I like reading Cookbooks too, SWW. I love enjoy many of the recipes I find.
Of the trove of books that just came in today, only two have recipes, Anthony Bourdain's
Les Halles Cookbook and
David Rosengarten Entertains. The latter may not have as much content as I'd like; he's talking about cooking for parties of twelve, so there's not much I'll be able to use directly in my kitchen, cooking for just myself and der Brucer. I never can tell, however, since even the suggestion of a combination of ingredients can get me experimenting in my kitchen.
On the other hand, Bourdain is a danged good writer on his own, even if he would look at my use of "danged" as too prissy. All right, he's a f***ing good writer, with no explitives deleted. He writes crime novels. He writes about food. If you were watching Nova on PBS a few nights ago, most of their show about Typhoid Mary was based on a nonfiction book he wrote. He's a culinary bad boy who isn't afraid to say what really goes on in a kitchen. Call his book an exploration of cultures, both of professional kitchens and French bistro food.
I've already mentioned Mimi Sheraton's
Eating My Words. Again, this counts as a book about culture, this time from the other side of the restaurant, the dining tables. Like other books I've found written by critics, I'm expecting what I learn from Sheraton to also explain criticism in general, and make me more aware of what good criticism involves (something BK will agree is in short supply on the Internet).
Fourth tome: Harold McGee's
On Food and Cooking: The Science and Lore of the Kitchen. This book has been out for twenty years already; I don't know why I've never picked it up before. And yes, it's a book about science. Physics, chemistry, biology, all the stuff that makes food (and our reaction to it) tick.
I'm still working on Rosengarten's
It's All American Food, which arrived a few days ago, about half-way through. This gears more towards history, pointing up how the various immigrant groups altered their cuisine because the ingredients from their homelands weren't to be found when they came to America; how the differing regions of the USA, with their differing abundances of foodstuffs, shaped our regional cuisine; and how some items have become American staples no matter where you go. And it's packed with recipes.
Like I say, there's a lot that can be learned from cookbooks, and from food-related books. And for me, this kind of reading is fun!
