a Silver Fox rabbit?

It could be that the authors don’t want to contribute to the shuttling of food around the country — the editor is locavore founding father Gary Paul Nabhan, after all — but it seems unfair to build up interest in these foods and then snatch away the chance to find them.

But this is a must-have book for any food lover who cares about the more interesting ingredients available throughout our country.

This book was sent to me for review.

Hey all, there’s still room in my upcoming UCB Extension wine class. Sign up soon!

Some Recent Food/Wine Books

In March, Alder wrote a vinography.com post titled “Food And Wine Pairing Is Just A Big Scam.” The resulting comment thread surprised me: I didn’t think it was a particularly novel revelation that there’s never one and only one perfect wine for a meal. Some of the best wine writers in the industry — Karen MacNeil and Ed Behr to name two — have been arguing this point for years.

I disagree with Alder’s absolute stance about food and wine pairing — I have some basic guidelines that work well — but I don’t disagree that a major industry has formed around convincing people that they can only pick out a wine for dinner with an expert’s help.

How could I? I’ve been sent three food-and-wine-pairing books for review, and there are probably a dozen others out there. That gives me the chance to compare them instead of doing a full post for each.

He Said Beer, She Said Wine, Calagione & Old
Maybe you can’t judge a book by its cover, but its title is fair game. She’s an urbanely dressed sommelier; he’s a “guy’s guy” brewer. Together, they’re a couple that bickers about what to drink with dinner while maintaining outdated gender stereotypes. There’s even a photo of her standing with crossed arms and her back to him looking at the camera. I guess if they ever make a romantic comedy movie out of the book, they’re all set for the poster shot.

The frustrating thing about this book is that the eye-rolling gimmick hides decent information. It’s nice to see a food-pairing book give equal footing to beer — which in many ways is more food-friendly than wine — though it feels a little wrong that many of the recommended beers come from Calagione’s brewery. The two authors present wine and beer as a series of characteristics that expand your ability to find similar drinks: levels of oak in wine, for instance, and levels of hops in beer. The book encourages its readers to make their own judgment, though only after it has pre-biased them to the results. If someone says a wine smells like lemon zest, you’re likely to smell lemon zest on your next sniff. If a book says beer is the better choice for a dish, are you really going to be objective when you try it yourself?

But the information isn’t worth the cutesy dialog. Pick out a book that’s useful and not condescending. You’re an adult, and you deserve to be treated like one.

What To Drink With What You Eat, Dornenburg & Page
In the year and a half since I first reviewed this book, a mild annoyance of mine has become a full-blown rant: If you just tell a reader which wine goes with which food rather than explain why, you’ve abandoned that reader to ignorance. What To Drink is guilty of that sin, but it’s hard to argue with its voluminous lists, culled from the opinions of sommeliers around the country. If nothing else, it has the potential to introduce readers to new wines (and the book is mostly about wine, though there are other drinks in there) and provide brainstorming opportunities for jaded, cynical wine geeks like myself.

But I find it interesting that while I recommend it — even still — I almost never consult it. So why recommend it? I think the bulky lists offer something, even without an explanation as to why the wines work. They offer a wealth of possibilities and a reassurance that, in fact, there isn’t one wine for any food. There are tons. While it never says so, it underlines my basic food and wine premise: Most wines go with most foods. And that’s a lesson in its own right.

Williams-Sonoma Wine & Food, Joshua Wesson
I don’t look to the Williams-Sonoma books for the kind of cookbook I like. The ones I’ve seen are simple collections of recipes; I look for more technique in my tomes. So I listened politely but skeptically at a book launch party as the executive editor of the series told me how good their food and wine book is.

Then she sent me a copy.

The book organizes its sections by style of wine — Crisp Whites and Juicy Reds, for instance — just like the better modern wine lists. Each section describes the flavors and characteristics of the wine style. It then talks about how those traits affect the wine and food pairing. Finally, it gives several recipes that exemplify the kind of dish that suits the wine. Each of those recipes offers guidelines about the New World and Old World wines to seek out. It doesn’t give specific labels. It gives you terms you could use in a wine store: an Alsace Riesling, a Merlot-based Bordeaux. And for each of those recommendations, it offers a reason.

It educates and illustrates. It lets the reader understand what the author was thinking. What more can I ask for in a wine-and-food-pairing book?

Book Review: A Geography Of Oysters

I consider myself pretty oyster savvy, but the other night I looked at a restaurant’s oyster selection with new eyes. The names gave me clues they hadn’t before, and I had enough knowledge to comment on the presence of Olympias and Belons (these from Maine, I think), both unusual fare.

The secret to my new awareness? Rowan Jacobsen’s A Geography Of Oysters, an exhaustive look at the North American oyster industry. (Like all modern books, it has a companion website; unlike most such sites, this one is deep and useful.) Rowan was the managing editor at The Art of Eating for a time, but this is such a good reference that I have to recommend it, even though our former working relationship straddles my “know too well to review” line.

Rowan has that Art of Eating passion for extensive research. You will learn about the life cycle of an oyster, the history of oyster cultivation, and the many different farming techniques. And that’s all before he gives you a detailed tour of oyster regions, breaking them down further into the individual oysters that come from them. You’ll learn that a Malpeque can come from anywhere on Prince Edwards Island, while a Colville Bay comes from one tiny point. You’ll learn that the original Wellfleets and Bluepoints no longer exist: Each has been replaced by oyster seed brought from somewhere else. His detailed surveys include taste profiles of each different oyster type. And, of course, he has practical information for the oyster shopper, from shucking to recipes.

As good as the information is, the writing is the pearl in its shell. Rowan is one of the writers I look to as a model; he has a knack for colorful prose with a snappy tone and wit. Of life as an adult oyster, he writes, “You find a nice spot, settle into the lotus posture, and do nothing but eat, breathe, and periodically blow off a third of your body mass in one titanic ejaculation.” He ponders the use of the word terroir in reference to an oyster’s unparalleled ability to reflect its environment, writing, “Terroir, after all, refers to terra firma, and oysters’ terra isn’t very firma. But it’s a term already familiar to most readers, and speaking of meroir would get you laughed out of most restaurants …” It’s rare to find such pretty prose, and I feel like sending snippets to all the crappy writers out there.

