This book review is dedicated to my irrepressible and irreverent childhood friend Peter Adelman, whose mother, Myra, introduced me to the joys of Jewish cooking, while his favorite sandwich was a ham sandwich. He also introduced me to deli in Columbus, Ohio, such as it was. C’mon, Pete, help me out: what the hell was the name of that place? Bubbe and Zayde’s? All I remember for sure is that there was something vaguely obscene about the shape of the mustard and ketchup bottles…

I have to admit it: where I live is a deli flyover zone or drive-by desert, a strip-mall, deli-chain wasteland. When we left Chicago and moved downstate to east central Illinois, the dominant complaint people shared with us was that there weren’t any good places to eat out. By way of illustration, they would toss their hands up in a gesture of helpless surrender and declare, “We don’t even have a single deli!” Since then, a few businesses have opened with the word “deli” in the title, but, let’s face it, they’re just butcher shops or sandwich shops and mediocre ones at that. A deli, as David Sax patiently and lovingly explores, is so much more.

Chambanoy finds a place in David Sax’s book on page 107 1//2, right between the chapter on Chicago and the chapter when he heads southwest to St. Louis. Driving down I-57, he would have passed less than a mile from my house. Maybe next time he drives by, there will be a reason to stop rather than step on the gas.

David Sax’s Save the Deli is a great little read. (more…)

Many thanks to Ari Weinzweig and his Guide to Better Bacon for championing this book. I had heard of it before, and looked it up, but (like Ari initially) took one look at the two-color cover, saw recipes still calling for saltpeter, and dismissed it as irrelevant, as hopelessly out of date. What a mistake!

While, as Ari points out, the story of his life would hardly qualify as “adventures” by TV standards, with food programming that’s more about adventures, risk-taking, and thrills than about real food, I found the book hard to put down once I started. Maynard’s account of his life reminded me of an interview that I was fortunate enough to have a few years back with the master cabintetmaker James Krenov. After talking about the “studio furniture” scene, which was full of arty pretensions and more flash than substance, James Krenov said that his main hope for his life’s work – his furniture, his books, his teaching – was that it would help to make more of a place for “quiet work,” work that didn’t need to scream or shout. Maynard’s is just such a quiet book, all about hard work, work well done, and the peace and contentment they bring.

And he certainly had experiences that were adventures to him!

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Many thanks to Jose for suggesting this addition to Larbo’s Library and to Jillian Downey at Zingerman’s for kindly sending me a review copy!

Although I’ve been an avid reader of their catalog for years, I’ve never actually made it to Zingerman’s deli in Ann Arbor, Michigan. I’ve traveled to Nancy Newsom’s ham-curing operation in Princeton, Kentucky, to Armandino Batali’s salumi in Seattle, and now to Nueske’s smokehouse in Wittenberg, Wisconsin, but I have yet to make it to Ann Arbor. Maybe it’s a hangover from those years growing up in Columbus, Ohio, during the Woody Hayes era, and being dyed-in-the-wool as a Buckeye. But, as a food mecca, Zingerman’s should be right up there on anyone’s list of food pilgrimage sites.

As someone who started curing his own bacon and never looked back, one of the things I’ve always admired about Zingerman’s is their willingness to go to any lengths to get the best. If they can’t find it, they make it themselves. Since opening the deli in 1982, they’ve opened their own bakehouse, their own creamery, and their own candy-making operation. This book actually represents a new addition to Zingerman’s businesses, since it’s published by Zingerman’s Press, which used recycled paper for the book, which was then “printed, bound, and warehoused locally, in southeastern Michigan.” In other words, Zingerman’s itself is a model of the kind of thoughtful and passionate, small-scale, locally-rooted business that Ari writes about and champions.

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A few months back, I reviewed the Marianskis’ book, The Art of Fermented Sausages. Because they go deeper into the issues of chemistry, microbiology, sanitation, and equipment (for smoking, fermenting, and drying), I concluded that the book would be useful for amateur sausagemakers ready to attempt these more technically challenging sausages. But, as a hastily written and self-published effort, the book suffered from a number of problems which I belabored: poor organization, stilted prose, numerous typographical errors, no index…

So it’s heartening to see that Stanley Marianski has taken these criticisms to heart, revised this book (as well as two others), established a new publishing company to put them out, and then contacted me to ask if he could send me a review copy. Now that’s a class act!

The overall organization hasn’t changed much, but the prose has really been cleaned up. The new index is minimal but still helpful. Referring back to this book for information on molds, yeasts, and all the various bacteria present in sausages (both desirable and undesirable) is now much easier. The indexing of the recipes, however still leaves a lot to be desired. Since all the recipes are listed alphabetically in the Contents, listing them again by name in the index doesn’t offer any new help. If, instead, you want to find sausages by the kind of meat they’re based on (pork, beef, or chicken), by other ingredients they use, by the country or region they come from, or by the fermentation culture they use, the index still won’t help you.

