Biography
Three Many Cooks
Three Many Cooks ladles out the highs and lows, the kitchen disasters and culinary triumphs, the bitter fights and lasting love. Of course, these stories would not be complete without a selection of treasured recipes that nurtured relationships, ended feuds, and expanded repertoires, recipes that evoke forgiveness, memory, passion, and perseverance.
Read it here
Duncan Hines
America’s pioneer restaurant critic best known for the cake mixes, baked goods, and bread products that bear his name, but most people forget that Duncan Hines was a real person, an often-overlooked culinary pioneer whose love of good food led to his name becoming a grocery shelf favorite.
Read it here
No Experience Necessary
No Experience Necessary is Chef Norman Van Aken’s joyride of a memoir. In it he spans twenty-plus years and nearly as many jobs—including the fateful job advertisement in the local paper for a short-order cook with “no experience necessary.”
Read it here
L.A. Son
Los Angeles: A patchwork megalopolis defined by its unlikely cultural collisions; the city that raised and shaped Roy Choi, the boundary-breaking chef who decided to leave behind fine dining to feed the city he loved—and, with the creation of the Korean taco, reinvented street food along the way.
Read it here
Chef Tell
Before the heyday of the Food Network, there was Chef Tell, America’s first TV showman chef, big on personality and flavor. Most of Chef Tell’s forty million baby boomer viewers—a number comparable to Julia Child’s—never knew his fascinating, hardscrabble life story.
Read it here
Ivan Ramen
The end-all-be-all guide to ramen from Ivan Orkin, the iconoclastic New York-born owner of Tokyo’s top ramen shop.
Read it here
Manresa
The long-awaited cookbook by one of the San Francisco Bay Area’s star chefs, David Kinch, who has revolutionized restaurant culture with his take on the farm-to-table ethic and focus on the terroir of the Northern California coast.
Read it here
Provence, 1970
They cooked and ate, talked and argued, about the future of food in America, the meaning of taste, and the limits of snobbery.
Read it here
Mastering the Art of Soviet Cooking
A James Beard Award-winning writer captures life under the Red socialist banner in this wildly inventive, tragicomic memoir of feasts, famines, and three generations.
Read it here