Oysters are the ultimate foodie food; A Geography Of Oysters is the ultimate guide to them.

The Art Of Simple Food

In Mouth Wide Open, John Thorne admits that he often reviews cookbooks without testing the recipes. Heresy, he says. So many cookbooks don’t have reliable recipes; shouldn’t you check a few before suggesting the book?

Probably. But taking a page from Thorne, I find myself willing to recommend Alice Waters’ The Art of Simple Food despite the fact that I have yet to explicitly make one recipe in it. I’ve come closest with the winter version of minestrone soup and the grapefruit-avocado salad — less a recipe than a shopping list to begin with — but in each of those cases I put my own spin on the dishes.

But the book keeps resurfacing in my weekly meal planning sessions. I flip through it and think, “Hm. Soufflés. That sounds good.” I scribble soufflé on my list and assemble one on the right night. Or a bean dish catches my eye, or a meat dish, and I make that, more or less. I know how to make soufflés, soups, salads, and the other dishes she includes: The book just reminds me that those dishes are out there, waiting to be made. Often, they use ingredients that pique my interest, though few will surprise devotees of California cuisine: goat cheese, chard, salt-packed anchovies, Meyer lemons, fennel, and arugula (Waters prefers the term rocket).

If you don’t have a casual knowledge of these dishes, you’ll quickly gain it. Waters has aimed the book at the unconfident cook, laying out recipes à la The Joy of Cooking: List an ingredient or three, add a paragraph about what you’re supposed to do with them, list the next ingredients and their steps. She also includes solid explanations of cooking equipment and ingredients. Use this book enough, and you’ll find yourself with a good grounding in cooking basics.

You’ll also have no doubt about Waters’ position on sustainable, organic, local, and ethical foods. She trumpets them at every possible moment in a focused beam of Watersness that can become oppressive as it repeats, page after page. I say this despite sharing her stance. Will the average reader tire of it even more quickly?

Perhaps. But they won’t tire of the straightforward, delicious dishes that appear on the dining room table, reminders that sometimes simple food is just fine.

Mouth Wide Open

I have a reputation for being a tough critic — I prefer “thoughtful critic” — when it comes to book reviews. But I’m actually easy to please: do your research, think about what you’re writing, and communicate your ideas clearly. You get bonus points for good imagery and rhythm, but they’re not necessary.

In the swamp of modern food writing, however, few authors poke above the miasma of mediocrity and deliver on my lean requirements. One of them is John Thorne.

I imagine many of you already know Thorne’s writing. His attitudes and beliefs are among those that form the substrata of my own. If you like this blog, you probably like him, and you won’t need my encouragement to buy Mouth Wide Open, the latest collection of excerpts from his magazine Simple Cooking.

If you haven’t yet found him, Mouth Wide Open is a great place to start.

Thorne is at his best when he writes long pieces about single dishes. He meditates on them, researches them, and cooks them. These are not Cook's Illustrated-esque diaries of adjusting a recipe by 1 tablespoon of this and 1 tablespoon of that until he arrives at some “perfect” rendition. These are thought-provoking and in-depth essays that reel in history and personal experience.

Consider his piece on the Piemontese dish bagna cauda, which I challenge anyone to read without experiencing a gripping need to make the dish as soon as humanly possible: “To get at the essence of bagna caôda, then, you must imagine yourself tired, famished, sitting in a field somewhere surrounded with comrades, a raw scallion in one hand and a tumbler of equally raw red wine in the other … your body glows in the warmth that comes from ingesting an overload of butter and oil. Life, for the moment, is nothing but unalloyed delight …” Discussing the role of anchovies in the dish, he writes, “These anchovies also satisfied something that reaches so far into the past that it predates humankind itself: the craving for salt.” How did the anchovies become so integral to a dish from a landlocked region? Thorne’s research points to the Jews who were booted from Spain in 1492. And as he outlines recipes from several decades of cookbooks, he notes how the ingredients have changed in recipes for this “traditional” dish — more garlic and less butter — and how it has moved from main course to appetizer. (He writes of bagna cauda’s evolution: “Which only goes to show that authenticity, slippery as an eel, can never be grasped for long … unless you’re willing to slam its head against the side of a table.”)

His long pieces on marmalade and on cod and potatoes will impel you with equal force into the kitchen. But even his short meditations will inspire you. In “The Cook Concocts His Midnight Snack,” Thorne writes about sweet corn and milk: “I blended the kernels and the pulp together, mixed in a cup of milk, a pinch of salt, and a dash of Jamaican hot sauce. Then I gently heated it up in a saucepan, just enough to have to blow on the first few spoonfuls to cool them, and served it up.” What a pity that corn season has ended.

Thorne invites comparison with Edward Behr, another of the food world’s greats, and indeed the two men are friends. (And one of the pieces in Mouth Wide Open first appeared in The Art of Eating.) But the two magazines have their own identities. Behr’s research combines travel and interviews with books and history, whereas Thorne’s focuses on books and the Internet. This is not to diminish Thorne’s work — you’ll find few publications with more thought behind them — but to say that his publication is, as Behr himself describes it, “close to home and kitchen.” As a happy side effect of this close-to-the-hearth position, the techniques and ingredients that Thorne describes are within anyone’s reach.

Gift-giving holidays are upon us, and bookstore shelves are about to groan with the weight of fluffy books rushed out for the season. Instead of some bland and middling food book, give your friends and loved ones a book that will open their eyes — and their mouths — to a universe of passionate writing and deep thought. Give them Mouth Wide Open.

This book was sent to me as a review copy.

P.S. For those of you who care about such things, I have reversed a long-standing style choice on OWF. Though most of my clients choose to drop the serial comma, the comma that appears before the last item in a list, I have decided to keep it in these posts. Since the only rule with style-guide decisions is that you apply them consistently, I thought it worth flagging this change to OWF’s style guide.

Vinography Book Review: Decantations

Vinography.com readers may have noticed that Alder has started to run book reviews written by guest contributors. When our mutual friend Tim Patterson, the book review editor, asked if I wanted to contribute, I decided to review the wine book I was reading at that moment. You can read my review of Frank Prial’s Decantations as of today.

The Elements Of Cooking

One of my biggest complaints about recipes is that they may inspire but they rarely teach. Just like any other craft, cooking requires core skills, and few cookbooks explain them to the novice.

