One book I’ve read recently–or reread as it were–is Strunk and White’s The Elements of Style.  The forward once again captivated me in a way that the subject rarely is, and as I neared it’s end and saw who wrote it, I am embarrassed to admit that I had not previously considered that the White half of Strunk and White, is E.B. White; the author of Charlotte’s Web and Stuart Little.

You see, of late I have also been reading Letters of E. B. White; all the while in shock that a man who is best known for writing children’s books writes with such grace.  Connecting the dots, it would appear I now have a new author to count amongst my favorites, and here is one food-related E.B White quote, from a letter he wrote to Bennet Cerf regarding Charlotte’s Web, that I am especially fond of.

A farm is a peculiar problem for a man who likes animals because the fate of most livestock is that they are murdered by their benefactors. The creatures may live serenely but they end violently, and the odor of doom hangs about them always.

I have kept several pigs, starting them in the spring as weanlings and carrying trays to them all through the summer and fall. The relationship bothered me. Day by day I became better acquainted with my pig, and he with me, and the fact that the whole adventure pointed toward an eventual piece of double-dealing on my part lent an eerie quality to the thing.

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Connecting the Dots

With over 6 million books in print, Katzen is and award-winning illustrator and best-selling author of such classic cookbooks as The Moosewood Cookbook and The Enchanted Broccoli Forest. Her newest project is Get Cooking, a multimedia series of books and videos for beginning cooks.

For more information view the event flyer or visit The Burning Kumquat’s site.

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Event: Mollie Katzen at Washington University 10/6

Certainly I’d had good wine before, and I definitely preferred it as my libation of choice with a meal.  Outside of restaurants, however, I’d been primarily a beer drinker because I could not only wrap my head around beer, I could afford it.  I had no idea what Williams Selyem was that night and, if the wallop of flavor were any indicator, I was pretty damn sure it was a winery producing a product well outside my price range.  Arriving home and doing a bit of googling, however, I found a bottle at Brown Derby, in Springfield, MO, for $55.  While I realize that’s not cheap by any means, it was significantly less than I’d anticipated, and I immediately purchased it and two other bottles of Williams Selyem Zinfandel to tuck away into my cellar (AKA the cool/dark corner of my basement).

The slippery slope of oenophilia had landed and, where once I was a guy that simply knew he liked wine more than beer but felt he couldn’t afford it, I quickly became a guy that reads a dozen wine blogs a day and voraciously clamors for information.  Which brings us, windingly, to my poorly written point: One of those posts was written by Stephen Schenkenberg on stlmag.com about his favorite wine books and websites.  It’s a good list but, as a newcomer to this world of wine, I thought I’d offer up a newbie’s perspective (which you can read here in it’s shiny-new polite form, or as an stlmag comment in it’s original, several glasses in, grammatically incorrect–but possibly more entertaining–form)

Books
Oldman’s Guide to Outsmarting Wine: 108 Ingenious Shortcuts to Navigate the World of Wine with Confidence and Style – Mark Oldman
The “For Dummies” book without the word “dummy” on the cover.

Windows on the World Complete Wine Course: 2009 Edition – Kevin Zraly
Every edition is always a great primer for people that don’t know a thing about wine.  I read it when I was 21 and I read a newer edition again when I was 31.

The Oxford Companion to Wine, 3rd Edition – Jancis Robinson
This is the tomb once you decide you’re into wine.  You’re not going to sit down and read this baby, but you’ll reference it like mad as points of interest crop up in your journey to wine enlightenment.

World Atlas of Wine – Hugh Johnson, Jancis Robinson
You read the Oxford Companion, and now you need to have some good maps so you have a better idea about just where your favorite 100% Northern Rhone syrah came from.

Sotheby’s Wine Encyclopedia: Fourth Edition, Revised – Tom Stevenson
Because you need an opinion that isn’t Jancis Robinson’s

Websites

cellartracker.com
Not only will you keep track of your increasing collection on this site, you can see who also rated your favorite wines high and cross reference it with other favorites of theirs you haven’t had.  It’s a great way to guarantee success.

vinography.com
Sure this guy’s often rating highly priced wines, but his biographies of winemakers and descriptions of vineyards keep me coming back for more even if I can’t always afford them–or even track them down.

drvino.com
Tyler Colman’s blog.  This is one of the more laid back wine blogs I’ve run across while still spewing forth a walloping wealth of information.  He’s also the guy who’s always calling it like it is and I get the impression he’s the guy the big wine dogs love to hate.

winespectator.com
Only for the forums which are infinitely more active then cellartracker’s–though they’re largely filled with point whores.

erobertparker.com
Only because Parker and Jay Miller’s tastes seem to be similar to mine.  When they score a wine big, I generally like it.  So the tip here is: find a reviewer whose opinion you actually approve of and read them.  A 100 point wine from a critic whose tastes varies wildly from your own serves you absolutely no purpose.

