Best food writing 2009 / edited by Holly Hughes.

ISBN:

9780738213699

Title:

Author:

Hughes, Holly.

Edition:

1st Da Capo Press ed.

Publication Information:

Philadelphia, PA : Da Capo Lifelong, c2009.

Physical Description:

xii, 348 p. ; 21 cm.

General Note:

Includes index.

Contents:

The cranky connoisseur / Too much of a mouthful / The raw deal / Medium-size me / Go slow, foodies, it's the way to win / Seeking market freshness / The misunderstood / Illegal cheese / Wine scams: a counterfeiter confesses / Marshmallow fluff / Spam: it's not just for inboxes anymore / Out of the wild / Summer's end / Beef: it's what's for dinner / The last of the great $10 steaks / Highway to hog heaven / By meat alone / The disappearing art of the country ham / Morality bites / The beauty of the beast / Kitchen smackdown -- Take this! Sort of French, sort of Italian / Take that! Starting with five appetizers / Two food writers in a kitchen smackdown / Dairy's queen / Eggs enough and time / Deep in the heart of Texas, we bread steak / The best chocolate chip cookie I've ever had / They remember home / What is real cooking?

Mac 'n' jeez / How not to hire a chef / A beautiful mess / Back to the Old World, 1962-1967 / What we hunger for / Dining around. The last time I saw Paris / English Oyster Cult / Tokyo, cocktail capital of the world / Eternal city / Bridging the chasm / FoiX GraX / Eat your damn dessert / Should fine dining die? / The Grapes of Wrath, in three episodes / Picky-picky / Beating eggs / Getting to know him / An uncalculating science / The last meal / The eggs and I

Subject Term:

Food -- Literary collections.

Cookery -- Literary collections.

Gastronomy -- Literary collections.

Dinners and dining -- Literary collections.

Food habits -- Literary collections.

Added Author:

Hughes, Holly.

Format:

Books

Publication Date:

2009

Publication Information:

Philadelphia, PA : Da Capo Lifelong, c2009.

Available:*

Shelf Number	Material Type	Copy	Shelf Location	Status
641.3 BES	Recreational Reading	1	Standard shelving location	Searching... Unknown

Bound With These Titles

On Order

Summary

Best Food Writing 2009 authoritatively and appealingly assembles the finest culinary prose from the past year's books, magazines, newspapers, newsletters, and Web sites. This anthology features both established food writers and rising stars cooking up everything from erudite culinary history to food-inspired memoirs. By turns opinionated, evocative, sensuous, and just plain funny, it's a tasty sampler to dip into time and again.

As in previous editions, Best Food Writing 2009 will include top-notch writers like Colman Andrews, Anthony Bourdain, Frank Bruni, Bill Buford, Madhur Jaffrey, Ruth Reichl, Raymond Sokolov, Calvin Trillin, Alice Waters, and many others.

Author Notes

Holly Hughes , editor of the Best Food Writing series since its inception, is also the author of Frommer's 500 Places to Take the Kids Before They Grow Up . She lives with her family in New York City.

Reviews (2)

Publisher's Weekly Review

Editor Hughes skims the cream off a year's worth of culinary journalism in the latest annual. As with previous editions, Hughes captures the gastronomic zeitgeist in a broad range of essays; she opens strong with Timothy Taylor's witty take on connoisseurs and gourmands, an examination of the slow and raw food movements, and a vendor's take on farmers' markets. Though some topics, like legendary steak houses and the neighborhood diner, have been done to death, they're carried by the quality of the writing. John DeLucie's sardonic account of his truffled macaroni and cheese, as well as Tim Carman's brilliant "How Not to Hire a Chef," are the kind of slice-of-life tales that deserve a wider audience, and make up for the volume's misses (Margaret McArthur's take on cooking the perfect soft-boiled egg, Lettie Teague's piece on wine scams). Other crowd-pleasers include Calvin Trillin's quest for the best barbecue in Texas and Robb Walsh's all-too-short examination of a classic pairing: oysters with martinis. This is a sound reader for those looking to catch up on trends in the culinary world, but foodies already immersed in the culture are sure to find some overlooked gems. (Nov.) Copyright 2009 Reed Business Information.

Booklist Review

Look past the tinge of hyperbole, and Timothy Taylor makes a good point in the opening essay to this culinary collection when he asks, Who in the Western world isn't a foodie now? He's not complaining about crowded elbow room in the clubhouse of the elitely palated but, rather, pointing out that perhaps more than ever the simple act of consuming fuel has become a pervasive cultural obsession, bursting forth from glossy magazines, chic cookbooks, and more TV shows than an entire network devoted to food can carry. In this collection, just about every level of culinary curiosity gets a chance to shine, from Rachel Hutton's ode to Spam to Mark Caro's infiltration of underground foie gras cults. It's patently ludicrous to state, as Eric LeMay does in his piece lamenting the FDA's death grip on pasteurization, that when you eat cheese, you mainline the uncut elixir of life, but damn if it doesn't make you want to rush to your nearest fromager, or at least make you wish you had one to begin with.--Chipman, Ian Copyright 2009 Booklist