There are counterexamples. In Judy Rodgers’ Zuni Cafe Cookbook, the recipes are garnishes on long essays about quality and technique. To this day, it sits atop my list of recommended cookbooks. But those kinds of books come around only a little more often than moon landings.

And then there’s Michael Ruhlman’s The Elements of Cooking, which abandons recipes and glossy pictures altogether. Instead, Elements leverages Ruhlman’s time in culinary school and famous restaurants, and gives readers the building blocks to step above recipes and learn how to actually cook.

Give Elements to a friend who’s expressed an interest in preparing good food, and buy a copy for yourself. Even accomplished cooks will enjoy the essays at the beginning of the book that lay out the fundamentals of kitchen savvy. If you think of sauce as the liquid that pools on a plate around your dinner, read his long discussion of it and think again. He writes, “The mayonnaise that enriches and binds a tuna salad is its sauce; a quenelle of olive tapenade on a grilled duck breast can serve as its sauce.” Even if you already think this way, the book’s early chapters provide a good review of cooking fundamentals, much as its spiritual ancestor, The Elements of Style, reminds writers about the basics of their craft. Like that classic guide, you’ll want to revisit this book every so often to hone your culinary mind.

But if the essays are the soul of the book, the glossary is its body. Page after page gives concise definitions and short essays about common cooking terms and ingredients — at least the ones you’ll find in a French-influenced kitchen. I consider myself a knowledgeable cook, but I found a few terms that I had forgotten over time, if I ever knew them (à la ficelle, for instance). Though these definitions exist elsewhere, most notably in Harold McGee’s On Food And Cooking, Elements collects them into a small tome that can sit close at hand even in a crowded kitchen.

My conversations with friends about this book show me how useful such a reference can be. I spoke with one about Ruhlman’s admirable choice to use proportions instead of quantities. “For instance,” I said, “he writes that equal parts butter and flour in a roux thickens some amount of liquid.” But I couldn’t remember that amount (10 times the amount of roux, by weight). I spoke with another about how the book answers those little questions you sometimes have: I said, “Quatre épices is three parts pepper, 1 part cloves and cinnamon and whatever.” I couldn’t remember the fourth spice (nutmeg). Maybe your memory is better than mine; I’ll just use the book.

At times, though, I wish the entries offered more. For foam, Ruhlman writes, “While foam does have its uses (foamed milk in coffee is a good example), it can feel affected or gimmicky when used for the sake of itself rather than as an integral part of the dish.” What is it about the foam on coffee that makes it useful as opposed to gimmicky? And how would I as a cook know when a dish could benefit from foam? He never says. And inevitably, there are the questions about how one ingredient made it into the book while another didn’t: There was room for bladder but not for brisket?

If you’re as pedantic as I, you may find some nits to pick in this book. Under the entry for balsamic vinegar, for example, Ruhlman writes, “All true balsamics come from Italy, most notably Modena … and will say so on the bottle.” Unfortunately, so will all the industrial versions bottled in the same area; look for aceto balsamico tradizionale instead. Under the entry for generic vinegar, he blithely mentions that you can add wine to a starter without noting that most modern wine has too much alcohol for the vinegar-producing bacteria; dilute your wine to at most ten percent to keep your population alive. He describes cooking with wine, but fails to mention that oh-so-useful safety tip: Add the wine to the pan away from the roaring flame on the oven.

Only a few of you will probably care about the occasional muddled sentence — Does the description for quatre-épices, “A working ratio is three parts pepper to one part nutmeg, cinnamon, and clove,” mean that you should use 3 parts pepper and 1 part each of the others, or 1 part of the others combined? (The former, according to his previous book Charcuterie.) And probably even fewer of you will care about the inconsistent layout of the glossary items. I feel like the publisher should have set forth a style guide specific to that section and then double-checked each entry against it. For stock, you find “a flavorful liquid made by gently heating vegetables, aromatics, bones, and meat …”. For spider, you find “A large flat mesh ladle used for retrieving fried items from hot fat is called a spider”. For beurre manié, you find “butter into which an equal volume of flour has been rubbed and kneaded becomes ….” Capitalize sentences and not fragments, okay; but what of beurre manié’s full sentence? Variety in a reference text keeps the pace lively, but the stylistic inconsistencies kept snagging my eyes.

I’m hoping they stop bugging me, though; I intend to flip through this book often.

This book was sent to me for review.

The River Cottage Meat Book

In some ways, this is one of the easiest reviews I’ve done: If you cook meat, buy The River Cottage Meat Book. Author Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall engages and entertains the reader with solid information about meat cookery, sustainable farming, and kitchen economy, all written with an oh-so-British wit and charm. My goodness, he even has pictures of meat slaughterhouses. Try finding those in other meat cookbooks.

I would stop there, save for the tiny phrase included in the marketing materials that the publishers sent me. Though this book came out in the United Kingdom 3 years ago, this edition has been, according to the leaflet, “tailored for American cooks.”

Here’s where I get twitchy. The editors at Ten Speed Press worked hard on this effort. They didn’t only drop extra u’s and adjust the recipes; they changed some of the original text.

Just not enough. Or maybe too much.

I first noticed a problem when I read Fearnley-Whittingstall’s text on rabbits. I’ve been working on a rabbit piece for a while, so my eyebrow arched when I read his advice to only buy wild rabbit from your butcher. Have fun doing that here in America, where USDA laws prevent anyone from selling wild animals: Our meat inspectors want to see the animal pre-mortem, not post. (As an aside, not all farmed rabbits are raised in conditions akin to an industrial chicken farm, as he implies.)

Want a guide to American beef cuts? No problem. Want to know the best turkey breeds to buy as an American shopper? Good luck.

I wrote the publisher and the editors referred me to the copious endnotes that, in some cases, give the correct American information. Some of the main text has been changed, but some of the new information has been placed in the endnotes. They preface the section with a note that they balanced the need to give Americans good information while retaining Fearnley-Whittingstall’s charming prose. I think I would have preferred all the new information in endnotes, and I would want the endnotes divided up and put at the ends of the chapters, rather than tucked at the back where you have to hunt them down. As it stands, the book has some relevant information where the reader expects to find it, but it also has a lot buried near the index.

