Cooking History Books

Luba Gurdjieff's memoir is a delightful reflection on her life with a most unique family that included her Uncle G.I. Gurdjieff. For those of us keenly interested in the philosophy of Mr. Gurdjieff, you may find yourself wanting more reflections on her remarkable Uncle and less on her joys and tribulations of operating a bistro in London for many years. Yet for those who love the Gurdjieff Work, any stories and memories of that remarkable social experiment known as the Priory, relish any memories of those heady days. And for this alone Luba's memoirs are enough. Only Thomas & Olga deHartmann's "Our Life With Mr. Gurdjieff" comes as close to providing that feeling of domesticity & intimacy with the great man as this book does. Moreover, she conveys an earthy appreciation & savor of life itself (very much her Uncle's neice)in her approach to feeding the bodies and souls of those who came her way. The cuisine is standard European bistro fare, with the odd exception of corn on the cob! Her borsht recipe is one of the best I've had, as well as her remembrance of her Uncle's famous salad recipe is a joy to read. This book is a delight for both gourmet & gourmand, but it's real quality is the warm, open hospitality of the old world that shines in every page.

This is a padded-out excuse to present a few anecdotes about Gurdjieff, plus some old photos and such and make a few bucks off the Gurdjieff cultists who must have every book pertaining to him, but so what. It does give another perspective, however insignificant, to the events of three-quarters of a century ago, something that is sorely needed in the environment of true believers of various stripes with the entrenched positions about the man they worship as a living god or dismiss as a charlatan. The truth is somewhere in between, and this work is one of the few that seems to reflect that. And it is quite well presented.

George Ivanovitch Gurdjieff's All and Everything was unashamedly vast in concept: a 1238 page magnum opus. Catholicity, thematic and stylistic, remains the hallmark of today's burgeoning `Gurdjieffian' oeuvre. Even so, these slim, unindexed paperbacks - by his niece Luba and by Henri Tracol, Institut Gurdjieff President - make extraordinary companion pieces. "Of course", concedes Tracol, "in any kind of ascesis, there is always an element of apophatism". Or as Luba exclaims: "I was fed up with caviar".

Eldest daughter of Gurdjieff's worldly brother Dmitri, Luba garnishes her free-wheeling autobiographical sketch with slapdash bistro recipes for galubtzy, custard sauce and "Rabbit à la Sylvie" (cf. The Alice B. Toklas Cook Book). Her cameos of Gurdjieff's Prieuré circle in the 1920s and 1930s reach us as patently uncensored reportage: rich dumplings of naïveté, warmth, vitality and candour, likely in vulnerable constitutions, to induce cardiac arrest.

Tracol's infinitely more judicious book comprises a dozen or so disparate texts ranging back 50 years - broadly `philosophical' modules, spared from their author's hypothesised "wild and vengeful bonfire". Tracol's youthful resolution to live out Malraux's injunction "transform into consciousness as wide an experience as possible", presaged decades of globe-trotting incident and discriminating reading, which here guarantee a quiver of intriguing adductions: Pueblo Indians, French cinema, the Fisher King's castle, Manichaeism, macrobiotics, meta-linguistics, Sengai's Zen drawings, and so forth ...Acute individual insights not only abound (Tracol's International-Airport-as-analogue-of-psychic-dispersion would adorn Barthes' Mythologies) but, more importantly, cohere - eloquent witnesses to his long spiritual Odyssey in the Gurdjieffian tradition.

Luba, sensing perhaps that her famous uncle dwarfs his apologists and detractors alike, breezily pre-empts our objections: "Silly. I'm a silly woman. I laugh too much. I love too much. I have too many friends who love me". Her ensuing Niagara of ungrammatical indiscretion seats an opéra bouffe Gurdjieff in a child's electric-powered car; displays him hiding Easter eggs under rose bushes; and - extrapolating a minor grievance over royalties - comes perilously close to misconstruing the raison d'être of the post-Gurdjieffian Foundations ... Yet Tracol, high in that movement's pantheon, personifies disinterested Gallic intelligence, fastidious, erudite, perspicacious, he glides on the subtlest of dialectics towards ever more quintessential and rarified truths; agree with him or not, his authenticity is bankable.

