This is a psychology book for cooks about food. Not a cook book, but a psychology book. You will see how your brain deals with information from your senses, so you can understand that people actually find a soup called "muoma" creamier than a soup with the name "sitsee", how making up walks and rhymes makes it easy to remember things and why wine in an expensive looking bottle tastes, really tastes, better. You will see why some people like baking and some people are not, why people who enter their homes through the kitchen have a higher chance of being overweight. And much more. I have tried to explain things using examples of food and cooking whenever possible, and avoided explaining anything I could not explain in an amusing or interesting way . I will take you hundreds of thousands of years back, and show you that we are the cooking ape, creatures of the fire. Without cooking we would not exist. You will read how your brain constructs what we see, hear, smell, feel and taste, and how much we actually add to what we think we just perceive, and how this is very much the case when we eat. You will learn how to use your memory efficiently in the kitchen using simple tricks. I will show you different personalities in the kitchen, and what to do with that. We will dig into technique-based cooking and recipe-based cooking and how that affects you and your cooking. Hell, we'll even look at language and food names, pricing strategies, and how we can use that knowledge to our advantage.

This book is NOT a how-to-cook book, but a how to think-about-cooking-book. That is why I think this book will be interesting and useful to cooks -from experienced professional cooks to people who can hardly cook. Speaking of which: the reasons why many people do not cook to fullest of their abilities (or not at all) are purely psychological reasons. Just think about it: anyone can acquire the physical skills to become a decent cook in a relatively short time. Compared to becoming a half-decent drummer of guitar player, becoming a half-decent cook is a walk in the park. You only think you do not have the time, you think are not interested, you think it is all far too complicated, you think you have lost interest in cooking, you think are too important to cook, you think you know it all already, you think you are wasting your talents in the kitchen: you think, you think, you think. So we are going to pay some attention to that thinking of yours. How are we going to do this?Most cookbooks seem to think you do not. At best, you are a package of some skills and knowledge, but more often you are just regarded as a soulless, emotionless manipulator of tools following instructions. The kitchen is a place completely disconnected from you and your world, and the tools you use have nothing to do with you. "Dice the onion", "whisk until creamy". I think it is high time to get "you" back in the kitchen.In the chapter "Can you cook?' we look at the strange finding that good cooks usually have a reasonable idea of how good they are in the kitchen, but that many bad cooks have no idea how bad they are, and actually are convinced they are quite good (let's hope you are not one of those!). How do you know which one you are? Read on. Then I will take you back even before the stone-age, and make a point that we are the cooking ape: we could have never become us with our large brains without cooking our food. We big brained apes, Homo sapiens and just before us Home Erectus have been cooking for two million years! That is astonishing, because we, Homo sapiens, have been around for just two hundred thousand years. Then I will show you how cooking our food shaped our societies, made a thing like marriage necessary, and put women around the fire and in the kitchen, for better or for worse.Next, we turn to a bit of pure psychology: how do we process information? How do we see, hear, smell, taste, and touch?. You will see that we perceive the world much more with our brain than with our senses, that we in fact construct the world, we don't just "get it". We will use these insights later to explain strange effects in the kitchen: why the name of a dish changes how it tastes, how the shape of the serving plate, the music, how your brain uses almost anything to construct "taste". Memory is next. I will show you how your memory works, and how you can make it work for you in the kitchen by applying memory tricks. If you realize your memory is nothing like a hard disk, but more a story-producing database of ever-changing knowledge with a preference for pictures, all sort of cool tricks become possible.Now we are ready to look at multi-sensory experiences and cooking. We look at how you can manipulate all information around food to change experiences of the diners. Here we will also have a look at the psychology of wine tasting. Then we will turn to recipes and techniques, and how they influence the way you think about cooking and the way you cook, and how to use your kitchen, your knife, and dealing with mistakes.Next up are the cooks and diners themselves. We will look at individual differences and you will get some handy questionnaires to check what kind of cook and diner you and the ones around you are. Then comes the menu: how should the menu look, how do you name dishes and, not unimportantly, how do you price them? Last up is psychological aspects of cooking and eating healthy.

The phrase "dude food" likely brings to mind a range of images: burgers stacked impossibly high with an assortment of toppings that were themselves once considered a meal; crazed sports fans demolishing plates of radioactively hot wings; barbecued or bacon-wrapped . . . anything. But there is much more to the phenomenon of dude food than what's on the plate. Emily J. H. Contois's provocative book begins with the dude himself—a man who retains a degree of masculine privilege but doesn't meet traditional standards of economic and social success or manly self-control. In the Great Recession's aftermath, dude masculinity collided with food producers and marketers desperate to find new customers. The result was a wave of new diet sodas and yogurts marketed with dude-friendly stereotypes, a transformation of food media, and weight loss programs just for guys. In a work brimming with fresh insights about contemporary American food media and culture, Contois shows how the gendered world of food production and consumption has influenced the way we eat and how food itself is central to the contest over our identities.

