So you've bought Alinea for your favorite wannabe gastro-physicist and The River Cottage Cookbook for your farm-to-table friend. At a loss for the other foodies you're shopping for? Here are the three books that top my own wish list.For the locavorous turophile: American Cheeses: The Best Regional, Artisanal, and Farmhouse Cheeses, Who Makes Them, and Where to Find Them by Clark Wolf. American cheese certainly doesn't mean processed and cellophaned anymore, but for many it does still just mean Humboldt Fog and Maytag Blue. No disrespect to those two venerable cheeses; it's just that there's much more out there hidden amid our amber waves of grain. Luckily, we've got Clark Wolf to unearth these treasures. More than a primer, American Cheeses qualifies as an ode.
For the literary-minded homebody: Second Helpings of Roast Chicken by Simon Hopkinson. As the title implies, this unassuming volume serves up more of what Hopkinson offered in last year's sleeper hit, Roast Chicken and Other Stories. It's hard to say whether the well-curated recipes or the charmingly told narratives appeal more; luckily, both abound.
For the kitchen experimentalist: The Flavor Bible: The Essential Guide to Culinary Creativity, Based on the Wisdom of American's Most Imaginative Chefs by Karen Page and Andrew Dornenburg. Another sequel of sorts, this follow-up to Page and Dornenburg's award-winning tome on wine pairings, What to Drink with What You Eat. could have been titled What To Eat with What You Eat. I, for one, am a sucker for lists, and in this book, lists abound. In an entry on avocados, for instance, I learn that the ingredient complements a range of flavors from arugula to yogurt, with over five dozen in between. The idea? To equip the home cook to innovate, but logically.
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