To history's validated roll-call of VIP visitors at Gurdjieff's Fontainebleau Institute Luba adds, without a peppercorn of embarrassment or evidence, the young Franklin D. Roosevelt: "It was all done so hush-hush. When he left, and he became President of the United States ... I said `Gosh! It's Teddy'. Is Tracol similarly a-historical? Never in Luba's Monty-Pythonesque mode. Yet a fine nose for chronology is essential to sniff one's way through this sacred literary grove to the paradigmatic evolution at its heart ... The Tracol who met Gurdjieff in October 1940; who found himself "standing before him ... confronting the exacting benevolence of his gaze"; who thenceforward for nine years stoicly met the rigours of group work in German-occupied and post-war Paris - this Tracol emphasised a "voluntary concentration on struggle". The Tracol of serene old age (palpably closer to Simone Weil) also leans touchingly on higher and transcendent forces.

Luba, offering umpteen hostages to fortune, innocently trumpets her uncle's all-too-human aspect but curiously misses the `superhuman' Gurdjieff of insights, powers, and real ideas; she cannot conceive that her magpie family hatched out an eagle. Tracol, by contrast, rejoices in antennae which instantly pick up Gurdjieff as avatar. Less tangible in his book, however, is his master's Rabelaisian alter ego, the creature of surreal incident and ribald humour so brilliantly evoked in Fritz Peter's autobiography Boyhood with Gurdjieff.

Is Henri Tracol himself perhaps an unringed falcon? Certainly the voltage of his intellect is not disgraced by those of the moderns who crop up in his discourse: René Guénon, Lucien Lévy-Bruhl, Stephane Lupasco, Paul Mus, Wolfgang Pauli, Pitirim Sorokin, etc. Fed at Gurdjieff's `ideas-table', Tracol has feelingly repaid with the lifetime's service of a first-rank mind ... Luba's idiosyncratic tribute to her Uncle George issues from unmodulated emotions and calls to the emotions: "He loved life ... He was more alive than anyone I've ever seen. I loved him. I like him. I admire him. He was fantastic". The sheer discrepancy of these two approaches conveys something of their begetter's universality. The fiftieth anniversary of Gurdjieff's death has come and gone yet he remains `X the unknown quantity'.

James Moore is Gurdjieff's biographer.
He undertook the Gurdjieff module in the
Dictionary of Gnosis and Western Esotericism.

Luba's book is enjoyable in many ways. The recipes, like the memoirs, are down to earth and represent good honest cooking, most of it Luba's and not her uncle's.

Luba tells of the ups and downs in her life and demonstrates how in spite of difficulties with the help of her fighting spirit she made it. Her life-span takes us through both of the World Wars. The first caused the family to emigrate, the second required a great deal of hard work to survive.

Full of life and laughter, and reminiscent of her uncle, she tells of her visit to Coombe Springs, run by J. G. Bennett, two years after she left the place. She came there at tea time and was looking for her friend:

"...they were all sitting around on their bottoms, the legs all cross. I said, "Hey, everybody - anybody know where is Nottie?" It was as if nobody was there. Nobody even looked at me. They were all concentrating, or constipated - I don't know what they were. Just sitting there. I started clapping my hands, shouting, "Wakey, Wakey!"

THis is a professional chefs dictionary.... Not as explained in advertisements.... I thought this was going to be a collectors Italian "JOY OF COOKING" ...That's why I returned it the same day that I received it....
Sam Campanaro

Gillian Riley with the help of other contributors has created a comprehensive encyclopedia of Italian food, which is enlivened with mini-essays that display her wit and her erudition. She covers all 20 regions of the mainland, Sicily and Sardinia. She discusses cheeses, sausages, produce, spices, regional dishes, cooking styles, history, cultural influences and important culinary figures, but excludes wine, which would require a volume of its own.

