The Ancient Sin of Gluttony: What’s Really Behind the Shunning of Paula Deen
We need strategies that do not drag us back to the dispositional focus of the Inquisition’s witch-hunts, that propelled the …
Category Archives: Critic's Corner
And to Think it all Started with a French Cookbook: Forty Years of Chez Panisse
Alice Waters often said that Elizabeth David’s French Provincial Cooking started the whole thing, meaning Chez Panisse the restaurant. And of …
Pass the Nostalgia, and Nix the Organics
I’ll be blunt: I like my food with a heaping handful of nostalgic romanticism. Yes, there are those who claim …
Why Cookbooks?
Why on earth so many cookbooks, when no one cooks? Or do they? Read Adam Gopnik’s thoughts in the latest …
MILK: That Old White Magic
[Note: Ironically, I just came across this December 15, 2008 NPR interview with Anne Mendelson: "A Culinary History of Milk …
Some Notable Food Books of 2008
There are food books and there are food books. The following list contains no whispers from FoodTV icons or other …
LEAFING OUT: Cooking with Asian Leaves
A new (to me, anyway) cookbook always heralds further culinary adventures for armchair explorers. In Cooking with Asian Leaves, authors …
*Critics’ Corner: Yum-O Gal, You’re No Fannie Farmer, or Julia Child, for That Matter
“Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery,” C. C. Colton said in 1828 in The Lacon: or, Many Things in a Few …
Out of Africa: Review of “Food Culture in Sub-Saharan Africa”
Say “African food” and most people visualize a cartoon with two missionaries boiling in a black iron pot in the middle of a jungle clearing. That’s the “Dark Continent” picture, deeply rooted in the West’s persistent attitude of colonialism toward Africa. Or, instead, they “see” stick-thin children sprawled out on their mothers’ laps, listless, flies swarming everywhere.
