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.
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"Gastronomical Map of China" as published in "The Chinese Festive Board." Click the image for more detail…
Originally published in 1935, “The Chinese Festive Board” offers a brief-yet-comprehensive overview of Chinese cuisine, including etiquette, sample menus and an impressively extensive food glossary. The core of the book, however, is its collection of 50 recipes, which addresses the basic foundation of Chinese cookery. The specific edition of “The Chinese Festive Board” that I found was a sturdy paperback from 1985, published by Oxford Press Hong Kong, and featuring the pictogram map presented above (this clever line-drawing provides the design [... read more ...]
I had ramen for lunch and dinner on Tuesday, as I meandered up the 101 from San Jose back to wine country. The first stop was at Santuoku in San Jose, followed a few hours later by Ramen Dojo in San Mateo. Both were very amazing, and very different bowls of soup. In between, I found this old copy of “Jim Beard’s Complete Cookbook for Entertaining,” published in 1954. It was $5 at B Street Books in San Mateo. Aside from its obvious connection to James Beard, I really admired the 1950s-era design of the book, especially the end-papers. [... read more ...]
A few weeks ago, I found an odd little book titled “L’Art et Les Biscuits,” which features the historic advertising and marketing campaigns of Lefevre-Utile, the French biscuit company known as LU here in the United States (originally founded in Nantes in 1846, LU was purchased by Kraft Foods in 2007). “L’Art et Les Biscuits” captures LU in its heyday, documenting the company’s ad campaigns from 1897 to 1914, the same era that marked the Golden Age of French lithography. As one might expect, the lithography movement influenced a large portion of Lefevre-Utile’s advertising and packaging, and many [... read more ...]
Shoyu ramen with pork, spinach, and bamboo shoots.
Living in the Napa Valley, I’ve long been searching for a decent bowl of ramen that doesn’t require a bridge toll. Unfortunately, there’s no realistic solution to this problem, so far as I can tell. For what it’s worth, I can at least find the Vietnamese counterpart to ramen at Pho #1 in Vallejo, which I also recommend wholeheartedly. But despite their superficial similarities, pho is not ramen, and the latter dish still requires a $5 trek across the Carquinez Bridge, if not the Golden Gate. I mention this fact [... read more ...]
After a satisfying breakfast at the Brown Sugar Kitchen in West Oakland last week, I drove up to Black Oak Books on San Pablo, a place where I can always kill a couple hours by browsing their used cookbook section. I have a penchant for kooky old books that are long out-of-print, and when I had discovered an old copy of 1962′s “An Illustrated History of French Cuisine” by Christian Guy, I was hoping that the book would be filled with lots of great vintage illustrations, as the title seems to suggest. Unfortunately, this wasn’t really the case, at [... read more ...]
I found an interesting old paperback at the used bookstore a few weeks ago, 1993′s “California Wine Country Cooking Secrets,” edited by Kathleen DeVanna Fish. The book itself is somewhat poorly conceived — part tour guide, part cookbook, part Napa, part Sonoma — it doesn’t really offer much definitive advice or insight regarding any of these four subjects. Instead, “California Wine Country Cooking Secrets” glosses over the critical details, and simply compiles fluff descriptions for the bigger wineries, alongside a handful of restaurant entries, each offering three recipes. That said, the Napa restaurant section does remain the most compelling [... read more ...]
While killing some time between meals the other day, I finally turned up a copy of “The Natural Cuisine of Georges Blanc” at a used bookstore in Berkeley. It was a nice find, and one of the best discoveries that I’ve recently made “in the field” (as opposed to trolling eBay for such an item). Originally published in 1987 — just six years after the eponymous author earned his third Michelin star — “Natural Cuisine” earns its stripes for its lavish photography, with the pictures outnumbering the recipes by almost three to one. Although long out of print, the [... read more ...]
In many ways, I feel like “The Omnivore’s Dilemma” is the companion reader to Eric Schlosser’s “Fast Food Nation,” a book that first sent a shockwave throughout the American food industry in 2005, by holding up a mirror to our current eating habits. “The Omnivore’s Dilemma,” written by Michael Pollan and published in 2006, raises the stakes by broadening its scope: Although Americans can easily avoid the drive-thru if they so choose, our ability to avoid industrialized corn by-products — such as high-fructose corn syrup (much maligned, and deservedly so) — presents a far more daunting challenge.
Personally, I [... read more ...]
For anyone who has ever cooked professionally, “Don’t Try This at Home” may feel a little too familiar at times. Edited by Kimberly Witherspoon and Andrew Friedman, this short story collection is an engaging compendium of classic kitchen war stories, written first-person by an impressive roster of America’s most well-known chefs (along with a handful of famous chefs from across the Atlantic). Anyone who has ever faced a dinner rush with little more than dread and determination can relate to many of these anecdotal tales, and the book draws most of its strength from its humor and [... read more ...]
In the interest of full disclosure, I have a unique connection to Michael Ruhlman’s 2006 book, “The Reach of a Chef”: I happen to be the “UCLA graduate who worked in L.A. entertainment and also the dot-com world before it burst” on page 81. Ruhlman had visited my Skills I class for several days in 2004, and although I had read and enjoyed his previous book, 2001′s “The Soul of a Chef,” I chose to remain aloof. I didn’t want to become fodder for any anecdotes, especially as I began my very first kitchen class at the CIA. Under [... read more ...]
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