Books about Gastronomic from Amazon.com

Animal lovers, relax--"Spotted Dog" is a kind of pudding, not a dalmatian It is also the favorite pudding of Jack Aubrey, the fictional creation of writer Patrick O'Brian. Aubrey's adventures as an officer of the British Navy--and those of his friend and ship's surgeon Stephen Maturin--during the tumultuous years of the Napoleonic Wars have been masterfully detailed in O'Brian's many novels; now Anne Chotzinoff Grossman and her daughter, Lisa Grossman, take readers on a culinary adventure through the kitchens and cuisine of the early 19th century.

Since food figures prominently in O'Brian's novels, his fans will already be familiar with such names as Skillygalee, Drowned Baby, Soused Hog's Face, and Jam Roly-Poly, but they may wonder exactly what those dishes are. Lobscouse and Spotted Dog makes it all clear: Skillygalee, for example, is oatmeal gruel, while Drowned Baby is similar to Spotted Dog, only without the currants and eggs. And Spotted Dog is...? You'll find the recipe in the Grossmans' book, along with excerpts from the Aubrey/Maturin novels and many other authentic 19th-century dishes to test your sense of adventure, your culinary prowess, and possibly your waistline. Lobscouse and Spotted Dog is more than a cookbook--it's a window into the past, an inspired piece of culinary detective work, and a delightful gastronomic companion to the novels of Patrick O'Brian..
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Grab this book and your forchetta (fork) and head to Italy for a tantalizing tour of tastes. Faith Heller Willinger is an American living in Italy who has devoted her taste buds to sampling and reporting on the best Italian kitchens have to offer. If you think Italian food equals pizza and spaghetti, the variety of offerings found in the 11 northern regions explored in this book will astound you. Each regional section begins with helpful explanations of Italian dishes from local menus. Next, the wine and food specialties are temptingly presented with interesting tidbits about production methods and historical origins. For example, grissini, yard-long breadsticks of the Piemonte region, were first made in 1668, when "the Savoia court doctor, Don Baldo Pecchio, had the court baker whip up some crunchy, thin and easily digestible breadsticks for the sickly Prince Vittorio Amadeo II, who suffered from 'intestinal fevers.'" Each section is finished off with a listing of restaurants and inns, organized by city. If you aren't sated yet, Eating in Italy also provides gelato flavors, a key to Italian opening and closing hours, types of pasta, wine terminology, and a food glossary..
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Why are there restaurants? Why would anybody consider eating to be an enjoyable leisure activity or even a serious pastime? To find the answer to these questions, we must accompany Rebecca Spang back to France in the eighteenth century, when a restaurant was not a place to eat but a thing to eat: a quasi-medicinal bouillon that formed an essential element of prerevolutionary France's nouvelle cuisine. This is a book about the French Revolution in taste and of the table--a book about how Parisians invented the modern culture of food, thereby changing their own social life and that of the world.

During the 1760s and 1770s, those who were sensitive and supposedly suffering made public show of their delicacy by going to the new establishments known as "restaurateurs' rooms" and there sipping their bouillons. By the 1790s, though, the table was variously seen as a place of decadent corruption or democratic solidarity. The Revolution's tables were sites for extending frugal, politically correct hospitality, and a delicate appetite was a sign of counter-revolutionary tendencies. The restaurants that had begun as purveyors of health food became symbols of aristocratic greed. In the early nineteenth century, however, the new genre of gastronomic literature worked within the strictures of the Napoleonic police state to transform the notion of restaurants and to confer star status upon oysters and champagne. Thus, the stage was set for the arrival of British and American tourists keen on discovering the mysteries of Frenchness in the capital's restaurants. From restoratives to Restoration, Spang establishes the restaurant at the very intersection of public and private in French culture--the first public place where people went to be private.

(20011222).
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Long lauded as one of the world's most revered culinary instructors, French-born Madeleine Kamman's career arose from remarkably humble beginnings in central France. As a young woman, Madeleine got her training by working in a family restaurant in Touraine and in the kitchens of France's most respected regional cooks, who nourished her appetite for the tradition, rigor, and personal nature of cooking. Her exuberant and colorful memoir of that time—originally published over 25 years ago—tells of collecting mussels at the shore, churning butter from the milk of village cows, gathering mushrooms in nearby woods, and then transforming them into glorious food under the tutelage of her informal mentors. Over 250 recipes for the simple dishes she learned at their sides illustrate her evocative reminiscences of a bygone era in rural France. Part travelogue, part social history, part instruction manual, this classic is required reading for anyone who wants to know more about the life, times, and tastes of a woman who has helped shape American cooking..
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Designed for travellers, this indispensable gastronomic, on the spot quick reference dictionary, phrasebook and guide, will help you handle any Portuguese or Brazilian gastronomic situation, translating what is on your plate..
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Here's a mystery guaranteed to make you hungry--for the salmon-filled pasta squares that Chef Laurence Levain sells for $20 a pop at his Washington, D.C. restaurant, for the salad of curly chicory and thick chunks of country bacon that first brings Levain and American food critic Chas (for Charlotte Sue) Wheatley together in Paris, for the warm polenta salad and pan-fried three-meat dumplings served at the CityTastes benefit the night that Levain is found dead of an apparent heart attack and Chas--his lover--has to write his obituary. Washington Post restaurant critic Phyllis Richman certainly knows her food, and her skill at keeping a lively mystery plot simmering is almost as impressive..
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