Some pages look like standard encyclopedias, for example, page 322:

Prosciutto (see ham and Parma ham)
Provatura, a pulled buffalo-milk cheese similar to mozzarella
Provola, an aged (or smoked) pulled cheese from the south
Provolone, the same cheese made in the north, where the milk is richer and more abundant
Provola di Floresta, a pulled cheese made from cattle on Mount Etna
Prunes (see plums)
Pudding
Puglia, which continues for several pages.

Essays include:

-- A discussion of Futurist painter Marinetti's attack on pasta for making Italians pacific and listless She points out, as Marinetti never did, that rice was "a patriotic, home-grown food, unlike pasta, which depended on imported grain".

-- Beef Carpaccio was named by Giuseppe Ciprani of Harry's Bar because the color "reminded Cipriani of the deep reds in the paintings in a stunning exhibition in the Palazzo Ducale in 1963 of Carpaccio, a name to conjure with, which is what everyone has been doing ever since".

-- Pirciati are a long hollow kind of pasta similar to bucatini. Although there are no formal recipes in the book, Gillian illustrates the perfect sauce for pirciati with a delightful restaurant scene from one of Andrea Camilleri's Commissario Montalbano books, "Il Colore della Notte". The sauce "burns", as you can tell from the ingredients: oil, onion, two garlic cloves, two anchovies, a teaspoon of capers, black olives, half a chilli pepper, tomato, basil, black pepper and grated pecorino. "Alternating forks of food with gulps of wine, groans of extreme agony and unbearable bliss ... Montalbano even had the courage to mop up the remaining sauce with a piece of bread, wiping his brow from time to time."

-- Cicero, the Roman orator, reportedly gave the family name to chickpeas, whose Latin name is Cicer arietinum (ceci in Italian).

-- Mozzarella di bufala is made from the milk of water buffalo not native to the country. They were brought to Italy from Asia during the late Roman Empire -- a better legacy than garum, a sauce made by fermenting fish and their entrails.

-- The entry for Parmesan runs to more than 2,000 words and includes information on its nutritional value, the region where it is produced, the breed of cow used to produce it (the razza reggiana, or vacche rosse), the role of the cheese maker, the origin of its name, Moliere's deathbed demand for it, its frequent and lustrous depiction in 16th and 17th century paintings, and the proper method of serving: "One disdains the phallic peppermill, but must always appreciate the attentive grating, at the table, of parmesan over pasta or soup, as magical in its way as shavings of truffles."

The book includes extensive cross referencing, a thematic index, a general index, a comprehensive bibliography, and a list of suggested further reading.

I would have liked more illustrations, and perhaps some pronunciation guides. Nonetheless, this is an invaluable resource for anyone searching for information on Italian food, and it is enormous fun to read.


Robert C. Ross 2008

Love this book - answers any question you have about italian cooking, and in such an engaging writing style - this isn't a boring reference book. I don't know much about Gillian Riley, but I know she clearly loves what she's talking about. A beautiful addition to my food book collection - highly recommended!!!!

This is an excellent book, but not for beginners. It requires a considerable level of knowledge, but the amount of information -historical, technical, gastronomic- is truly outstanding. Kudos!

Pat Willard has described a passion, in _Secrets of Saffron: The Vagabond Life of the World's Most Seductive Spice_ (Beacon Press). It is a three-fold work: the history of the spice; Willard's personal history with it (a foundation for pleasing essays from a sensuous woman); and assorted recipes. I have not had enough saffron to consider myself a fan, and I have not tried the given recipes for saffron-soaked custard, pork, lobster, or paella, but I can tell you they sound good, and that Willard has written two previous well-regarded story-and-recipe books on pie and on broths. Cooks are probably in good hands.

It is enormous fun, with Willard as a laughing guide, to see world history as saffron history. She speculates that the makers of Persian carpets found saffron a useful yellow dye and its smell from the vats turned it into a perfume, and then the cooks tried it. The Egyptians used it as perfume, but especially liked the bright yellow for the clot in which to wind their dead. Alexander the Great had plenty of chances to soak up the cultures of his conquests, and liked saffron baths and tea and rice, and before dinner he had wine with saffron mixed into it. Saffron, unlike other spices, could be grown in England, and it still was costly, so it made the fortunes of such towns as Walden, which became Saffron Walden. It was only when new discoveries like capers, sugar cane, and vanilla came from the new world, and banquets were pared from forty dishes to a puritanical ten or so, that saffron began to wane. The ounces of saffron that could be harvested from acres of crocuses eventually became tons of potatoes and corn, crops that were dependable and less fussy.