But, all in all, this new edition is much more worthy of the wealth of knowledge and experience that Stanley Marianski brings to this subject. He is the first author to delve into the technical and scientific information on the subject that has come out in the last 60 years (some of which is only available in foreign languages), sift out what’s relevant and practical for someone working at home, and make it comprehensible and easily doable. In addition to this service provided by his own books, the recent establishment of his small publishing company (Bookmagic LLC) promises even more. Having a publishing company dedicated to bridging the gap between meat science and home hobbyists could be the key to bringing many other new books on meat curing, smoking, and sausage-making to market. For these efforts and for his dedication to this subject, all of us amateur meatheads are greatly indebted to him!

As of TODAY, the new, revised editions of his books are available through Amazon. Remember, you heard it here first!

As odd as it may seem for a born-again, latter-day Dionysian*, I find myself leading a small-group discussion for members of a Christian fellowship who are reading the book Food & Faith.

It’s a great collection of essays by many of the usual suspects (such as Wendell Berry, Gary Nabhan, M. F. K. Fisher, and Marion Nestle), as well as a range of more explicitly religious writers meditating on the place of food in our lives and in their spiritual journeys. Here are some tidbits from the section dedicated to Spirituality and Food, a little food for thought from this feast of thought for food.

From The Interiority of Food, by Thomas Moore:

“When I was a child, we ate fish on Friday and fasted for hours before communion and gave up certain foods in Lent, and these simple food practices helped link religion with daily life in a simple but effective form of enchantment. When practices like these disappear, the fantasy associated with food, and therefore its soul and charm, diminishes. These days even religion seems to have forgotten the importance of lacing food with sacred imagination, and so we are left with food as a mere means of sustenance and health. We are getting fat in body, but not in soul.”

You don’t have to be religious or even “spiritual” to appreciate the importance of investing the world of “daily life” with “enchantment.” When we lace something as simple, as mundane and quotidian, as food with “sacred imagination,” we are not deceiving or poisoning ourselves; on the contrary, we are clearly seeing the world as a construct of imagination. If the world appears dead and mechanistic, that’s only because we have made ourselves dead and mechanistic.

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Fungus phobe or fungus phage?  I’ve always been a huge fungus fan (of the edible ones, at least), but have never known enough to gather wild mushrooms.  (I know just enough to know that eating wild mushrooms without knowing how to identify them can be extremely dangerous.  And hallucinations, stomach cramps, vomiting, diarrhea, convulsions, liver and kidney damage, and painful death are just not thrills that I’m looking for from my food.)

Over the years, I’ve collected a number of field guides to mushrooms, but they always cover too much territory.  Mushrooms are fascinating, but what this Little Piggy wants to know is which mushrooms are edible, which ones make for the best eating, and how should they be treated and prepared in the kitchen?  And knowing about edible mushrooms in Europe or all the species that are edible in North America doesn’t help me much; all I need to know is what I can find in my state, close to home?

Finally, the book I need is here.  Published by the University of Illinois Press, the authors focus on 40 of the tastiest and most common edible mushrooms you can expect to find in Illinois and neighboring states.  The best part of the book are the copious photographs, clearly illustrating important identifying features.  And their discussion of each edible variety concludes with descriptions and illustrations of “look-alikes,” so you can tell if you’re on the right track before you even bother to bring them home.  They also include lots of good advice about when and where to look for them, when the mushrooms are at their best, and what to do with them in the kitchen.  Morels, chanterelles, boletes, and puffballs all get whole sections devoted to them.

Once you’ve scored your first wild mushrooms (or just chickened out and bought some at the farmers’ market), the final chapter on cooking will give you plenty of ideas about what to do with them.  This chapter contains a range of recipes from chefs all over the state.  I’d love to try making Gert and Lasse Sorensen’s Morel Tiramisu or Charlie Trotter’s Wild Mushroom Lasagna with Arugula Pesto, or, closest to home (from Silvercreek, in Urbana), Christian Phernetton’s Duck Confit and Morel Wellington with a vanilla bean and game reduction.

Now get foraging!

Just finished reading this small book by Alice Feiring, a wine writer I hadn’t heard of before. Like the wines she champions, the book can seem a little thin, patchy, and doesn’t quite bring it all together in one neat package, but her soul is clearly in it and that’s enough to make it interesting and to keep you engaged. Although she makes too much of demonizing Robert Parker Jr., it is refreshing to read someone championing smaller, quieter, more interesting and traditionally-made wines. She loves wines from the Loire, particularly its cabernet franc, and that alone is reason enough to love her. She also has good things to say about French gamay, a grape that the annual flood of Beaujolais Nouveau had made me despair of ever being interesting, so I’ll be on the lookout now for some worthier representatives.