I’ll return to this book over and over again, both for its prose and its recipes, but I’ll look elsewhere when I want to know my options at the store.

This book was sent to me as a review copy.

La Bonne Table

Most people hearing the name Ludwig Bemelmans think of a little red-haired girl who lives in an old house in Paris all covered with vines. But the man behind Madeline spent his life in restaurants—behind the doors as a cynical waiter, at the table as a passionate eater and drinker, and in the office as an owner—and often wrote about that world.

La Bonne Table collects many of his food-centric pieces as well as the sketches he made to go with them. From “…sausages the size of a small finger…served on a bed of sauerkraut, with the same brown beer my grandfather brewed” to “Caviar aux Blinis, Borsch, Homard Sole Mio, Faisan Miami,Purée de Marrons, Pommes Soufflées, Salade Georges at Marthe, Bombe Washington,” just one part of the extravagant meal planned by a wealthy Miami resident for her birthday, Bemelmans detailed the best and the worst of the food he enjoyed so much. Even some of the menus he collected over the years, convenient doodle pads for him, appear in the book.

But forget the food. The best bits of this book come when Bemelmans writes of the people in the restaurant world. Some portraits may be David Sedaris-esque exaggerations, but even as approximate nonfiction they delight. Gabriel, the maître d'hôtel who staves off disaster at the Miami birthday, moves placidly and confidently through his daily tasks, master of his craft: You don't need Bemelmans’ sketch atop “No Problem At All” to picture him with a thin mustache and an imperious air. There is Herr Otto Brauhaus, who flusters and yells and fires his employees on a whim, only to hire them back the moment they spin even an implausible sob story. There is Mr. Sigsag, a twitchy waiter—I picture him as small and wiry—who is eager to please rich clients and quick to chastise workers at other restaurants. His characters only fall flat in the “Fancies” section, a collection of short stories that often draw on his experience around Hollywood’s elite. I didn't care about any of the characters, and the stories seem to have been dropped in without regard to order or plot. I was tired of these even before I boarded a 16-hour flight. (Perhaps there's no real way to capture that narcissistic world—Christopher Guest’s For Your Consideration was the least funny of his mockumentaries.)

The characters in Bemelmans’ vignettes move against a window looking in at the 1930s. Even his disdainful descriptions of the wealthy can’t hide the splendor of a coming-out party or a Jewish wedding (he doesn't mention any other kind) held in the Ritz where he worked. I imagine galas of this form still happen, but Bemelmans’ descriptions make me wistful for such extravagance, even though I probably wouldn&rsqo;t have gone to any of these events. On the other hand, there are reminders of the less glamorous facets of that time: rich people with “blackie” servants and German generals.

But one thing about Bemelmans is timeless. Good food and drink should never be taken for granted.

The Atlas of American Cheese

Melissa and I followed a simple syllabus for our cheese education six or seven years ago. Each week, we would mark a few cheeses in Steven Jenkins' The Cheese Primer, buy them, and eat them that night. One of us would read aloud from the Book of Jenkins or appropriate issues of The Art of Eating, and we would learn something of the history and the people behind each cheese.

That worked for European cheeses. But even seven years ago, The Cheese Primer was riddled with Emmentaler-sized holes about America. Too often, we'd taste a new domestic cheese at a restaurant, go home and look it up, and find nothing. Our industry sprinted ahead as The Cheese Primer stood still.

Other books entered the race — Laura Werlin's All-American Cheese and Wine, for instance — but the cheese industry kept running. New books simply ran out of breath farther on the racetrack than Jenkins' book.

Jeffrey Roberts' The Atlas of American Cheese might have the legs to keep up, if only because of its size. Four hundred fifty pages tell the stories of our country's cheese makers at the rate of one a page, give or take, and in the process tell a larger story of an upstart industry that couldn't exist a decade or two ago, when few American foodies roamed our culinary wasteland.

The book frustrates the hardcore fromagophile. Most of the cheeses get terse descriptions: "Evangeline: Aged three to four weeks; triple cream, soft ripened bloomy-rind, tangy runny; 4 ounce cylinder; ACS," says a typical entry. Pictures tend to feature the people and not their products.

But the atlas hits the locavore or agritourist dead on. Who are your local producers? Thumb through the section for your region. Want to find and taste the cheese? Look up the distribution information for it. Want to tour the farm? Look up its visitor policy and give the cheese makers a call. Want to know who uses their own milk instead of sourcing it? Look for the farmhouse icon on the top of the page. Want organic cheese? Look for the big O icon. If you like information, you'll like this inclusive tome.

The main text on each page tells the story of the farm, such as it is. I don't envy Roberts the work of making each entry unique and interesting — how many different ways can you write "Bob and Joan had goats and found themselves with an excess of milk"? Many of the stories fail to captivate, either because they're not that interesting or because the text itself has a flat, reference-book tone: "Established in 1982, Lively Run is one of the oldest goat dairies in the United States. Located in Interlaken, between Cayuga and Seneca Lakes, it was owned by the Feldman family until 1995. Suzanne, a German citizen, met and married Steve while he was stationed in Germany." Only the not uncommon exclamation points break up the steady pace.

But at least the information is there, which gives this book a hard-to-top advantage. The American cheese industry will keep moving forward, but this book will pace it for a long time.

This book was sent to me as a review copy.

The Hog Island Oyster Lover's Cookbook

The foodie lifestyle is a bit like a scavenger hunt, except that you collect experiences instead of items. Collect enough, and the realm of foodiedom embraces you. Collect all of them, and I suppose you become Jeffrey Steingarten.

Just like any good scavenger hunt, some items on the foodie list score more points than others. Eating raw oysters is a high-ticket item; most people can't get past the slimy, soft texture. I couldn't when I tried them as a kid, and I banished them from my mouth for years. But as an adult I fell for the tender, briny raw meat. Once you find your way to them, it's hard to imagine eating them any other way.

So I made the inevitable joke when I opened The Hog Island Oyster Lover's Cookbook: "Why do you need a cookbook for oysters? Isn't every recipe just shuck, slurp, repeat?"

