This engaging and approachable (and humorous!) guide to taste and flavor will make you a more skilled and confident home cook How to Taste outlines the underlying principles of taste, and then takes a deep dive into salt, acid, bitter, sweet, fat, umami, bite (heat), aromatics, and texture. You'll find out how temperature impacts your enjoyment of the dishes you make as does color, alcohol, and more. The handbook goes beyond telling home cooks what ingredients go well together or explaining cooking ratios. You'll learn how to adjust a dish that's too salty or too acidic and how to determine when something might be lacking. It also includes recipes and simple kitchen experiments that illustrate the importance of salt in a dish, or identifies whether you're a "supertaster" or not. Each recipe and experiment highlights the chapter's main lesson. How to Taste will ultimately help you feel confident about why and how various components of a dish are used to create balance, harmony, and deliciousness.

Offers a guide to vintages, grape varieties, and wine appreciation.

Master of Wine Jancis Robinson has created this wine tasting course based around practical exercises that will guide you from your first sips to confident, well-informed gulps. Clearly divided into theory and practise, this workbook first provides all the information you need before you put it into practise. Learn the correct way to taste wine and enjoy the tasting exercises specially devised by Jancis based on readily available and inexpensive bottle. Learn how to recognise the most popular grape varieties from Chardonnay to Riesling, Pinot Noir to Cabernet Sauvignon, and why you should choose a good sparkling wine over cheap Champagne. There is advice on choosing from a wine list and how to match food with wine. How to Taste will awaken the wine connoisseur in us all.

“A rich, engrossing, and deeply intelligent story….This is a book I won’t soon forget.” —Molly Wizenberg, bestselling author of A Homemade Life “Fresh, smart, and consistently surprising. If this beautifully written book were a smell, it would be a crisp green apple.” —Claire Dederer, bestselling author of Poser Season to Taste is an aspiring chef’s moving account of finding her way—in the kitchen and beyond—after a tragic accident destroys her sense of smell. Molly Birnbaum’s remarkable story—written with the good cheer and great charm of popular food writers Laurie Colwin and Ruth Reichl—is destined to stand alongside Julie Powell’s Julie and Julia as a classic tale of a cooking life. Season to Taste is sad, funny, joyous, and inspiring.

"The science of taste and how to improve your sense of taste so that you get the most out of every bite"--

Taste is a lyric meditation on one of our five senses, which we often take for granted. Structured as a series of “small bites,” the book considers the ways that we ingest the world, how we come to know ourselves and others through the daily act of tasting. Through flavorful explorations of the sweet, the sour, the salty, the bitter, and umami, Jehanne Dubrow reflects on the nature of taste. In a series of short, interdisciplinary essays, she blends personal experience with analysis of poetry, fiction, music, and the visual arts, as well as religious and philosophical texts. Dubrow considers the science of taste and how taste transforms from a physical sensation into a metaphor for discernment. Taste is organized not so much as a linear dinner served in courses but as a meal consisting of meze, small plates of intensely flavored discourse.

A startling debut about the extraordinary end of a marriage and its very strange aftermath. Meet Lizzie Prain. She is an ordinary housewife and lives with her lovely dog and her husband, who is a bit of a difficult fellow, in a quiet cottage in British country side. She's a wonderful cook. She enjoys her garden. And, occasionally, she makes cakes for the village parties. No one has seen Lizzie's husband, Jacob, for a few days. That's because last Monday and Lizzie snapped and cracked him on the head with her garden shovel. No one quite misses Jacob though, and Lizzie surely didn't kill him on purpose. And now that she has the chance to live beyond his shadow, she won't neglect her good fortune. Over the course of the following month, with a body to get rid of and few fail-proof options at hand, Lizzie will channel her most practical instincts and do what she does best: she'll cook Jacob, and she'll eat him. But when Lizzie inadvertently befriends an isolated misfit, she will be tested: Will Lizzie turn to this new person for solace and abandon her desperate plan or will her new friend be an unwitting accessory to her crime? Dark, unexpectedly funny, and achingly human, Season to Taste is a deliciously subversive treat. In Lizzie Prain, Natalie Young has created one of the most remarkable and surprising heroines in fiction.