Showing titles in Culinary

In this moving, hilarious, and insightful memoir, Laurie Woolever traces her path from a small-town childhood to working at revered restaurants and food publications, alternately bolstered and overshadowed by two of the most powerful men in the business. But there’s more to the story than the two bold-faced names on her resume: Mario Batali and Anthony Bourdain.

From the glamorous to the entitled, from royalty to the financially ruined, everyone who wanted to be seen—or just to gawk—at the hottest restaurants in New York City came to places Michael Cecchi-Azzolina helped run. His phone number was passed around among those who wanted to curry favor, during the decades when restaurants replaced clubs and theater as, well, theater in the most visible, vibrant city in the world. Besides dropping us back into a vanished time, Your Table Is Ready takes us places we’d never be able to get into on our own.

When Anthony Bourdain died in June 2018, fans around the globe came together to celebrate the life of an inimitable man who had dedicated his life to traveling nearly everywhere (and eating nearly everything), shedding light on the lives and stories of others. Now, for the first time, we have been granted a look into Bourdain’s life through the stories and recollections of his closest friends and colleagues. Laurie Woolever, Bourdain’s long-time assistant and confidante, interviewed nearly a hundred of the people who shared Tony’s orbit.

From Pasadena to Cambridge to New York, Washington, D.C., India, Ceylon, Paris, Marseilles, Santa Barbara, and Maine, Bob Spitz re-creates an extraordinary life. He takes us beyond the image of Julia as the tall, eccentric woman with a funny voice who taught America how to cook, to establish her as a genuine rebel and beloved icon, a woman who redefined herself in middle age, helped to change the role of women in America, set the standard for how to create a public personality in the modern media world.

Interweaving forgotten colonial history and long-buried indigenous traditions, Dafilmmaker Jill Damatac takes us through her time in America, cooking her way through Filipino recipes in her kitchen as she searches for a sense of self and renewed possibility. With emotional intelligence, clarity, and grace, Dirty Kitchen explores fractured memories to ask questions of identity, colonialism, immigration, belonging, and to find ways in which the ritual, tradition, and comfort of food, can answer them.

Burt, the hound of Beelzebub, has risen from the dead; Gadget, the miniature horse, has moved into the kitchen; and Tommy has decided to expand his beer business and on the advice of his wife, Rose, is thinking about distilling gin. What can possibly go wrong? With Brexit looming, a second baby on the way and sales of IPA beer plummeting, trouble is brewing in the Loire.

Culinary Leverage: A Journey Through the Heat is about exposing the dysfunction of an industry through the eyes of a highly decorated chef who, through hard-won experience, resilience and grief, soul searching and moments of reckoning, finds a healthier way forward, not just for himself but for the restaurant business as a whole.

One ordinary day, out of the blue, the heart-shaped tin in which Bee Wilson baked her wedding cake falls to the ground. This should have been unremarkable, except that two months earlier her husband left her for another woman. In a search of others who had also invested kitchen objects with strong meanings and emotions, Wilson found that this way of thinking might be the rule rather than the exception. Even those who believe they’re not at all sentimental might have a weak spot – a grandmother’s wooden spoon or a salt shaker inherited from a parent.

Victory in the Kitchen is a culinary biography: a life lived through food, ranging from rural Berkshire to wartime London, via Belle Epoque Paris and prohibition-era New York. While Georgina Landemare saw herself as ordinary, her accomplishments, and the life she lived, were anything but. She started her career as a nursemaid and ended it cooking for one of the best-known figures in British history, Winston Churchill, a man to whom food was central as a diplomatic tool in a time when the world was embroiled in a worldwide war.

Craig was the last person anyone would have expected to open an American diner in Paris. He came from humble beginnings in a working-class town in Connecticut, had never worked in a restaurant, and didn't know anything about starting a brand-new business. But from his first visit to Paris, Craig knew he had found the city of his dreams. Pancakes in Paris is the story of Craig tackling the impossible - from raising the money to fund his dream to tracking down international suppliers for "exotic" American ingredients, and even finding love along the way.

