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'Summer Cooking'
Elizabeth David
Foreword by Molly O'Neill
New York Review of Books -- 1995, reprinted in 2002
Buy it on Amazon

Sometimes you want a cookbook author to give it to you straight.

None of this "You can whip this up in 10 minutes!" when you are certain, as you possess merely mortal chopping skills, it will take you 20 with that pile of onions.

The well-traveled cookbook author Elizabeth David, who many think brought "real food" to the English in the 1950s, is of this no-nonsense school. She saw it among her duties to bring picnic food and something called "seasonal shopping" to her countrymen and women, as they were stuck in an out-of-season loop. On one page she gripes about the mortification of seeing ratatouille on a February menu comprised of tomatoes and (ugh) cabbage.

On another she writes of the English approach to the "dread" salad season that is summertime: "What makes a cook think that the beetroot spreading its hideous purple dye over a sardine and a spoonful of tinned baked beans constitutes an hors d'oeuvre?"

Tell us how you really feel, Elizabeth.

What we tested and whether the book's worth buying, after the jump.

The German beer supply is in danger as a result of British World Cup fans' unquenchable thirst. According to a recent article in The Mirror, the 70,000 England fans visiting Nuremberg drank about 17 pints each-roughly 1.2 million in all. One calculation put that at 200 pints per minute. "The hardest thing for the breweries is keeping up with the thirst of the English," said one brewery spokesman. I'm a little curious about how they attribute beer sales to certain groups of fans. Sure, a beer vendor can say, "Wow, the people in the ___ jerseys were sure poundin' em'," but how do you pin large figures on one group? Surely those vendors must have been selling to other fans as well. Nevertheless, there are the personal accounts. "Never have I seen so many drink so much in such little time," said one bartender. As Andrew noted, his people are a hungry bunch, too.

[Via Fark]