It turns out you can cook them. Who knew? Jairemarie Pomo has recipes for Oysters Rockefeller, Oysters with Chorizo and White Beans, Thai Oyster Soup, and more. She also serves up recipes for raw oyster dishes — Oyster Shooters and Oysters with Cucumber, Lime, and Sake are two of them — and sauces to sprinkle on the meaty morsels. I don't know how much I'd vouch for the recipes as they're written. I made the Oysters Poached in White Wine with Caviar when we had Clotilde et al over for dinner, but on a dry run Melissa and I thought it would need a little zing. I used wasabi caviar instead, and that made the dish. Pomo herself, with another oyster and caviar dish, adds lemon ice.

The recipes may tempt the oyster lover, but Pomo also devotes about 80 pages to oyster lore. Not surprisingly, that information, told in straightforward text, centers around Hog Island, the famous oyster production company in Tomales Bay (there are others nearby, but Hog Island has always managed to combine marketing savvy with high quality). You hear about the favorite shucking knives of the Hog Island staff, their production techniques, and so forth, without learning about other oyster farms. But some of the information is universal: species, shucking technique with asides about equipment, and eating oysters in months without R's. I wish her section on alcohol and oysters covered more drinks — where is Muscadet in her list? why does she only mention French Sauvignon Blancs and not New Zealands, even though the latter often win oyster-wine pairing contests? — but that is the voice of a wine geek. At least she devotes time to the topic.

My favorite oyster recipe is "3-4 drops of lemon juice," but Pomo's dishes keep tempting me. If you like oysters — even if you don't like them raw — you'll find a place for The Hog Island Oyster Cookbook on your shelf.

This book was sent to me for review.

The Art of Decanting

A few years back, I took a one-day CIA class named State of the Art Professional Wine Service. Not all the lessons stuck: To this day I have a 10 percent chance of pulling out a cork with an Ah-So opener and a 90 percent chance of shoving it into the wine. But I will never forget the moment when the teacher asked us to name three reasons for decanting wine. We called out the first two—separating old wine from sediment and letting young wine aerate—but the third eluded us. Finally, she said, "Because it's so beautiful."

That simple statement kicked off my small decanting fetish. I watch waiters and wine stewards do it at other tables, and I relish the chance to do it at home. I swirl young wines in our ship's captain decanter, peering through the garnet sheet that spreads along the bottom.

I had high hopes for Sandra Jordan's The Art of Decanting. How could I resist a whole book focused on my secret delight?

But don't bother with this fluffy book. Decanting occupies just a slice of the pages. Corks, corkscrews, glasses, bottles, wine appreciation, and more occupy the rest. Forget any depth with so many topics crowded into this slender volume. I confess that I hadn't heard the term monteith before, but that was all I gleaned from the book. (It's a large, shallow bowl for chilling wine glasses, often with scalloped edges to hold the stems.)

The book made more sense after I read Jordan's back flap bio. She designs "a high-end line of wine country-inspired lifestyle products for the home." Jordan's love for the wine world's accessories approaches fetishism. Photos of simple and complex examples of each object fill the book, demonstrating that wine, like any other hobby, has an infinite amount of gear to buy.

The pictures and presentation suggest a triumph of form over function, and the writing continues the theme. Hyperbole and overwrought prose swirl across the pages. Should they ever make an audiobook version, the publisher should recruit James Lipton to deliver the bombast the text requires. "The glass decanter is the bottle's best ally, for it receives the bottle's precious cargo and opens it to the edifying air." "The decanter stands upon the table; full now, its bounty expands, in scent and flavor, with the air." A deft hand could manage this florid text, but Jordan wings them at the reader in a constant flow, a blinding stream of gilded lilies.

I can forgive the light coverage and the ornate wording as a style choice, but I have no patience for her shoddy information. For a fetishist such as Jordan, screw caps and other new closures must seem crass, but she doesn't mention them in the cork chapter—even to dismiss them as lower life forms—despite their surge in the marketplace. She accepts without question the Riedel marketing speak about glass shapes tailored to each wine, even though controlled tests and two minutes of critical thought argue against the sales patter. (See my similar rant when the Chronicle ran a Riedel puff piece).

But worst of all: "Finally, the server will wish to smell the cork. Beware a moldy odor, Hugh Johnson cautions, which may indicate that the wine is 'corked' (or tainted by TCA, a combination of mold and other unsavory elements) and thus undrinkable. If all is well with the cork, however, then one can feel confident in moving on to the next delightful steps of wine service." Despite Jordan's attempt to bring in an expert, she misses the key word may. You can have a skanky cork atop a great wine and a musty drink when the cork is fine. The only way to know if a wine is corked is to smell it in the glass. "Sniffing the cork" is a common misconception, but Jordan's family is shoulder-deep in the wine industry; they should know better. (By the way, TCA is not "a combination of mold and other unsavory elements," but a specific molecule—2,4,6-trichloranisole—that often comes from mold. If the sentence was a victim of missing-serial-comma syndrome, then I retract this aside and replace it with a complaint about the lack of parallel structure in the list.)

The wine fetishist in your life may appreciate this glorified Wine Enthusiast catalog of accessories, but everyone else can skip it.

Alice Waters and Chez Panisse

The food world divides into two camps about Alice Waters: those who see her as the patron saint of sustainable food and those who see her as an elitist hippie who gained fame by stealing the credit that others deserve. No one denies she's an icon.

She barely needs the appositive "founder of Chez Panisse" next to her name, but it's always there, like the implied "you" in an imperative. Waters almost closed the restaurant a few times over its three-decade life, but she has yet to give up on it. It's her passion and her platform. Chez Panisse wouldn't exist without her; nor would she, as a household name, exist without it.

Of course, you can make the case that Chez Panisse exists in spite of Waters' efforts. As you read Thomas McNamee's heavily researched and well-written Alice Waters and Chez Panisse, you'll keep seeing the same question: How did this restaurant survive? McNamee paints Waters as a woman with a flighty demeanor and a solid-steel will, like cotton candy hiding a metal pole. Mesh those two traits and you get a sieve that filters out profit. Waters had no business sense tucked into her arty exterior, and every attempt by others to control her spending slammed against that hard core of obstinance.

But McNamee points out that "impossible" isn't in her vocabulary. She inspires those around her to make it work. She knew that if the food was good—and the ensemble cast of interviewees all agree on Waters' pitch-perfect palate—it would all turn out somehow. And it did. McNamee plucks out a thread that runs through the Chez Panisse history: The perfect person always seemed to appear right when they were most needed.

