Preparation Books

Acorn is central to The People -- it is the primary staple food of the Indians of California and sustained them through the winter. A bad crop of acorn meant possible starvation, so the food is treated with respect and tradition throughout the process of turning it from a bitter nut to a sweet flour for making soup or bread.

The book is beautifully photographed and gives detailed instructions for how to make acorn both the traditional way with a granite mortar and sand pit and the modern way with a blender and kitchen sink. I have watched the Indians of Yosemite Valley make acorn many times and have made acorn myself, so I can assure you that the instructions will help even beginners make acorn for themselves.

California Native Americans used acorn as a staple food, and still reverence it. "One must create a relationship with the tree, one must understand the ground which cherishes the fruit so lovingly." But that understanding is not mere words, it is a vast array of knowledge -- and a special technology of place. Julia Parker, Kashia Pomo, who married into the Yosemite Mono/Paiute family headed by elder Lucy Telles, spent many years learning the lifeways that Lucy taught by example.

Julia tells anthropologist, writer, and friend Beverly Ortiz the story. of acorn preparation through a seasonal round. It is Julia's story, but it is also the story of California Native women over thousands of years. Many photos (by Raye Santos, of Julia preparing acorns; family activities and people from the Telles and Parker family albums; and from 19th and 20th century Yosemite National Park Service collections) make clear the intricate technology these women developed. The process, followed step by step from the story and photos, is shown as part of a life-and-seasonal cycle. The acorns, gathered from the ground, should be dried for a year before being shelled and pounded into meal and flour. The meal is then leached of bitter tannin in shallow sand basins, then separated and cooked with hot rocks in water-tight woven baskets.

The careful explanation of each step in the long process of food preparation is enlivened by Julia's personal recollections of traditional family life, and the cultural/spiritual/social meanings of all the activities. This is a fascinating way to understand Native lifeways, full of life and meaning. Readers will understand, from this woman's inside view, why the book's title -- It will live forever -- is true. This is not an academic account of a dead past; it is a lifeway still alive. At Native events in California today, women still take the time and trouble to prepare this traditional food and experience their closeness to the earth, and their cultural survival as a people.

There is enormous contrast between this lively account of Native women, maintaining life, and the distancing, dead accounts by male anthropologists and historians, which mount Native cultures and lifeways with a freezing academic objectivity, as if they were bagged specimens dead and long gone. This book is highly recommended for young people, as an alternative to the deadly, boring, and incorrect accounts prepared for young people that purport to present archaic Native societies. Those awful books form a minor industry among textbook publishers. This book is a delicious antidote to such multicultural poisons. -- Reviewed by Paula Giese, editor, Native American Books (http://www.fdl.cc.mn.us/~isk/books/bookmenu.html)

I believe this book would be of interest to anyone with more than the most minimal interests in food. At the very least, it is a highly accessible catalogue of good vegetable dishes. Although some dishes do contain meat, fish, or meat stocks, it can also serve as an excellent resource for enlivening vegetarian diets, as the author does minimize meat ingredients.

These types of books are not commonly written in English by British or American writers. It always seems to be the Germans and the French who write the great compendia volumes for various interests. Unfortunately, good German and French and Italian works like this are hard to come by, even at the local Borders or Barnes and Noble. So, I am immensely grateful that Wright has rescued us, at least in the specialized world of Mediterranean cuisine.

Some people may find issue with his selection of vegetables. Wright's strategy is to be as broad as possible, including both vegetables only found in the wild and vegetables which have been imported to the Mediterranean shores from the orient or from the new world. I am very happy with this choice, especially since entries indicate the most likely point of origin for each plant and it's current distribution. There is nothing more annoying than looking for an entry in a reference book, not finding it, and wondering why it was left off, out of laziness or because it did indeed fall outside the scope of the book. With this book, that question should never arise. I also endorse the vegetable classification done by commercial criteria rather than by scientific criteria. Who could imagine this book without the tomato! My only disappointment here was that mushrooms were all lumped together under a single heading. Culinarily, this makes some sense, as most mushrooms are interchangeable in dishes, but I have to believe the distribution and ethnic uses of morels is quite different from portobellos.

One of the great joys of the book is that it's emphasis is both culinary and scholarly, in that much material, such as scientific names and common names in many different languages is available here along with very useful recipes. One direction in which the book is not exhaustive is in the choice of recipes. For vegetables such as artichokes and tomatoes, only a small representative sample is included. Whole books could be dedicated to the dishes of these vegetables. What we find is interesting, tasty examples which may not be found elsewhere.

I find the culinary contents of this book to be truly amazing and of tremendous value in any foodie's library. Surprisingly, I find several problems in the more scholarly content of the book. There are at least two statements on artichokes I find very surprising. One is that the choke is edible and the second that the stalk of the choke is not eaten. I rely on the authority of Mario Batali to believe both of these statements is incorrect, at least for Italians, who, Mario reports, regularly buy artichokes with long stems, peel, cook, and eat them with the heart. Another statement says that white asparagus is actually normal green asparagus, blanched before it is picked. `Blanched' is simply the wrong word, as it indicates a brief heating in water. A better word may be `bleached', although that has misleading associations as well. The fact is that they are whitened by mounding soil around the stalks to keep them away from sunlight. No heat of chemical is involved. The book would have been well served by a really good copy editor. Well, all the blurbs on the back cover are from culinary stars. No Nobel laureates here.

That aside, this is a wonderfully useful book. I wish many more of this type from Wright and other English speaking authors.

There are plenty of other good vegetable dishes. I also fancy okra, and Wright has included a delicious recipe "Okra with Olive Oil" that uses pomegranate molassas. Another dish Wright describes as a "guiless dish from Apulia" is "Oven-baked Potatoes and Mushrooms" with portobello mushrooms and pecorino cheese.

Wright says he is not a vegetarian, so don't buy this book if you're opposed to animal products in your vegetables. However, if you're an "ovo-lacto" veggie, you might check it out.

Also the fact that the handbook can easily fit into a lab coat pocket makes it a great quick reference while in the hospital.

Although anesthesiology is an enormous subject the pocketbook book fullfills its purpose as a quick
reference. I would recommend it to any fourth year on an anesthesia elective or intern on an anesthesia rotation.

My score ended up being higher than I had hoped for, and I give much of the credit to this book and the rest of the series. Strongly recommend for Step 1 review!