Willard's history is good, but her personal stories are the best writing in the book. Her bittersweet recounting of going to the Saffron Festival in Spain, where Saffron isn't grown in any quantity anymore, is fine travel writing, and her introduction to the spice by a mysterious stranger who came to call on her has the bittersweet extended into eroticism. She has a rich memory of what happened after her mother's death: "Of all the things that go through your mind when you watch death approach, thinking of food may seem the most absurd, maybe even a little obscene. And yet it is what the living almost always turn to... the living's way of breaking away, the body understanding before the mind fully does what is the necessary and correct order demanded in the wider world." The way Willard writes about the subsequent effect of the saffron crème brûlée pie (recipe, of course, included here) would have made her mother proud. Willard can tell us also of her own successful growing and harvesting of saffron, in Brooklyn. This is a book of many delights, a gathering of all sorts of saffron stories and histories, tasty, pungent, and wonderfully personal.

Saffron is, in my opinion, one of the greatest flavoring agents in the world. I'm partial to it in baked goods and dairy products, and have developed my own recipe for saffron ice cream which is so addictive that I don't dare make it often. The finest (and incidentally the most expensive) wine I ever drank had a distinct saffron note to it which made the experience of drinking supremely heady. Saffron is mysterious to most people, even experienced cooks, and for many an acquired taste.

Pat Willard's book, though it does offer a number of saffron-rich recipes, is primarily a history of the spice and its travels. But even more compelling is the personal content, the stories of Willard's own involvement with saffron which range from amusing (her red silk bodice and almost-but-not-quite association with the SCA) to poignant (her saffron-rich creme brulee pie, created while trying to hold off the worst of the grief over her mother's death.) Willard has a gift for personalizing her work, and even though some of what she writes has an almost confessional quality, her stories are never less than graceful.

The recipes she includes are often quite old, and can be difficult to follow for modern cooks, but there are also more contemporary recipes which will whet your appetite for saffron. If reading about food is as pleasurable for you as cooking and eating, then this book will be a good addition to your shelves.

The author writes about saffron the way I cook with saffron - sparingly. The book was probably 70% autobiography and 30% saffron. There were times where I would finish a chapter thinking, "Where was the saffron in that?"

I'll probably only ever read one book about saffron, and it was a mistake to have it be this one.

I read SAFFRON during my lunch break and as it is a small light-weight book I was able to complete it in 2 weeks or 10 lunch breaks. SAFFRON is exactly the kind of book I like to take to work for lunch-time reading: small enough to carry in my backpack; interesting enough to induce me to put my work aside and take a much needed noon-time break; compartmentalized enough that I can read it in installments without losing track; and about food which generally increases my enjoyment of my midday meal which consists of raw carrots, boiled eggs, yogurt and an orange.

SAFFRON is not as well researched or comprehensive as TULIP by Anna Pavord nor is it as informative or well written as the "cooking" books of Elizabeth David whom Willard clearly admires. (In fact, Willard suggests the reader use David's books for recipes.) Willard explains in the opening section that she has not written an historical book documented with citations, nor has she provided recipes that work in all cases. (She says she has not tried many of them--in some cases the ingredients are no longer available or unknown, or the weights and measurements are unknown.)

Willard has gathered together interesting tidbits from a variety of sources -- autobiographical events which are probably the most entertaining part of the book as she is very forthcoming; tales, stories, quotes from literature and history, some sources mentioned in passing, other not, some researched others not. Willard's take on history is flawed but amusing. My sense is that that she selected material based on it's entertainment value not it's verismilitude. Willard's book provides the reader with a bit of diversion, and I for one need frivolity sometimes.

Just finished reading this story..It is fantastic, has all, loved it. I related to it. The food, the story, the pain of Cuba..