One of those people was Jeremiah Tower, conspicuously absent as an interview subject in a sea of firsthand accounts—quotes from him all come from his book California Dish or ephemera. Tower and Waters adored each other at first, but like so many relationships, passion wasn't enough for the long haul, and the two now lock horns in a decades-old battle. Perhaps Tower first raised the common cry that Waters claimed his work for her own. He has certainly been the most vocal about his creation of "California cuisine." McNamee makes it clear that Waters isn't innocent of all the charges, though he refrains from passing judgment.

But just as Chez Panisse wouldn't exist without Waters, it would never have survived without Tower. His stunning menus, cooked early in the restaurant's career and bearing little resemblance to today's less elaborate dinners, pushed Chez Panisse into national reviews. Elaborate French feasts, rare ingredients, and an unwillingness to bow to diner comfort made for an unforgettable experience, or so I imagine.

Of course he was high as a kite most of the time. McNamee doesn't pussyfoot over the restaurant's famous drug-and-sexcapades—everyone sleeping with everyone, waiters stoned on the floor—but he doesn't feel the need to tee-hee over it for his reader's enjoyment. It was a fact of the restaurant; it was a fact of the time.

Other famous chefs came and went: Lindsey Shere, Mark Miller, Paul Bertolli, Deborah Madison, Steve Sullivan, Judy Rodgers. The list goes on and on, and McNamee interviews them all, along with the waiters, dishwashers, and friends of the restaurant he could find. Squabbles arose often, but every person who walked into Chez Panisse took away and spread Waters' gospel that the best ingredients are the freshest ingredients. The local and seasonal slant of Chez Panisse's menus grew out of that philosophy—it wasn't a fixture from the start—and so did Waters' activism.

Today, Waters is rarely in the restaurant. She devotes most of her time to speaking out about the deplorable state of school lunches and promoting sustainable agriculture. She has become a famous figure, no longer sporting the beret she wore for years but still recognizable. Slight, still a little scattered, but as passionate as ever. McNamee admires her drive to make the world a better place and respects her commitment to her ideals. She has not become a brand, like so many other famous chefs—no Las Vegas branch of Chez Panisse is planned—but that iron will transformed her restaurant from a quiet statement to a megaphone that all the country can hear.

The Perfect Scoop

Since the Glace-A-Tron 6000 arrived last December, I've made lots of ice cream. But until a week ago, I only had one recipe book on my shelf: Cook's Illustrated's out-of-print How to Make Ice Cream. The tiny book only features traditional ice cream and gelato recipes, and—real mint chip and salted caramel aside—I've lacked the time and energy to develop new recipes. I've been deep in an ice cream rut.

David Lebovitz's The Perfect Scoop is the friendly passerby offering to push me back onto the road of inspiration. Within moments of opening it, Melissa searched for a pad of stickies she could use to mark pages. Rice Gelato, Panforte Ice Cream, and Lemon-Speculoos Ice Cream were just some of the flavors on her list. David's more modern flavors—Pear-Pecorino, Olive Oil, and Parsley—went on mine.

A quick primer on technique, equipment, and ingredients opens the book, and then you dive into a sea of recipes: several dozen ice creams and gelatos and a couple dozen each of sorbets, granitas, and sauces. If you enjoy David's blog, you'll enjoy the witty and wry prose. Each recipe lists suggested pairings from the sauces section, so you'll want to try recipes a few times with different toppings.

My quibbles with the book come down to taste. I prefer fewer egg yolks in my ice cream—my vanilla uses half as many yolks as David's—as did most of the participants in a blind "vanilla off" I held at Easter dinner. David also likes more mix-ins than I do, though I like the idea of adding chopped chocolate truffles. And I'll note that his rice gelato, essentially frozen rice pudding, requires a good 30 minutes, not 5 or 10, to soften enough for an ice cream scoop; the ground-up starch makes the gelato rock hard. On the other hand, it's worth the wait.

But you can adjust the recipes to your tastes. With so many inspiring ideas, you'll get plenty of practice.

This book was sent to me for review. Also, David's a blog-friend and we have a number of mutual friends.

Markets of Paris

I would like to give Markets of Paris the review it deserves. I would spend a week in the City of Light, visiting the markets open on each day. Then I would tell you if Dixon and Ruthanne Long's 500-word descriptions do justice to each market's ambience. I pitched this idea to OWF's publisher, but he wouldn't approve the budget.

But the next time I go to Paris, I'll use this pocket-sized book to help plan our trip. The guidebook promises to send its readers to places that Melissa and I like: Those outside of most tourist books and inside the hearts of locals. The book covers markets of all types, from food markets to the Marché aux Timbres et aux Cartes Téléphoniques—stamps and phone cards. It also features information about French culture, the authors' favorite brasseries and bistros, and other tourist information.

As I considered the book for review, I found myself flipping it open at random times of the day to discover a new market. There's one for used and antiquarian books, a couple of flea markets, and a legion for cheese and vegetables. Armchair travelers will enjoy the little voyages possible in the straightforward prose, but actual visitors may be frustrated that there's no "week at a glance" view. If I were only going to be in Paris on a Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday, I'd have to flip through the entire book to learn which markets are open. But that's a minor complaint.

Pack this guide in your luggage next time you're en route to Paris. I know I will.

This book was sent to me for review.

Fierce Food

One thing becomes clear after reading through Christa Weil's Fierce Food: One person's fierce is another person's fantasy. I won't be saying "Pass the bat" or "I'd like to try the human placenta" in the near future, but grasshoppers, barnacles, and betel nut? I'd try them. Foie gras, blood, and bone marrow? I cook them at home.

Weil's culinary sideshow of "the unusual, exotic, and downright bizarre" globetrots in a series of short features. Each spotlights a "fierce food," headed by an iconic key that provides an at-a-glance summary of the item. Supposed aphrodisiac? You'll know by the northeast-pointing arrow. Noticeably stinky? Watch for wavy lines. High likelihood of making you ill? A lit bomb.

