Not sure which new cookbooks are worth investing in this year? Take the guesswork out of your decision and follow along with food52'sTournament of Cookbooks. The competition -- run by this new home-cooking Web site's founders (former New York Times food editor Amanda Hesser and food writer Merrill Stubbs) -- pits 16 of this year's best books against each other, to be cooked from and judged by 17 venerable chefs and food writers.
Tournament rounds will play out over the course of 4 weeks, with a decision announced every weekday beginning Wednesday. For the first challenge in the bracket, "My New Orleans," by John Besh was bested by "Real Cajun," by Donald Link, as judged by Daniel Patteron. The winning book will take home the first Piglet trophy and be feted at the Astor Center in New York City on Nov. 9, 2009.
After the jump, see list of the cookbooks and judges in play. ...
There are seasoned restaurateurs and there are talented cookbook auteurs. The twain aren't always possessed of the same skill set -- no one was expecting James Beard to jump on the line when the saucier called in sick at Chart House, nor was Julia going to be summoned to expedite at her favored Santa Barbara haunt, La Super Rica Taqueria -- but food fetishists can dare to dream. Think of it as culinary fantasy football, mulling over the cookbooks we'd like to see writ real and sit-down-in-able.
I posed the notion of a pop-up restaurant to Matt Lee and Ted Lee., co-authors of my all-time most beloved (and stained) cookbook, the James Beard Award winning "The Lee Bros. Southern Cooking," and the upcoming "Simple Fresh Southern" and they shared their menu wish list and locale in the video above. (By the way, the first guy is Ted. People get that mixed up all the time.)
Which non-restaurant chef's cookbook would you like to see turned into an eatery, even for just a single meal? Let us know in the comments below.
Everyone from Anthony Bourdain to John Besh to longtime friend Jacques Pépin has a memory about the woman who taught America how to cook
Known for her distinctive chirruping voice and down-to-earth attitude towards French cooking (and one famously dropped roast chicken), Julia Child maintains an everlasting influence on generations of professional and home cooks.
On "The French Chef," Child taught America that anybody can cook with the right instruction while managing to be the best of both worlds: educational and engaging.
With the biographical movie, "Julie & Julia," hitting theaters nationwide on Aug. 7, AOL Food chatted with notable chefs and food personalities about their personal memories and thoughts of Child and her considerable impact on the way America cooks at home.
"[She] singlehandedly created the cooking show as we know it, started the whole notion of the celebrity chef, created a market in which me and many of my friends have prospered," said Anthony Bourdain, chef and host of Travel Channel's "No Reservations." "She changed not just the culinary world -- but the whole world."
With Child's trademark sign-off -- a jolly "Bon Appétit!" -- her knowledge and quirky charisma allowed Julia to teach America that any one can cook, even a 4-hour long boeuf bourguignon, with the right coaching.
Chef Jacques Pépin, Julia's longtime friend and collaborator, remembers what the 6-foot-2 doyenne of French cooking taught him when he first started doing television.
"I learned to be a bit more casual," Pépin told AOL Food.
But Pépin said while Julia might sometimes make mistakes in the kitchen, for her, the focus of cooking on TV was "what did I learn today?" Viewers, she thought, "should be learning something."
Child was a mentor to Chef Emeril Lagasse, and he made several appearances on her show 'Cooking with Master Chefs'. In the video below, he explains just what he loved about her "I don't give a crap" attitude.
Celebrity chef Sara Moulton, executive chef of Gourmet magazine, TV personality and cookbook author, first met Julia in 1979 while working as a food stylist on her PBS cooking show "Julia Child & More Company" and remained friends until Child's death in 2004.
"She was so spontaneous which is why everyone loved her," Moulton said, adding: "You never knew what she was going to do."
Chef John Besh of Restaurant August in New Orleans and cookbook author of "My New Orleans" went so far as to name Child "the ambassador of French Cooking."
"She was the first one to take the mystique out of cooking," Besh told AOL Food. "She was the pioneer of speaking about food in everyday terms and removing a lot of the snobbery from it."
See what else Chef Besh told AOL Food about Julia Child. Click the arrow to start the video.
Top Chef winner Stephanie Izard spoke with AOL Food about Julia Child's influence on her career. Click the arrow to start the video.
Michael Psilakis, New York City chef and TV personality, raced home to watch Julia Child on television growing up because she reminded me of his grandmother -- "a big woman with big hands and funny accent."
More than that, Psilakis said Julia spread the culinary world to a lot more people than chefs like himself could ever touch in a dining room.
"What she really is teaching, more than the process of how to cook something, is the gift that food really is," Psilakis said. "She showed people that food is this glorious gift."
Child taught that life should be lived with an amount of joie de vivre and unashamed passion as Matt Lee of the James Beard Award winning cookbook author duo The Lee Bros. shared in this memory of Julia that involves bubbly and a sword.
"She was the speaker at a black-tie holiday dinner of an ancient Harvard arts organization. I don't recall a thing she said, but that she elicited plenty of laughter from the crowd, a mixed group of about 100, students, faculty and alumni," Lee said.
"Nearing the end of her remarks, she called for a saber and champagne bottle, and the dining room fell silent as she proceeded to perform that Napoleonic trick (shearing the cork and glass collar clean with a brisk stroke)," he continued.
"In this case, the cork sailed out over the crowd in a wide arc, taking what seemed like a full minute to cross the room, all eyes following," Lee said. "It nailed the economist John Kenneth Galbraith's red wine goblet, which shattered and dropped its full load on the tablecloth, at which point the entire room stood up and gave her a standing ovation."
With her undeniable presence and zest for life, Child reached out and touched audiences by being unpretentious and real -- changing foodways by convincing the home cook that "you can do it too."
Kat Kinsman and Sara Bonisteel also contributed to this story.
So you think you're out playing hooky from work on the promise of a lovely Southern lunch stewed up by your favorite cookbook authors and then all of a sudden, in strides Bobby Flay.
Matt Lee and Ted Lee and the rest of the assembled had been lured to a barge on the Hudson River -- Matt's preferred canoeing channel -- on the premise that the brothers would be filming a segment for a Food Network special called "Lowcountry Lowdown." They'd filmed the first half in Charleston, S.C., and reportedly, the duel would have gone down on their home turf, had Chef Flay not fallen prey to the vagaries of air travel.
Read more about throwing down with the Country Captain after the jump.
Whenever I visit my boyfriend's parents in South Carolina, I 'm amazed by Southerners' allegiance to the Memphis-based grocery store, Piggly Wiggly. Known simply as "The Pig" by all (as in "We're out of milk and onions. Looks like I need to go to the Pig!"), Piggly Wiggly's status in the South cannot be overstated.
I mean, when you see adults wearing a tee-shirt that reads "I'm Big on the Pig," you know that it's more than just low prices and convenient parking that's bringing them in.
Leave it to the New York Times Magazine's food writers Matt and Ted Lee to bring us Piggly Wiggly -- no matter where we live -- via Boiled Peanuts, their Southern food products site.
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Whenever I visit my boyfriend's parents in South Carolina, I 'm amazed by Southerners' allegiance to the Memphis-based grocery store, Piggly Wiggly. Known simply as "The Pig" by all (as in "We're out of milk and onions. Looks like I need to go to the Pig!"), 
