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Loading... Choice Cuts: A Savory Selection of Food Writing from Around the World and…by Mark Kurlansky
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will love Sign up for LibraryThing to find out whether you'll like this book. Everything about this book is based on one simple subject - food. Kurlansky takes that subject and explores everything having to do with it. From growing, hunting, buying, and preparing to smelling, eating, and savoring it. The art of cooking, the downfall of rotting, from killing to cultivating. From Cato to Chekhov, Kurlansky finds quotes, essays and passages from a multitude of well known individuals, some with lives centered around food like M.F.K. Fisher and Elizabeth David and some not like Virginia Woolf, Ernest Hemingway and E.M Forster. Whether focused on an ingredient like garlic or chocolate, or a technique like faking venison or baking bread, or a location like favorite restaurants or markets, Kurlansky covers it all. It's historical and cutting edge. Technical and funny. Poetry and dissertation. Well worth the read. (  ) SeriousGrace | Jan 1, 2009 |  "Around the world" is really stretching it. The writing here is almost entirely from America and Western Europe. It's just all the usual suspects, things I'd read time and time again. I mean, I Brillat-Savarin and MFK Fisher too, but they make for fairly dull inclusions in an anthology that I had hoped would expose me to new writing. Many of the excerpts are also way too short to get any meaningful sense of style or emotion from them anyway. Definitely worth skipping, unless you have never read any food writing and are looking for an introduction. (  )1  vsmoothe | Jun 3, 2006 |  no reviews | add a review
Amazon.com (ISBN 0142004936, Paperback)"Food is about agriculture, about ecology, about man's relationship with nature ... about nation-building, cultural struggles, friends and enemies ... and at times, even about sex." Thus Mark Kurlansky, author of the award-winning Cod and Salt, introduces Choice Cuts, his anthology of food writing throughout history. Kurlansky has cast his net very wide and presents a legion of food writers on every possible culinary subject.The usual suspects are here, sometimes in triplicate: Brilliat Savarin on gourmets, female food-love, and how to gain weight; M.F.K. Fisher on bachelor cooking, the dislike of cabbage, and dinner at France's famed Monsieur Paul's in the 1940s; Elizabeth David on the folly of the garlic press, the glories of toast, and English pizza. But Kurlansky's trail starts much earlier with Plato on cooking (food as a branch of medicine, a notion shared by many modern advertisers), Heroditus on Egyptian dining, and, resoundingly, Mencius, a student of Confucius who, in the third century B.C., implored Chinese leaders to observe saner food and environmental policies. There is a great deal to digest here, but readers can take small bites at their leisure. Enjoyed in this way, the book provides an endlessly fascinating glimpse of humankind's second--or is it the first?--greatest pleasure. --Arthur Boehm (retrieved from Amazon Fri, 24 Apr 2009 07:58:16 -0400) The first test round has been closed. Visit the Open Shelves Classification group for details. |
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