But the small treatises that follow the hieroglyphics are worth your extra time. Weil has a casual and humorous writing style, but she hasn't skimped on research. Each digestible chapter empathizes with the reader's reactions—she's tried many of the foods—and delivers a wealth of useful information. You'll get lessons on dragonfly aerodynamics, the tough life of a barnacle harvester, the proper recipe for a scorpion restorative, and more. The book is more armchair eating adventure and useful reference than stow-it-with-you guide, but you'll enjoy each fierce food foray.

But before you dive in, could you pass the fat-tailed sheep's tail?

This book was sent to me as a review copy.

San Francisco Food Lover's Pocket Guide

Every month or so, one of my readers asks me for advice on food tourism in San Francisco. I offer some ideas—Incanto and the Ferry Building—but then defer to higher authorities: Sam, The Slow Food Guide to San Francisco, and The San Francisco Food Lover's Guide. Patricia Unterman's popular foodie tour book, written by the restaurant reviewer for the Examiner and the chef-owner of Hayes Street Grill, is the book I tend to use when planning a place to eat.

Great as her book is, it's too big to schlep on a daily basis. We never have it with us when we want an impromptu dinner in the City. I guess we weren't the only ones who noticed that problem, because Ten Speed Press recently released the San Francisco Food Lover's Pocket Guide, a slimmed-down version of its big brother. "It's the perfect size for a desk or backpack," said Melissa when she saw it. The petite book has the same organization—by neighborhood—as the large version, and also has the entries for markets, bars, and stores that made the original more than a restaurant guide. (It also extends into the greater Bay Area.)

The publisher didn't simply repackage the older book: This new version has all the updates you'd expect. Unterman notes when chefs have recently left and writes about new favorites such as Thomas Keller's Ad Hoc. Each of her original long descriptions of food destinations has been snipped and folded into one pocket-size paragraph giving tips on what you should order and what you should not. I don't agree with everything she writes, but that's the nature of a reviewer-reader relationship. As a rule, she and I have similar tastes.

This book was sent to me as a review copy.

Notes on Notes on a Cellar Book

As a buying guide, George Saintsbury's Notes on a Cellar Book is useless. He recalls the wines he's enjoyed in 60 years of drinking, but you'll never get to taste the bottles. It's bad enough that he mentions the '69 this or the '72 that, but these are years from the nineteenth century, not the twentieth.

As a window into wine appreciation 80-100 years ago, however, this book is fascinating. Offhand comments remind you that oidium, phylloxera, and Prohibition were current events. Wine came from "shippers," and you bought it by the cask. German wine was called "hock," after Hochheim in the Rheingau. England was the center of wine criticism and the export market everyone wanted to be in.

But the armchair time travel isn't just between the lines. Saintsbury opens with chapters on sherry and port, topics often left out of today's general-purpose wine books. His choice wasn't odd; England imported these wines by the boatload as a residual effect of British imperialism—to this day, most major Port companies belong to English families. Bordeaux and Burgundy, on the other hand, share a chapter. Aside from Champagne, the rest of the wine world is dealt with in a chapter entitled "Hock, Moselle, and the Rest." Saintsbury suggests wine and spirits as cures for specific diseases, and gives glimpses of his and other cellars where you'd find beer casks and containers holding a mix of port and sherry, combined when each had gotten stale in the decanter. And he has none of the prosy tasting notes we're so used to seeing. The modern tasting note is a fairly recent invention; Saintsbury merely praises the virtues of different drinks. Even I, who hates the blandness of modern tasting notes, wanted to know how those wines tasted.

On the other hand, it's easy to draw modern parallels to Saintsbury's opinions. He argues that wine's proper place is alongside good food and charming company, an early version of the romantic wine writing we find today. He rails against England's temperance movement, much as we shake our heads at states where you can't purchase wine on Sunday. He takes shots at the blanket opinions covering all wines from a single vintage, a silliness that persists to this day.

At least, that's what I think he says. My inner wine geek enjoyed the comparison of connoisseurship then and now, but my inner writing geek noticed how the definition of good writing has changed in the same period. Clauses and tangents interrupt the text like facial tics. Saintsbury assumes that his reader can blithely translate French or Latin phrases, know the meanings of uncommon words, and understand shorthand allusions to poets and other contemporary writers. I often had to re-read sentences to make sure I had followed his meaning through the maze of asides. On the other hand, Saintsbury might find my "cut all that you can" style terse and staccato.

My mission as a wine writer is to make the subject approachable to more people. But I admit that a part of me enjoys this glimpse of a more elite wine scene. Elaborate parties, with true ladies and gentlemen bedecked for dinner. Tables laden with crystal. Clubs where members sipped sherry and played dominoes. But in the end, I'm happy to draw the curtains over that window and look out my own, where everyone gets to play the wine game.

Book Review: Food Is Culture

Insightful nuggets speckle the slim book Food Is Cuisine, an extended essay by Massimo Montanari. You'll find yourself giving a mental hmm several times in each chapter of this tiny volume by the noted Bolognese professor of medieval history and the history of food.

"Why does one eat cheese with pears and melon with prosciutto?" asks Montanari. He argues that these pairings come to us from medieval Europe's medical theory about four "humors"—hot and cold, wet and dry—that existed in every person and needed to be kept in balance. Healthy people had to eat humor-balanced food so as to not disrupt their own internal equilibrium. Healers thus suggested offsetting moist fruit with dry ham or cheese. Cooks were to use "wet" techniques on old, and thus "dry," animals, much as we boil or braise tough meats today.

And maybe our globalized food chain is more human than our desire for seasonal produce. Farmers have always bred for extended seasons; merchants have always created trade routes to bring fresh produce from far-off lands. Today we follow the same ideals, but our technology lets us push our boundaries around the globe and the calendar. Those of us who want to eat seasonally are the ones bucking tradition.

Fans of The Omnivore's Dilemma will appreciate Montanari's attempts to fill in the connection between culture and food. Michael Pollan uses his book's introduction to describe the way culture—"a fancy word for mom," he famously says—dictates our tastes; Montanari explores this topic in-depth throughout the chapters.

What a shame, then, that these treasures are buried in muddy academic prose such as this: "Because the language of food, unlike verbal language, cannot be left out of the concreteness of the object, nor of the intrinsic, in some way predetermined, semantic value of the means of communication." I know that large words and lumbering sentences are the weapons of academic jousting, but they make a tough slog for the average reader. The book seems to want to be in two worlds, but fails to succeed in either. On one hand, Food Is Cuisine would be a thought-provoking essay by a knowledgeable historian, but its academic prose will turn off most bookstore browsers. On the other hand, Food Is Cuisine would be a solid academic work, but its short sections and lack of citations will turn off most professors and students.