Eduardo Machado came to the US in 1961 as part of Operation Peter Pan, a program that transported about 14,000 children from Cuba to the United States after Batista fell. His grandfather tells the young Machado that his arroz con pollo "will taste just like Cuba." Machado thinks: "How do you make a meal taste like a place? I should have asked him directly. Instead, I spent the rest of my life looking for the answer."

I really enjoyed the story of how Machado finally reconciled his sense of loss for his homeland with the new life he created for himself in the United States. And, as a foodie myself, I enjoyed how he told his story with the help of food.

Example: Machado loved his grandmother's cafe con leche. "I was only 5 years old, but I knew one thing for sure. All I had to do was dunk the bread into the cup. Chew, sip and heaven in the morning was possible."

Fidel Castro destroyed the family: "The savior had become the tyrant. Fidel was now the source of all suffering for my family, more than Batista ever was." He says he felt contempt for his family, then guilt. Velveeta sandwiches he was forced to eat didn't help matters.

In the end Machado goes back to Cuba as a middle aged man, and makes peace with Cuba, his family and perhaps with himself.

He eats a tamale and wonders if it was as good as the ones he remembered as a kid. "And then it hit me. I didn't care. I didn't want to compare them. ... I no longer wanted to be the kind of Cuban that let what was lost get in the way of the beauty and the joy and life and food that was staring me in the face."

An interesting and insightful memoir, with some useful recipes for Cuban food.


Robert C. Ross 2008

I have read many Cuban exile memoirs as well as those of Polish, Russian and other exiles groups. I also have several cookbook/memoirs about "old Cuba." This memoir is really one of the most irritating of the lot. Mr Machado goes on and on about loving his homeland and yearning for the taste of its food etc. That is fine. But he also goes on and on about his issues with his family - especially about his resentment towards his parents for sending him as a "Peter Pan" child to the US (Operation Peter Pan was a way for Cuban parents to send their unaccompanied children out of Cuba under the auspices of Catholic charities. This was at a time when parents in Cuba believed that their children would be rounded up and shipped to the Soviet Union to be "re-educated." Out of desperation, they were willing to send their children and then hoped to follow them). Mr Machado at one point rants about how they sent him and his 5 yr old brother just so they could make sure he grew up the way they thought he should. Well, one would wonder at any parent who willingly separated from their child for any other reason except to save them from a fate they viewed as horrible. This is just one example of a general trend to make rather vicious statements about his family, the US govt., other Cuban exiles (especially in Miami) and anyone else that disagrees with his view. It wasn't that gripping a memoir and the it wasn't really a great food related book. I would say that if you want a better Cuban exile memoir, try Pablo Medina's Exiled Memories or Gustavo Perez-Firmat's Next Year in Cuba. And if you really want have a useful cookbook that includes lots of memories and background flavor, then try A Taste of Old Cuba by Maria Josefa Lluria de O'Higgins or Memories of a Cuban Kitchen by Mary Urrutia Randelman. Both are excellent and authentic and filled with family photos and stories. Oh and the Nitza Villapol book(Cocina Criolla or Cocina al Minuto)from the 1950's which Mr Machado mentions is readily available in reprints -- you don't have to go secretly to Cuba and look in a second hand book stall.

Eduardo Machado wrote a wonderful memoir of his early life in Cuba, to his young adult life in Miami and then Los Angeles, and then in his later years in New York and back in California.
His food recollections of his early days of Newspaper Soup, Bistec Empanizado, Arroz con Pollo, etc., he describes in such delicious detail.
His journey from Cuba to Hialeah and then to Miami pulled at my heart-strings. When him and his family got to Los Angeles, he wrote about many incidents. One in particular affected me very much. Him and his family went shopping at the Central Market in the valley. They were trying to find the foods they had grown up with in Cuba.
I could go on with this review, but in short, this book was one of the best memoirs in the food/immigration subjects.
Eduardo, thank you very much for a wonderful, tasty, and can't put it down read. Bravo!

