A culinary history of the seven food staples that have shaped human history, including 63 original recipes The Seven Culinary Wonders of the World is a global culinary history told through the stories of seven essential ingredients found in cuisines all over the world: honey, salt, chile, pork, rice, cacao, and tomato. Each of these foundational ingredients has played a long and valuable role in human foodways and culture, and each has its own fascinating history. This engagingly illustrated book traces the journeys of these foodstuffs as they were transported from their regions of origin to faraway cultures and countries, there to take up starring roles in new cuisines. The Seven Culinary Wonders of the World explores each food in depth, beautifully illustrated by specially commissioned artworks, and views them through a number of prisms--social, cultural, historical, and botanical--to offer readers fresh, informative insights into seemingly everyday foods that reveal themselves as wondrous. The rich and diverse cultural stories of these seven ingredients are also told, from the magical and aphrodisiac powers associated with cacao in Mesoamerican culture to the introduction of tomatoes to Europe by the Spanish conquistadors in the sixteenth century and the earliest cultivation of rice in China's Pearl Valley. Readers can take the seven ingredients into their own kitchens via 63 original recipes for dishes both traditional and innovative.

Pork -- Honey -- Salt -- Chile -- Rice -- Cacao -- Tomato

This book uses food as a lens through which to explore important matters of society and culture. In exploring why and how people eat around the globe, the text focuses on issues of health, conflict, struggle, contest, inequality, and power. Whether because of its necessity, pleasure, or ubiquity, the world of food (and its lore) proves endlessly fascinating to most people. The story of food is a narrative filled with both human striving and human suffering. However, many of today's diners are only dimly aware of the human price exacted for that comforting distance from the lived-world realities of food justice struggles. With attention to food issues ranging from local farming practices to global supply chains, this book examines how food’s history and geography remain inextricably linked to sociopolitical experiences of trauma connected with globalization, such as colonization, conquest, enslavement, and oppression. The main text is structured alphabetically around a set of 70 ingredients, from almonds to yeast. Each ingredient's story is accompanied by recipes. Along with the food profiles, the encyclopedia features sidebars. These are short discussions of topics of interest related to food, including automats, diners, victory gardens, and food at world’s fairs. This project also brings a social justice perspective to its content—weighing debates concerning food access, equity, insecurity, and politics.

No Experience Necessary is Chef Norman Van Aken’s joyride of a memoir. In it he spans twenty-plus years and nearly as many jobs—including the fateful job advertisement in the local paper for a short-order cook with “no experience necessary.” Long considered a culinary renegade and a pioneering chef, Van Aken is an American original who chopped and charred, sweated and seared his way to cooking stardom with no formal training, but with extra helpings of energy, creativity, and faith. After landing on the deceptively breezy shores of Key West, Van Aken faced hurricanes, economic downturns, and mercurial moneymen during the decades when a restaurant could open and close faster than you can type haute cuisine. From a graveyard shift grunt at an all-night barbeque joint to a James Beard–award finalist for best restaurant in America, Van Aken put his trusting heart, poetic soul, natural talent, and ever-expanding experience into every venture—and helped transform the American culinary landscape along the way. In the irreverent tradition of Anthony Bourdain’s Kitchen Confidential,and populated by a rogues’ gallery of colorful characters—including movie stars, legendary musicians, and culinary giants Julia Child, Emeril Lagasse, and Charlie Trotter—No Experience Necessary offers a uniquely personal, highly-entertaining under-the-tablecloth view of the high-stakes world of American cuisine told with wit, insight, and great affection by a natural storyteller.

In this innovative cookbook, James Beard award-winning author Michael Ruhlman explains why the egg is the key to the craft of cooking. For culinary visionary Michael Ruhlman, the question is not whether the chicken or the egg came first, it's how anything could be accomplished in the kitchen without the magic of the common egg. He starts with perfect poached and scrambled eggs and builds up to brioche and Italian meringue. Along the way readers learn to make their own mayonnaise, pasta, custards, quiches, cakes, and other preparations that rely fundamentally on the hidden powers of the egg. A unique framework for the book is provided in Ruhlman's egg flowchart, which starts with the whole egg at the top and branches out to describe its many uses and preparations -- boiled, pressure-cooked, poached, fried, coddled, separated, worked into batters and doughs, and more. A removable illustrated flowchart is included with this book. Nearly 100 recipes are grouped by technique and range from simple (Egg Salad with Tarragon and Chives) to sophisticated (nougat). Dozens of step-by-step photographs guide the home cook through this remarkable culinary journey.

From chef, author, and host of Modern Pioneering, a cookbook featuring essays about food artisans committed to local, wild and non-processed cuisine. In Food Heroes, Georgia Pellegrini introduces readers to the lively stories of artisanal food devotees such as New York mushroom forager Marion Burroughs, French fig collector Francis Honore, fish missionary Jon Rowley in Washington State, and Ugo Buzzio in New York City, one of the last makers of traditional dry-cured sausages in the United States. Filled with colorful anecdotes, photographs, and recipes, this book offers an accessible introduction to the artisanal food movement, and vicarious living for armchair travelers, food lovers, and others who might won­der what it would be like to drop everything and start an olive farm, or who yearn to make and sell their own clotted cream butter. Thirty-two fantastic recipes follow the profiles, and encourage readers to find their own local suppliers.