stlbites.com – st. louis food blog of bill burge

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Sep 20, 2007 books, general food, sustainable agriculture

I like to read about food and I’ve amassed a pretty hefty cookbook collection over the years. They take up several bookshelves, and Ellie actually tells stories about how much space it takes up in our home. One of them is 8 feet tall by 4 feet wide, and unlike Heidi Swanson, there seems to be no end in site.

Hoping to save a little space, I recently started going to the library when I noticed they had an old, hard to find, cookbook I wanted to read. In the digital age, I’d somehow forgotten what a great public service the library is, and around 641, Dewey shows the glutens of the world a little love. Honestly, I was pretty shocked to see how great the gastronomy and cookbook sections were. So, while the library has worked out great, the money savings has been a little more mixed.

One book I was shocked to see was Marco Pierre White’s autobiography, The Devil in the Kitchen: Sex, Pain, Madness and the Making of a Great Chef. If you don’t know who he is, before Gordon Ramsay, there was White. He is the original rock and roll chef and the first person I’m aware of to consistently go into the dining room and tell people to shove off.

When I was on the ACF Jr. Culinary Team, he was a hero of ours, and I grabbed up all his cookbooks; the best of which was the tough to find White Heat. In it, we discovered strange foods like caul fat, that we, as young cooks, had never seen, had, or even heard of.

There’s a funny story in the book about a Michelin 3 star chef dining at White’s restaurant and afterwards coming into the kitchen to say everything was great except the fish, which was salty. White told the cook who prepared it to tell the chef to “F off”. That cook was Ramsay. His foray into customer abuse had begun.

Overall, as interesting as it was to me, a fan, I’m sad to say, the autobiography is pretty poor. White has a tremendous ego, and comes off sounding like a real jerk that ruins every meaningful relationship he’s ever been apart of both personally and in business. The book, therefore, was a library win. It equaled money saved because if I ever own it, it will have to be both cheap, and used.

Another I just happened across on the racks was one of my current reads: Animal, Vegetable, Miracle. It’s an interesting book about Barbara Kingsolver’s family doing their part–as they see it–to eat locally for a year. In many chapters, she and her husband unfortunatly get a bit preachy and come off sounding a touch condescending to those with a viewpoint that might differ from their own. Still, it’s entertaining and informative.

The best chapter that I’ve read so far is called “You Can’t Run Away on Harvest Day”. Unlike many in the locavore movement, the Kingsolver’s eat meat. To that end, they raised/are raising their own chickens and turkeys, and Kingsolver does a remarkable job talking about the reasons for eating meat, and why it is not inhumane. One point, which I’d never really thought about in detail, is that the animals on farms were domesticated to be docile. They were bread specifically as food, and for the most part, they would not survive in the wild. She touches also on the Slow Food point: the best way to save heritage breeds is to, in fact, eat them.

I’m not quite done with this one, but I’d definitely recommend it. Even with it’s definite one-sided-ness it’s one of the better books on the subject as Kingsolver is a more engaging author then most.

This book, therefore, was a library loss. I was enjoying it so much, I bought my own.

There were several more wins like Heston Blumenthal’s book . I’d always wanted it, but once I had the opportunity to flip through it, I realized it was a complete waste. Every chef out there wants a cookbook these days, but few chefs can really pull one off. It’s tough to come up with a new idea for a cookbook, or a new and interesting way to present an old one, and he failed on many levels.

Into the Vietnamese Kitchen was a draw. Old idea: Vietnamese food. New twist: easy to follow recipes with beautiful pictures that make you want to jump into the pages because your mouth is watering. I bought it.

Then there’s the incredibly strange book I stumbled upon Tuesday: Sound Bites: Eating on Tour with Franz Ferdinand.I spotted this in the new release rack at the library yesterday and I had to grab it.It’s not every day my fringe-hipster-indie-rock-world crosses paths with my over-opinionated-gluttonous-food-world. Apparently Alex Kapranos (lead singer/guitarist) was a chef and cook while he was in a series of failed bands leading up to Franz Ferdinand. So, while traveling all over the globe rock star style, he ate from both really well to really strange. He documents it here, and so far, it’s well written and entertaining.