For the two weeks my grandchildren join their dad at our house every summer, we celebrate: Thanksgiving dinner one evening, an Easter Egg hunt early on a cool morning, and always a Father's Day picnic with fried chicken and potato salad. It's the only time all year we're together, and family memories are more important than the calendar. Food is an important and essential part of the memories. Writing in Through the Kitchen Window, Helen Barolini sees the kitchen as "an embassy of cultural tradition." We are ambassadors of our heritage.

In this fine book, Arlene Voski Avakian presents a collection of American women's essays, poems, and recipes considering the importance of food, cooking, and kitchens in women's lives. These glimpses through kitchen windows provide diverse views: Julie Dash's admonition never to stir Geechee red rice after it comes to a boil appears together with Joan Ormondroyd's wonderful memories of her Russian-Jewish grandmother's beet borsht.

These kitchen memories come sweet and sour. Letty Cottin Pogrebin takes pleasure in holding a cookbook with her mother's handwritten recipes. Maya Angelou recounts with pride how her mother used her kitchen and cooking skills to open new doors for her family. But Marge Piercy sees a burnt meal as "not incompetence, but war," and Helen Barolini says, "growing up I had deliberately stayed as far awaya from my mother's kitchen as I could."

There is great value in Through the Kitchen Window, not only in the glances into other lives and the feeling of togetherness (and sometimes separateness) that the stories evoke, but also in the way they call back memories of our own lives. I started a list of food and kitchen memories while reading the first essay; and by the time I laid the book down, the list was pushing seventy-five entries. Now it lies on my counter, still growing with memories as varied as the tales in this book. A gallery of good taste indeed!

Read this book with your notebook in your hand and a napkin tucked under your chin. And stir up the ginger crinkles on page 63, and be a little girl again.

by Patricia Nordyke Pando
for Story Circle Book Reviews
reviewing books by, for, and about women

Avakian's "Through the Kitchen Window" offers a delicious medley of stories, anecdotes, and recipes from some of today's most celebrated women writers. Authors as diverse as Maya Angelou, Ester Shapiro and Dorothy Allison share rich and distinctly different perspectives of the significance of food and cooking in their lives. Numerous stories in this collection take the reader on inspiring journeys across cultural and ethnic borders, landing in wonderful and curious foreign worlds. Everyone from West Indian slaves, Cuban Jews and Irish peasants, to name a few, are represented along with their culinary legacies. However, these stories represent much more than food; they are personal portrayals of identity, character and intimacy. Extraordinary narratives about family, friends and spirit each intertwined with hidden meanings and secret hungers of food and life. These tales will move readers to recall occasions and loved ones indelibly marked by meals or food in our own hearts and minds. From tales of struggles between mothers and daughters, the sacrificial lamb of forbidden love to cafeteria food and lime Jell-O, each reader will find at least one story that warms the heart, as well as, feeds the soul. One of my favorite stories in this collection is by the popular women's historical author, Sharon L. Jansen. Her personal narrative of her relationship with her mother is far removed from her usual chronicled style. Her story '"Family Liked 1956": My Mother's Recipes' reflects her personal feelings of the exceptional 20-year correspondence with her mother through letters and recipes. Women, cooks, or anyone who ever found delight in the pleasure of eating, will treasure this book. Add it to your library and read it again and again. You'll never tire of the warmth, love and inspiration you will find in each and every story.

It took 3 seconds to decide to buy this book. A book to savor, chapter by chapter, to carry along when you need to read for an hour or so somewhere in your travels, to have bedside, and a companion for afternoon cool-down time. At this skill leval, many fine recipes, revealing even more of the cooks character and desire to do well. Fills those little niches of lonliness most of us feel , brings us in close to the discussion around the table with other women.Treasured moments! There are profound intellectual meanings as well.Steven King might enjoy the poem by Marge Piercy, "What is that burning in the kitchen!"Very funny and sooty!

