The Culinary Timeline is a side-project that I've been working on since October. I'm hoping to have most of it complete by the end of January, with any luck. Until then, updates around here will be weekly, rather than twice weekly. Do stay tuned.
|
Truffled Capon.
Vintage food photography continues to fascinate me, especially the quaint-yet-complex aesthetics of 1960s-era French cookery. Within an historical context, the early 1960s proved to be a pivotal era for both French and American cuisine: In France, the death if Fernand Point in 1955 marked the passing of a legend, but at the same time, Point’s legacy and influence would become even more widespread, thanks to his impressive stable of proteges (among them, Alain Chapel, Georges Perrier, the Troisgros Brothers, and Paul Bocuse). Meanwhile, in the United States, Americans were slowly becoming aware of French cuisine in [... read more ...]
Being in my 30s — and not being a native of Louisiana — my first exposure to Justin Wilson was from a Ruffles commercial in the mid-1980s. For better or worse, that was also the first time that I’d ever heard the Cajun dialect, a quirky easygoing patois that now has many associations for me, having lived and cooked in New Orleans since then. During the same few years that Wilson was landing these national ad campaigns, his Louisiana-based cooking series began to appear on California public television stations, and Wilson himself began doing cooking demos on several morning [... read more ...]
The full title of Ian Kelly’s Antonin Carême biography is “Cooking for Kings: The Life of Antonin Careme, the First Celebrity Chef.” Frankly, I’m a bit wary of the term “celebrity chef,” especially in the era of the Food Network and its streak of made-for-TV paper tigers. Placing the word “celebrity” in front of the word “chef” almost seems to diminish the latter; I don’t consider Thomas Keller or Ferran Adria to be “celebrity chefs,” even though they’re both reasonably famous. To me, they’re just chefs — albeit great chefs — plain and simple. I suppose that the word [... read more ...]
I suspect that in middle America — and perhaps anywhere else the Western world — most people would assume that the French have cemented their reputation as the world’s culinary avant garde. It’s certainly a fair assumption. Not only have the French enjoyed an enviable culinary tradition for the last two centuries, but Western pop culture has reinforced this idea again and again. The notion of sophisticated French cuisine has become an enduring cultural archetype both here and abroad, as seen recently in movies like 2007′s “Ratatouille,” or even going back 20 years prior, to the Danish film “Babette’s [... read more ...]
“Cooking: The Quintessential Art” is an odd little book, but with noteworthy pedigree. Co-authors Herve This and Pierre Gagnaire have each earned their stripes in the culinary realm (the former, as a food chemist and one of the pioneers of molecular gastronomy; the latter, as a three-Michelin star chef and an innovator of fusion cuisine). As contemporaries, This and Gagniere have both forged unique careers by rethinking the basic elements of cuisine. In “The Quintessential Art,” the two authors delve into the very meaning of cooking, by analyzing the culinary arts through a surprisingly comprehensive philosophical lens. Replete with [... read more ...]
Although “Life, on the Line” is packaged as chef Grant Achatz’s culinary memoir, the crux of the book may actually be the existential question it poses: If a three-Michelin star chef loses his ability to taste, is life even worth living any longer? For most of us, this question may seem a bit melodramatic. After all, taste is just one of our five senses, and there certainly must be more to life than food and cooking. But then again, who are we to judge? The passion, the genius, and the dedication of a three-Michelin-star chef is simply beyond the [... read more ...]
Although there are very few books that I’ve ever read more than once, I decided to re-read “Kitchen Confidential” this week, just to see how well the book has held up since I had first read it, almost 10 years ago. In this case, revisiting Anthony Bourdain’s 2000 best-seller seemed like a fitting exercise for me: I had just returned to the professional kitchen last month, after a three-year layoff selling wine at Nickel & Nickel. Naturally, with that much time away from the kitchen, I’ve come to view my current job at Étoile as a new beginning, and [... read more ...]
Lobster Russian Style: Garnished with hard-boiled eggs and black truffles, though the book allows black olives as a substitute for the latter.
I meant to snap some food pics from Berkeley and the East Bay this week, but my camera battery was drained. Among the missed opportunities: a grilled bockwurst from Top Dog, a falafel pita from Fa-La-La, and a plate of yellow curried rice from Bua Luang. On the upside, I did find several great used cookbooks at Pegasus Books, including “Everyday French Cooking” by Henri-Paul Pellaprat. Originally published in America in 1966, Pellaprat’s book is an [... read more ...]
If footnotes indicate anything, I’d argue that Susan Pinkard’s “A Revolution in Taste” is perhaps the best-researched text available on French culinary history. Pinkard has clearly done her homework, and her book is both comprehensive and concise, and for me, it represents one of the great recent surveys of food and culture. Published in 2009, “A Revolution in Taste” may prove a bit scholarly for the casual gourmet, but for the student of Western cuisine, the book offers an approachable and well-documented account of the culinary trends that evolved from the Greco-Roman Era to the French Revolution. Along the [... read more ...]
What most Americans would recognize as “Chinese food” is far more likely to be Chinese-American, than anything truly Chinese. That said, it may seem surprising that there’s no chop suey or General Tso’s chicken in China, at least not as we know them. The staunch food-snob might label these Americanized dishes as a bastardization of the original form, although I feel that “bastardization” is much too strong of a term. Okay, if the food is served from a steam-table, then it probably is a bastardization. But whether it’s a buffet set-up or not, mom-and-pop Chinese restaurants outnumber McDonald’s franchises [... read more ...]
|
|
|
