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Wednesday, June 13, 2012

How food moved from hearth to the restaurant




Author: Adam Gopnik

If you look at the contents, there's many emails to Elizabeth Robins Pennell. Initially I thought she might be an expert whose views are welcomed by the author in to his book like a field reporter back to the TV station or the call to the expert on 'who wants to be a millionaire'. This aspect of the book comes into life progressively. Even with the passivity of a relation between an admirer and his dead literary idol, the dissonance of an irredeemable past and the author's reaction to it pulses the one way communication with human pathos.

The author writes about the history of the restaurant not from when it was a restaurant but how preexisting cafe culture had to be merged into it to thrive. He also breaks myths about WW and restaurant timeline.

All appetites have their illusions, which are part of their pleasure. The author feels that the cookbooks stoke a fire in the readers that they know is not a wave that is success-ably ridable.

Is the mystery of good cooking - talent or a secret ingredient and is the chef willing to share it? Being in the critic business, he makes us see the ambiguity of taste and the writing we use to describe food and wine.
 His entry pass takes him to may places where he learns of the latest in modern cuisine. A NZ study about food miles and energy involved is counter-intuitive. What El Bulli is closing?

When you are cooking, do you find yourself capable of anything else? I find myself going back to the recipe to see if I missed anything.

Like species of plants and animals that go extinct, spices like Silphium too face a similar fate.

I hadnt read of Adam Gopnik except for a line of his quoted in How to cook like a man. This book links us to another food author Lisa Abend.

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