She doesn’t make wine recommendations–except to mention a few estates and a few importers–which is a pity, but you can track those down on her blog if you’re interested. Here are just a couple quotes from the book that stuck with me:

Speaking of recent Burgundy vintages: “Without the earthiness from the stems, the wines were all fruit and acid. They didn’t work. Destemming reminds me of the strange habit of peeling an apple or carrot, not eating the skin of a potato or cutting the bloom off a Camembert. It reminds me of those who don’t enjoy the smells of sex, and those who have to keep hand sanitizers in their pocket” (202).

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After Culinary Artistry (1996) and What to Drink with What You Eat (2006), The Flavor Bible (2008) is Karen Page and Andrew Dornenburg’s third book on drink and flavor pairings. Of course, they’d like you to believe that all three books “are essential to use in concert, as each covers different aspects of food and drink flavor harmony.” While Culinary Artistry looked to the past and drew on “the wisdom of history” to list “classic flavor combinations and preparations,” and What to Drink “celebrated the harmonious combination of food and drink” in preparing for the Dionysian feast that is yet to come, The Flavor Bible is an exercise in culinary eschatology, “chronicling new flavor synergies in the new millenium.”

So don’t be fooled into thinking that these are mere lists of things that taste good together. Sacrilege! The Flavor Bible “is an empowerment tool,” whose promise is nothing less than revolutionary. It promises “to break the mold of contemporary prescriptive cookbooks,” to free us from the rigid script and the slavish, blind following of recipes, which “negates the cook’s own creative instincts and judgment,” and thereby to open us up to a new “way of ‘being’ in the world.”

Wow! Sign me up!, even though I can’t quite tell if I’m at a clandestine meeting of a revolutionary cell, a management empowerment retreat, an EST seminar, a New Age happening, or an old-fashioned tent revival! After reading this Preface, I can’t help but feel that The Flavor Bible should have been done as a graphic novel, with big, dramatic lightening bolts or energy rays crackling off the food, and bold, all-caps text–like BANG! POW! WHAM! and KA-BOOM!!!–leaping off the page. But I guess they couldn’t afford that.

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OK, if you’re tired of me sticking tongues out at you, here’s a review of a new book on charcuterie by an acknowledged master.

Fritz Sonnenschmidt is a Certified Master Chef, who joined the faculty of the Culinary Institute of America in 1968 and retired in 2002. He authored and edited the book, The Professional Art of Garde Manger, which has been a standard textbook for many decades. Michael Ruhlman memorably describes Sonnenschmidt as a master of the cold kitchen, “who is very nearly a perfect sphere,” so presumably he has vast experience in eating charcuterie as well as preparing it.

Published by Delmar Cengage Learning, this book sets out to be a textbook for both the culinary student and the keen amateur. In the Preface, Sonnenschmidt declares “For some time now I have felt the need for a comprehensive and detailed book on preparing sausages, pâtés, aspics, and salsas the easy way, as my masters taught me.”

If indeed it were “comprehensive and detailed,” it would be worth the hefty $62 asking price. But the first five chapters, covering equipment, the raw materials, seasonings and cures, sausage casings, and the smoking of meats–all in less than 50 pages–are woefully inadequate.

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First, let’s get the carping out of the way.

Like other recent books by the Marianski’s this one is self-published, through Outskirts Press, and it clearly has not benefited from the services of a professional editor or proofreader. The book is littered with grammar mistakes, typographical errors, and odd locutions. The way the text is organized, they end up covering the same subjects from multiple angles, with the result that they repeat themselves over and over. Sometimes the organization simply seems haphazard, with “notes” appearing at the end of a section which could be more accurately labeled “afterthoughts.” The information presented is clear and accurate; just don’t expect a gripping read.

The most serious flaw is that the book contains no index. I plan to refer to this book a lot, and the only way to track down the subjects I’m interested in is a fairly detailed table of contents (sections are generally no bigger than a few pages and sometimes only a paragraph). I wanted to use the recipes at the back of the book to make a beef salami, but the only way to find out which recipes use beef is to look through them all, one by one.

As an example of the book’s lack of focus, buried in the middle of Part I is the clearest statement of their main point: “There is a difference in fermented sausage technology between the United States and the European countries. American methods rely on rapid acid production (lowering pH) through a fast fermentation in order to stabilize the sausage against spoilage bacteria. In European countries, milder fermentation temperatures are used and the drying, instead of the acidity (pH) is the main hurdle against spoilage bacteria. This provides color and flavor forming bacteria (Staphylococcus) with plenty of time to react with protein and fats and leads to better flavor development” (85).

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