As with any anthology, the appeal and the quality of the essays here varies, but what prompted me to write a review is the extraordinary tone of smug superiority that wafts off of all too many of those found here. The most egregious example of that smugness is to be found in a vicious little piece by Sally Bellerose in which she regales the reader with her saintly forebearance as she describes the horrors bestowed upon her delicate consciousness when she deigns to honor her reactionary parents with her presence at their dinner table. And could you have a book of this kind without including that Queen of Noble Suffering, Maya Angelou? She's represented here with a snippet from her often anthologized book "Wouldn't Take Nothin' For My Journey Now." There's also the pro forma male bashing in many of the essays ("Now I cook as a woman, free of that feeling of enslavement with which a male culture has imbued the process of preparing food.") There's also the stereotyping that often goes along with this kind of generic thinking; eg. "Everyone knows that TV dinners are mainly the province of heterosexual males and the career woman who lives alone. Gay men often enjoy cooking and are generally as good at it as the most creative woman." The editor is a professor in the women's studies program at U. Mass, Amherst. I doubt there's much room for discussion in her classes, unless that discussion serves her dogma. It's not the politics I disliked so much as it is the unquestioned assumptions and the tone of sanctimony that cling to these memory scraps. If you're already in the choir, this book will be happy to preach at you, but if you have yet to sign off on every blessed stereotype of oppression, you may find it annoying in some places,offensive in others,

This is a well-researched study of the events in Jefferson County, Texas, related to the subjects mentioned in the book title, including lots of minute details and images of persons involved in court proceedings. Not of any great interest, I would imagine, to anyone not associated with that area of the state of Texas.

ENJOYED VERY MUCH SINCE I WAS ONLY 13 WHEN IT ALL TOOK PLACE IT BROUGHT BACK LOTS OF MEMORIES.....SEEMED VERY ACCURATE AND TO THE POINT.

Having grown up in Port Arthur, Texas during the time of this open vice situation, I especially enjoyed this book. The writers seemed to know the characters although they were probably too young to have had the opportunity.
Their style was not along the lines I would have expected -- just the facts, m'am, but open and freeflowing with a touch of humor in the right places.
They also explained the justification many in the community had for accepting open prostitution and gambling. I applaud Landrey and O'Toole for their work.

Great portrait of Bordeaux, it's wines and communes, written in a non-pretensious style. Since I haven't been lucky enough to travel to the Bordeaux, Robert Joseph descriptions has help me envision the region, even without the need of the photos (althoug they've also helped).

This book is sort of all fluff; the pictures are pretty, but it's not really very informative. I'd skip it and buy a Michelin guide unless you want a picture book for your coffee table.

The book has wonderful photography, with a nice history of the region. A few major vineyards are listed, but don't expect it to be a list of key Burgundian hot spots! More the asthetic and artistic history of the area and how wine got started and grew.

This is one of the most beautiful books on wine that I have ever seen. The photographs are simply outstanding. There is not a lot of text throughout the book, but the author correctly calls the text a photographic journey. This is a beautiful coffee table book that will be a hit with you and your guests.

A great way to travel from vine to wine for all wine lovers

The important point here is the subtitle, which specifies "a photographic journey." This is a picture book and no more, but the pictures are fine and they are welcome. Most wine books, after all, skimp on photos (which are expensive to produce), and those they use are often pedestrian. Thus we seldom get a chance to see how beautiful is the world of wine-making. Here the photographer Charles O'Rear has traveled to many of the regions where the Cabernet grape is grown--Bordeaux, California, Chile, South Africa, Australia, New Zealand and Spain--to record and glorify the making of Cabernet from vine to bottle. There are plenty of panoramas here; vast views over endless vineyards are the bedrock of wine photography. But there are also lots of rewarding detail shots of pickers and their tools, winery interiors, grafting, and even the tally tokens used to record how much each picker has harvested. At one vineyard they are colored baskets; at another, plastic discs; at still another, ordinary clothes pins. All different, but all with the same meaning: They determine how much each picker is paid. These homely details, when added to the faces of the workers, invite you into the world shown in the vineyard panoramas. They're far more appealing that the inevitable "art" shots of wine glasses and barrel halls and ranks of bottles in a cobwebbed cellar.

The photos are generally so expressive it's not necessary to read the captions, which is a good thing. It seems to be a rule in picture books that captions must be made confusing and inconvenient wherever possible for the reader. Also, anyone who wants to actually read about wine is advised to go elsewhere. In picture books, the text is usually scanty and used as mere filler, and that is the case here.