The authors of The Perfect Meal examine all of the elements that contribute to the diners experience of a meal (primarily at a restaurant) and investigate how each of the diners senses contributes to their overall multisensory experience. The principal focus of the book is not on flavor perception, but on all of the non-food and beverage factors that have been shown to influence the diners overall experience. Examples are: the colour of the plate (visual) the shape of the glass (visual/tactile) the names used to describe the dishes (cognitive) the background music playing inside the restaurant (aural) Novel approaches to understanding the diners experience in the restaurant setting are explored from the perspectives of decision neuroscience, marketing, design, and psychology. 2015 Popular Science Prose Award Winner.

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER From Gabrielle Hamilton, bestselling author of Blood, Bones & Butter, comes her eagerly anticipated cookbook debut filled with signature recipes from her celebrated New York City restaurant Prune. NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY PUBLISHERS WEEKLY NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE SEASON BY Time • O: The Oprah Magazine • Bon Appétit • Eater A self-trained cook turned James Beard Award–winning chef, Gabrielle Hamilton opened Prune on New York’s Lower East Side fifteen years ago to great acclaim and lines down the block, both of which continue today. A deeply personal and gracious restaurant, in both menu and philosophy, Prune uses the elements of home cooking and elevates them in unexpected ways. The result is delicious food that satisfies on many levels. Highly original in concept, execution, look, and feel, the Prune cookbook is an inspired replica of the restaurant’s kitchen binders. It is written to Gabrielle’s cooks in her distinctive voice, with as much instruction, encouragement, information, and scolding as you would find if you actually came to work at Prune as a line cook. The recipes have been tried, tasted, and tested dozens if not hundreds of times. Intended for the home cook as well as the kitchen professional, the instructions offer a range of signals for cooks—a head’s up on when you have gone too far, things to watch out for that could trip you up, suggestions on how to traverse certain uncomfortable parts of the journey to ultimately help get you to the final destination, an amazing dish. Complete with more than with more than 250 recipes and 250 color photographs, home cooks will find Prune’s most requested recipes—Grilled Head-on Shrimp with Anchovy Butter, Bread Heels and Pan Drippings Salad, Tongue and Octopus with Salsa Verde and Mimosa’d Egg, Roasted Capon on Garlic Crouton, Prune’s famous Bloody Mary (and all 10 variations). Plus, among other items, a chapter entitled “Garbage”—smart ways to repurpose foods that might have hit the garbage or stockpot in other restaurant kitchens but are turned into appetizing bites and notions at Prune. Featured here are the recipes, approach, philosophy, evolution, and nuances that make them distinctively Prune’s. Unconventional and honest, in both tone and content, this book is a welcome expression of the cookbook as we know it. Praise for Prune “Fresh, fascinating . . . entirely pleasurable . . . Since 1999, when the chef Gabrielle Hamilton put Triscuits and canned sardines on the first menu of her East Village bistro, Prune, she has nonchalantly broken countless rules of the food world. The rule that a successful restaurant must breed an empire. The rule that chefs who happen to be women should unconditionally support one another. The rule that great chefs don’t make great writers (with her memoir, Blood, Bones & Butter). And now, the rule that restaurant food has to be simplified and prettied up for home cooks in order to produce a useful, irresistible cookbook. . . . [Prune] is the closest thing to the bulging loose-leaf binder, stuck in a corner of almost every restaurant kitchen, ever to be printed and bound between cloth covers. (These happen to be a beautiful deep, dark magenta.)”—The New York Times “One of the most brilliantly minimalist cookbooks in recent memory . . . at once conveys the thrill of restaurant cooking and the wisdom of the author, while making for a charged reading experience.”—Publishers Weekly (starred review)

"Pancakes are a luxury, like smoking marijuana or having sex. That’s why I came up with the names Ho Cakes and Slutty Cakes. These are extra decadent, but in a way, every pancake is a Ho Cake.” Thus speaks Kenny Shopsin, legendary (and legendarily eccentric, ill-tempered, and lovable) chef and owner of the Greenwich Village restaurant (and institution), Shopsin’s, which has been in existence since 1971. Kenny has finally put together his 900-plus-item menu and his unique philosophy—imagine Elizabeth David crossed with Richard Pryor—to create Eat Me, the most profound and profane cookbook you’ll ever read. His rants—on everything from how the customer is not always right to the art of griddling; from how to run a small, ethical, and humane business to how we all should learn to cook in a Goodnight Moon world where everything you need is already in your own home and head—will leave you stunned or laughing or hungry. Or all of the above. With more than 120 recipes including such perfect comfort foods as High School Hot Turkey Sandwiches, Cuban Bean Polenta Melt, and Cornmeal-Fried Green Tomatoes with Comeback Sauce, plus the best soups, egg dishes, and hamburgers you’ve ever eaten, Eat Me is White Trash Cooking for the twenty-first century, as unforgettable and mind-boggling as its author.