Hannah Selinger chronicles her rise and fall in the restaurant business, beginning with the gritty hometown pub where she fell in love with the industry and ending with her final post serving celebrities at the Hamptons classic Nick & Toni’s. In between, listeners will join Selinger on her emotional journey as she learns the joys of fine fine dining, the allure and danger of power, and what it takes to walk away from a career you love when it no longer serves you.

O lugar da Paola Carosella sempre foi a cozinha – até que a fama, a pressão do julgamento constante e a polarização política no país que ela escolheu para viver tiraram até isso dela. Na tentativa de achar um caminho de volta, a renomada chef de cozinha e apresentadora achou as respostas que ela procurava nos livros de uma ensaísta norte-americana: M.F.K. Fisher.

In this captivating memoir, the man whom Julia Child has called "the best chef in America" tells the story of his rise from a frightened apprentice in an exacting Old World kitchen to an Emmy Award-winning superstar who taught millions of Americans how to cook and shaped the nation's tastes in the bargain. The Apprentice is the poignant and sometimes funny tale of a boy's coming of age. Beyond that, it is the story of America's culinary awakening and the transformation of food from an afterthought to a national preoccupation.

Provence, 1970 is about a singular historic moment. In the winter of that year, more or less coincidentally, the iconic culinary figures James Beard, M.F.K. Fisher, Julia Child, Richard Olney, Simone Beck, and Judith Jones found themselves together in the South of France. They cooked and ate, talked and argued, about the future of food in America, the meaning of taste, and the limits of snobbery.

In Kitchen Person, unfussy eater Rachel Cooke chronicles several food upheavals since then: new TV cooks, Brexit, viral recipes, the home delivery phenomenon, and the global pandemic. She journeys from her childhood in Sheffield with Henderson relish and Granny's lamb chops, to a job interviewing top chefs and eating in fancy restaurants, to learning to shop and cook well herself, all the time growing more knowledgeable and opinionated about food.

Alysia Vasey's earliest memories are of walking alongside her grandfather as they explored the West Yorkshire moors that they called home. As an adult, this love for wild things stayed with her, even as she learnt that her family's knowledge of edible plants were a legacy of a much darker time during the Second World War. After leaving Yorkshire in search of adventure, Alysia was eventually guided home by her motto: be true to yourself and you will become the person you were meant to be.

Bacon. McDonalds. Cinnabon. Hot Pockets. Kale. Stand-up comedian and author Jim Gaffigan has made his career rhapsodizing over the most treasured dishes of the American diet (“choking on bacon is like getting murdered by your lover”) and decrying the worst offenders (“kale is the early morning of foods”).

Well-known and loved as a cookery writer and presenter, this is Mary Berry’s deeply personal account of the second great love of her life, gardening. She shares her love of growing plants, visiting gardens, and getting hands-on in her own plot. A passion that was sparked in her childhood, Mary first started gardening with her father and she has been fortunate to meet many inspirational and knowledgeable horticulturalists throughout her life. Full of anecdotes and pearls of wisdom, My Gardening Life is a unique memoir told through the gardens Mary has loved.

In the Technicolor glow of the early 70s, Jessica B. Harris debated, celebrated, and danced her way from the jazz clubs of the Manhattan's West Side to the restaurants of the Village, living out her buoyant youth alongside the great minds of the day - luminaries like Maya Angelou, James Baldwin, and Toni Morrison. My Soul Looks Back is her paean to that fascinating social circle and the depth of their shared commitment to activism, intellectual engagement, and each other.

The Pepperpot Diaries is Andi Oliver's long-awaited first cookbook. Showcasing both traditional and new recipes, cherished ingredients and vibrant flavours from across the Caribbean, let Andi Oliver take you on an exploration of identity and heritage as she shows you how to create simple yet sensational dishes that will bring the unbeatable flavours of Caribbean cooking to your table. Andi shares her deeply personal journey on reconnecting with the food she grew up eating - the flavours and ingredients that run through her heart and soul - and what the future might hold for Caribbean cookery.