Showing titles in Gastronomy

In The Meaning of Beer, award-winning beer writer Jonny Garrett tells the stories of incredible human moments and inventions, taking listeners to some of the best-known beer destinations in the world–Munich and Oktoberfest, Carlsberg Brewery's historic laboratory, St Louis and the home of Budweiser–as well as those lesser-known, from a 5,000 year old brewery in the Egyptian desert to Arctic Svalbard, home to the world's most northerly pub.

The author of Cod and The Basque History of the World takes an extraordinary look at an ordinary substance — salt, the only rock humans eat — and how it has shaped civilization from the very beginning. Mark Kurlansky has produced a kaleidoscope of history, a multi-layered masterpiece that blends economic, scientific, political, religious, and culinary records into a rich and memorable tale.

How we live is shaped by how we eat. You can see this in the vastly different approaches to growing, preparing and eating food around the world, such as the hunter-gatherer Hadza in Tanzania whose sustainable lifestyle is under threat in a crowded planet, or Western societies whose food is farmed or bred in vast intensive enterprises. And most of us now rely on a complex global food web of production, distribution, consumption and disposal, which is now contending with unprecedented challenges. The need for a better understanding of how we feed ourselves has never been more urgent.

Natalie Cassidy has been on our television screens for over three decades. We’ve grown up alongside Sonia on EastEnders, but what about Nat’s life beyond Albert Square? In Happy Days, Natalie isn’t just blowing her own trumpet, she’s taking readers on a journey through the highs and lows and the changing seasons of life. From yo-yo diets to raising strong girls, coping with grief to getting acting lessons from Barbara Windsor, step into Natalie’s world behind the screen.

More than just a companion to the hugely popular Travel Channel show, No Reservations is Bourdain's journal of his far-flung travels. The book traces his trips from New Zealand to New Jersey and everywhere in between, with Bourdain's outrageous commentary on what really happens when you give a bad-boy chef an open ticket to the world.

From the citrus groves of Sicily to a taco in Mexico City, In Search of the Perfect Peach takes you on a journey in the pursuit of flavor, with Franco revealing at every step how this incredibly simple desire can lead to radical change. Throughout, he offers us a deeply optimistic vision of how we as consumers can follow flavor to fix the food system and bring joy to our every meal.

Over the past three decades, Lew Bryson has been one of the most influential voices in whiskey. In Whiskey Master Class, Lew shares everything he's learned on his journey through the worlds of bourbon, Scotch, rye, Japanese whiskey, and more (yes, there are tasty Canadian and Irish whiskeys!).

Buon appetito! Everyone loves Italian food. But how did the Italians come to eat so well? The answer lies amid the vibrant beauty of Italy's historic cities. For a thousand years, they have been magnets for everything that makes for great eating: ingredients, talent, money, and power. Italian food is city food. Delizia! is much more than a history of Italian food. It is a history of Italy told through the flavors and character of its cities.

One ordinary day, out of the blue, the heart-shaped tin in which Bee Wilson baked her wedding cake falls to the ground. This should have been unremarkable, except that two months earlier her husband left her for another woman. In a search of others who had also invested kitchen objects with strong meanings and emotions, Wilson found that this way of thinking might be the rule rather than the exception. Even those who believe they’re not at all sentimental might have a weak spot – a grandmother’s wooden spoon or a salt shaker inherited from a parent.

The country certainly boasts an outsized reputation around the world for fast food and faster living – everything is louder, brighter, bigger, if not always better – yet for all the cartoonish depictions of its culture on the big and small screen, Felicity was convinced that in reality, most Americans are just like the rest of us… despite a troubling national tendency to eat doughnuts for breakfast. Her mission; to take a closer look at the iconic American dishes that have conquered the world...

The Pedant's ambition is simple. He wants to cook tasty, nutritious food; he wants not to poison his friends; and he wants to expand, slowly and with pleasure, his culinary repertoire. A stern critic of himself and others, he knows he is never going to invent his own recipes (although he might, in a burst of enthusiasm, increase the quantity of a favourite ingredient). Rather, he is a recipe-bound follower of the instructions of others. It is in his interrogations of these recipes, and of those who create them, that the Pedant's true pedantry emerges.

Being into food - following and making it, queuing for it and discussing it - is no longer a subculture. It's become mass culture. The food landscape is more expansive and dizzying by the day. Recipes, once passed from hand to hand, now flood newspaper supplements and social media. Our tastes are engineered in food factories, hacked by supermarkets and influenced by Instagram reels. Ruby Tandoh's startlingly original analysis traces this extraordinary transformation over the past seventy-five years.

You've seen the headlines: Parmesan cheese made from sawdust. Lobster rolls containing no lobster at all. Extra-virgin olive oil that isn't. Fake foods are in our supermarkets, our restaurants, and our kitchen cabinets. Award-winning food journalist and travel writer Larry Olmsted exposes this pervasive and dangerous fraud perpetrated on unsuspecting Americans.

This is a tale of pursuit through the kitchens of New York City at the turn of the century. By the late nineteenth century, it seemed that New York City had put an end to the outbreaks of typhoid fever that had so frequently decimated the city's population. That is until 1904, when the disease broke out in a household in Oyster Bay, Long Island. Authorities suspected the family cook, Mary Mallon, of being a carrier. But before she could be tested, the woman, soon to be known as Typhoid Mary, had disappeared.

Professor Jennifer Cognard-Black takes you on a culinary tour of fiction, from Proust’s evocative madeleine and the voracious hunger of fairy tales to the intersection of recipes with storytelling and the emotional consumption of food on film. These lessons look at how food can be so much more than mere set dressing in a great story.

Ruhlman propels himself and his readers through a score of kitchens and classrooms, from Asian and American regional cuisines to lunch cookery and even table waiting, in search of the elusive, unnamable elements of great cooking.

Since its earliest days, The New Yorker has been a tastemaker: literally. As the home of A. J. Liebling, Joseph Wechsberg, and M. F. K. Fisher, who practically invented American food writing, the magazine established a tradition that is carried forward today by irrepressible literary gastronomes, including Calvin Trillin, Bill Buford, Adam Gopnik, Jane Kramer, and Anthony Bourdain. Now, in this indispensable collection, The New Yorker dishes up a feast of delicious writing on food and drink.

What is the most unsayable thing you have ever wanted to say to your parents? For newly single food journalist Candice Chung, there’s been one thing on her mind lately: ‘If anything happens, I love you.’ Simple. Reasonable. If only her estranged Cantonese parents weren't so allergic to the word ‘love’. Still, she’s determined to tackle what's left unsaid. To find a way to unscramble what her family has been trying to tell each other all along – not in Cantonese or English, but with food.

Everyone knows how to drink beer, but few know how to really taste it with an understanding of the finer points of brewing, serving, and food pairing. Discover the ingredients and brewing methods that make each variety unique, and learn to identify the scents, colors, flavors, and mouthfeel of all the major beer styles. Recommendations for more than 50 types of beer from around the world encourage you to expand your horizons. Uncap the secrets in every bottle of the world's greatest drink!

Interweaving forgotten colonial history and long-buried indigenous traditions, Dafilmmaker Jill Damatac takes us through her time in America, cooking her way through Filipino recipes in her kitchen as she searches for a sense of self and renewed possibility. With emotional intelligence, clarity, and grace, Dirty Kitchen explores fractured memories to ask questions of identity, colonialism, immigration, belonging, and to find ways in which the ritual, tradition, and comfort of food, can answer them.