--Bill Marsano

This item was not quite what I thought it was. The online description was a bit vague.

This book covers the map, litterally. Anywhere in the world they have chocolate, Chantal Coady has been there and tasted them and here she gives your her astute biased opinion with pictures of the maker's actual chocolate bonbons. Does it get better than this? You can learn a lot from the little guide and come out way ahead on your chocolate connoiseurship.

If you love chocolate - and I do love chocolate - then this book is a must have!!!

It highlights the finest chocolates from around the world!!! It includes addresses, phone numbers and histories of the most reknowned chocolatiers!!!

And if I never have the opportunity to taste some of these chocolates in this life - at least I'll have the chance to sample them through the savory descriptions in the 'tasting notes' - not quite the same - but delicious in it's own right!!!

I have several Roman recipe books that are as well written, and I didn't really find anything new in these recipes, except [...] an [...] Anglo-centric way of writing, which seems to try to make the authors seem "really smart", using wording that many of my 12th grade students will not understand. With comments about growing seasons in modern England, and the cost of certain wines in the UK, and similar side bars, that I found disruptive. The colloqual British language calling minced meat patties "faggots" and choosing to use words of big caliber when smaller, more universally used common kitchen and cooking words would do, make this seem a bit pretentious.

It is a new addition to my library, but why are we given measures in 'big' and 'little' teaspoons and 'coffee cup' measures and 'dessert spoon' measures? These do not fit my standard of a proper measuring system. Are we to believe that the graduated measuring cup is not available in a British kitchen or are we supposed to assume that Ancient Romans drank coffee from a specific size of cup? (They didn't have coffee!!; which is a great blow to serious reenactors...)

I would rather spend my money on "The Frugal Gourmet Cooks Three Ancient Cuisines (Mass Market Paperback) by Jeff Smith" available here at Amazon.com (at a much more reasonable price.

For years, people reconstructing Roman food have taken Apicius literally, and without any thought into the many elements of Roman food. Usually, the food is at best tastless, often inedible, and the excuse is usually an emphatic "this is how the Romans did it! Their taste is not ours". Rather, Apicius is a guide for experienced cooks, much like 18th and 19th century US cookbooks, where the recipe leaves almost all the explanations and cooking instructions out.
Sally Grainger has done meticulous research into the elements of Roman cooking, and actually worked the recipes out into very palatable dishes. I've read through almost all the so called Apicius cookbooks and this is by far the most thorough explanation of the ingredients and how they are made, including mulsum and garum, and in depth descriptions of the unusual seasonings like lovage.
This will change how our reenactment and reconstruction efforts will present Roman food from now on, and make the accompanying academic book that much more interesting.

I was thrilled to receive Christopher Grocock and Sally Grainger's new comprehensive translation of the Apician cookbook, "Apicius, a Critical Edition". It is a masterwork.

I was also pleased to receive Grainger's "Cooking Apicius". Grainger is both a scholar and an excellent cook of Ancient Roman food. Her book is written in a friendly, personal, and sometimes chatty manner, and contains many Britishisms, but, then, she is British, after all.

Her discussions of various ingredients and cooking techniques were informative. I have cooked from the Flower/Rosenbaum translation, and also own Andre Dalby & Sally Grainger's "Classical Cookbook", "Around the Roman Table: Food and Feasting in Ancient Rome" by Patrick Faas, "Roman Cookery: Ancient Recipes for Modern Kitchens" by Mark Grant, "A Taste of Ancient Rome" by Ilaria Gozzini Giacosa.

I've found all these books instructive, but I enjoy working out the recipes myself and making my own decisions on what substitutes to use here in the US. At the same time, I always appreciate hearing how another cook interprets a recipe, and I very much appreciated Grainger's explanations throughout of her decisions to make certain interpretations or use particular ingredients.

I highly recommend this book to anyone interested in cooking recipes from the Apician cookbook, but shy of starting out from the original recipes themselves, which can be rather vague.