This book was sent to me as a review copy.

Book Review: Women of the Vine

Women buy more wine than men in the United States, but men dominate the upper echelons of the wine industry. Think of writers, wine makers, and sommeliers in your internal registry. Most of them, no doubt, are men. But you'll add a few women to that list after reading Deborah Brenner's Women of the Vine. The book's 20 profiles make the point that some of the most influential industry leaders are women, and that blatant sexism is a thing of the past. Customers no longer refuse to buy Château Potelle's wines because a woman, Marketta Formeaux, makes them. Restaurant diners no longer pause when a female sommelier walks up to the table, as they did when Andrea Robinson worked at Windows on the World. Enology schools no longer host hiring days and tell women students that the companies won't hire them, as they did when Merry Edwards went to UC Davis. At least, I hope not.

Brenner offers some inspiring portraits, but the choice of subjects mystifies me. Where is Jancis Robinson? Or European wine makers such as Austria's Heidi Schröck, still working in a traditional culture ripe with sexual stereotypes? The book's subtitle mentions "the world of women who make, taste, and enjoy wine," but Brenner seems to think that that world ends at the state boundaries of California. Even so, where is Karen MacNeil, director of the Culinary Institute of America's wine studies program, author of The Wine Bible—which I heard one editor describe as "a genre buster"—and a woman who holds fierce opinions about the treatment that women face in the wine industry? Where is Helen Turley, one of the most sought-after wine consultants in the state? Anyone in California can probably add their own Missing Persons reports. Brenner no doubt faced tough choices about whom to include and whom to cut, but do we need two profiles of women from the Gallo dynasty? I get the sense that Brenner chose women that would be easy for her to meet.

This take-the-easy-road approach also shapes the stories that Brenner chose to tell. These profiles will look good in the publicity packets handed out to future writers, but they lack depth that would give a full portrait of each subject. In a book whose theme is the rise above sexism, Brenner should have questioned Wine Adventure publisher Michele Ostrove as she explained her "for women" audience: "One thing we say is that women share information, whereas men look at it more competitively. It's kind of one-upmanship for them." And then: "They want to know how to go traveling to wine country and where they should go and where they should stay and what place has the best spas." But Brenner lets these sexual-stereotype marketing decisions skim past, even though Wine Adventure's "for women" slant was a last-minute tactic change from an egalitarian "for everyone" approach (a point barely mentioned in the profile). How about asking Stephanie Browne, founder of Divas Uncorked, about the double prejudice heaped on African-American women? How is she treated in restaurants now versus twenty years ago?

And if my inner reader looked for answers that never appeared, my inner editor found more than enough to keep it occupied. "Show, don't tell!" I kept shrieking in my head, the same phrase my own editors have sent back to me on more than one occasion. Of Stephanie Putnam, wine maker for Far Niente, Brenner writes, "Stephanie has always been the take-action type and loves outdoor and physically challenging hobbies." Show her being a take-action type. Use a quote from Putnam about loving wine making because it keeps her outdoors more. Of Merry Edwards, wine maker for her own winery, Brenner notes, "Merry was indignant and rightfully so. The notion that a company would discriminate against an entire gender was outrageous." She follows it with Edwards's own quote about her reaction, which would have sufficed to describe the outrage and would have made her passion and fury more immediate, rather than trailing after a screeching halt in the text.

I think there's an interesting story to be told about women in the wine industry. It would use the industry as a lens into the changes brought about by second-wave feminists throughout the country. It would discuss the way that modern young women take their rights and opportunities for granted. It would discuss the role of women wine makers in European cultures, and how that differs from the American model. It would look at the shift in men's attitudes; what men used to refuse to buy wine made by a woman, and what made them change their mind? It would weave the narratives of these women together to look at the big picture of what happened.

It would not be a series of puff pieces that leave more questions than answers. It would not be Women of the Vine.

This book was sent to me as a review copy.

Book Review: United States of Arugula

If you're like me, biographies and memoirs pepper your food and wine library, a mishmash of the lives of culinary luminaries. And if you're like me, you're waiting for some imagined block of spare time to read the ones you haven't yet pulled off the shelf.

David Kamp is not like me. In tracing America's culinary evolution—with a focus on the last five or six decades—for his book The United States of Arugula, he's read all the biographies. And the articles. And he's interviewed every foodie figure of note. Whether he's quoting Paul Child's letters about his new girlfriend with the odd voice or describing the Newsweek cover with Paul Bocuse, it's clear that Kamp pored through the literature and kept careful notes.

The result is a well-drawn map charting America's gourmet movement. Kamp starts with James Beard, Craig Claiborne, and Julia Child—the Big Three—even while acknowledging their predecessors. He tracks them and the bastion of French chefs, including Pierre Franey and Jacques Pepin, who arrived in 1939 to work at Le Pavillon, the World's Fair monument to French cuisine. He shifts his gaze to the West Coast in the late 1960s, detailing how Alice Waters and Jeremiah Tower built Chez Panisse on a bed of casual sex and heavy drug use, while Michael McCarty and Wolfgang Puck captured the eyes of the Hollywood set. Kamp drifts into the foodier-than-thou attitude of the 1980s and the rise of prepared-food vendors as women entered the upper realms of white-collar careers. Finally, he ends with today's mix of internet forums, the Food Network, and champions for sustainable agriculture. Throughout, he details the relationships amongst the chefs and writers who have shaped our cooking consciousness.

Kamp navigates this history with a breezy, colorful prose that keeps the reader moving. At times, the slightly flamboyant text feels too exuberant, too caught up in the romance of his topic. But he doesn't dodge the less pleasant aspects of the gourmet movement: Claiborne's depression, Beard's manipulations, and the inevitable back-biting that comes with any person's rise to fame.

Even for those who were in the food industry through the last few decades, Kamp's book will no doubt offer insights. For those of us who arrived recently to the food-loving game, The United States of Arugula offers a thorough look at the influences that shape us today.

This book was sent to me as a review copy.