Note: I now know, by the way, that Williams Selyem should really be written Williams-Selyem as it was a winery founded by Ed Selyem and Burt Williams in the early eighties, and later sold (to John and Kathe Dyson) in the late nineties.  Whatever the case, it’s delicious, and I’m eagerly awaiting my first mailing list shipment proving the point that sometimes a down economy can, actually, get  you something…

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Ah Ha! A Newbie’s Wine List or: How I Managed to Post Twice in One Day

It is not, however, just a book encapsulating what it’s like to be a student at The CIA eager to move forward into the industry well-equipped to succeed. Having become intensely attached to both The CIA and his instructors, Ruhlman’s perspective is not unbiased and this lends the book a sort of memoir quality. As a result, there is value to be had in his documentation of his experience not only of becoming a cook, but of finding out that he is one. An extraordinary writer capable of perfectly describing in vivid detail all the goings on in a kitchen, you’re left feeling almost as though you’ve stolen his journal and my unfettered enjoyment left me wondering why exactly the book is sometimes frowned upon.

Probably it’s that for the world of culinary students enrolled at local community colleges (and that’s most of them) there was, and continues to be, a certain jealousy cast towards The Culinary Institute of America. Many cooks, as Ruhlman points out, look down upon graduates of the school believing they are unprepared to enter the work force. Speak to any chef whose hired them, however, and they will often tell you that CIA graduates are more prepared to hit the ground running (as cooks not chefs) then practically any other workers. What they take from the school is not just a base set of traditional skills, but also a work ethic to build upon throughout their career.

In a word, The Making of a Chef is astonishing but, having originally hit shelves in 1997, my opinion is far beyond fashionably late as people have been saying that for over a decade. Really though, with the benefit of hindsight, I don’t think I would have fully appreciated the book for all that it is without the distance between today and the time in my life when I was a cook. After all, I went to Forest Park.

The book personally impacted me when Ruhlman mentioned the change in attitude when one becomes a cook. He believes—as do I—that you simply don’t look at certain aspects of your life the same again. Most obvious is that for each of us that has cooked and stopped, there is still a piece of us drawn to the lifestyle that is difficult to shake. Having met Ruhlman on his Elements of Cooking tour he also spoke more specifically of this change citing, as an example, the organizational skills he took with him out of the kitchen. He found that post-CIA he approached what once felt like the insurmountable task of writing a book in a far different manner.

In my own experience I took from my kitchen years an entirely different concept of stress than most office workers. In the positions I’ve held since cooking I often see people stressed as though things couldn’t be any worse. Every time, however, I just think to myself that these people don’t know stress. Stress is standing in a 120degree kitchen falling behind as a chef stands on a shelf hovering over the pass screaming down at you to move faster. All this after you’d been burnt by your coworker who sloppily put his fish into an over-oiled pan that splashed molten liquid across your arm creating a blister that swells larger each time you thrust your arm in and out of the 600degree convection oven that later in the night catches on fire.

If you sit in a chair and work in front of a computer (as I do today), the maximum amount of stress obtainable is still pretty low. Certainly some will disagree with this statement, but to put it another way: people simply don’t yell at you in the same way at an office. The possibility of your angry Irish boss literally throwing something in your direction is minimal.

With thousands of copies having been sold since its release, my word shouldn’t be the one that gets you to read The Making of a Chef. Others have praised it more eloquently before me. But, if you still haven’t, go ahead and add my opinion to the pile because you should pick up a copy. It’s one of the most engaging food memoirs you’ll find.

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The Making of a Chef

1. I spotted hardback copies of one of my favorite foodie books, The Apprentice by Jacques Pepin, on the discount racks of the Creve Coeur Borders.  I can’t possibly recommend it enough.  It’s incredibly interesting as a whole but, with Pepin’s insane skill, the really interesting bits are his years at Howard Johnson’s.

It’s hard to imagine a time when people were attempting to make chain food that actually stood up to some level of high standards.

2. Guanciale.  Salume Beddu was slinging some made with Fararr Out Farm Berkshire jaws at Tower Grove recently and it is delicious.

Toast some good bread, render some up like lardons, and top it with arugula and a fried egg cooked in the rendered fat for the ultimate (and fast) after-work snack.

3. Grits.  I’d been unimpressed by Revival’s in the past, but this week, cheesy grits baked in a dish and topped with a slice of ham and a sunny-side up egg were absolutely perfect.  It doesn’t get much better than egg yolk running over anything.

4. Getting much better…the Fat of stlbites.com has made an appearance at Niche.  Lamb belly is now the final savory course of the tasting menu and it’s ridiculously good–everything a solitary slice of tender lamb gut was meant to be.

Lamb – mushroom, cauliflower, tapenade (& Brussels Sprouts when I had it)

5. A guilty pleasure: Chicken Modega and a side of white cavatelli at the Town & Country Rich & Charlie’s.  Bonus: it was $28 for two of us to eat.  Bonus 2: That Rich & Charlie’s is BYOB. Bonus 3: It was enough for lunch the next day too.

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Notes

From Time.com:

…Hubert Keller (San Francisco’s Fleur de Lys) has opened a second Burger Bar in St. Louis, Mo.; he already sells 1,400 burgers each weekend night in Las Vegas.

It’s nice to see St. Louis in the national press a little more recently, but I think we can all agree it would be nice if it wasn’t for this.

Though, apparently, “burgerphilia has become so acceptable among foodies that two books on the subject are coming out this year: Hamburger America, by documentarian George Motz, and The Hamburger: A History, by New York magazine online food editor Josh Ozersky.”

But you shouldn’t care because if you’re really that interested in reading about hamburgers, you should be reading John T. Edge’s Hamburgers and Fries. From fried chicken to donuts, every book that guy writes is fantastic.

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Who knew…

Had I liked it, I might point you to the fabulous chapter in which he attempted to get his friend to appreciate the glory of coffee and olives. His clever tactics to trick her into thinking they were, at the very least not-half-bad, would serve many of us well as we poke and prod our friends and relatives to try new things.

Or perhaps I would comment on Roberts’ engaging sense of humor. More than any author I can recall his personality leaps from each page. Without actually having met him his openness regarding every facet of his life makes me feel as though I would probably know him better than members of my own family.

But, I did not like the book as I could not help but wonder why we needed it in the first place.

Adam D. Roberts’ you see is a blogger. He is (go figure) The Amateur Gourmet. He has a large following of adoring fans in the online food community, and that was my issue with the book. I am one of those fans, and for those of us that read his blog each week, there is nothing dramatically different about this book than one of his longer posts. His personality which makes his web page such a success is obviously there, but do too the formality of a book, he loses a bit of the eccentricity that is the secret to his success.

This one time however, I will admit I was wrong. I have realized in the month since finishing the book that while I personally did not need it, there are millions of Americans who do.

This book is not for people like me that discovered food long ago and are already fans of his blog. It is for the people who do not know who Adam D. Roberts is. It is for the people that grew up in families where nobody cooked and the question was always “where do you want to go” instead of “what do you feel like making?” But more importantly, it is for the channel surfer eating a micro waved dinner who stops just long enough on the Food Network to think to themselves “that looks good. I wonder if I could make that?”

Roberts thinks you can, believing if he can do it, anyone can.

By that standard this book is a huge success as Roberts’ takes you through his adventures like making his first tomato sauce, shopping at the farmers market, and learning how to dine with Ruth Reichl.

While it does contain some recipes it is not a cookbook, and while the title might lead one to believe some cooking skills will be taught, mostly it is a memoir encouraging people not to be afraid of the food world because it is exciting, and it is for everyone.

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Amateur Goes Pro

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.

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641

“William L. Burge IV, chef: ? “CULINARY ARTISTRY is one of the finest culinary pieces that I know of, not just because of the conversations with the chefs which are great, but more importantly for the lists of food combinations/suggestions. ? As a young cook, they served as a sort of flavor wheel, when I felt that a dish could use just a little something more. ? A must-have for current chefs, aspring chefs, and anyone interested in expanding their palate of usable flavors.”

[source: www.becomingachef.com ]

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Who knew I was a low level celebrity?