Building an appetite
one book at a time
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 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
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
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
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
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
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
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
A rising young chef lays bare his gripping story of culinary triumphs, consuming drug additions, and his continuing quest to stay on top while staying sober.
Read it here
From James Beard Award-winning writer Elissa Altman comes a story that marries wit to warmth, and flavor to passion. Born and raised in New York to a food-phobic mother and food-fanatical father, Elissa was trained early on that fancy is always best.
Read it here
Like Eloise growing up in the Plaza Hotel, Charlotte Silver grew up in her mother’s restaurant. Located in Harvard Square, Upstairs at the Pudding was a confection of pink linen tablecloths and twinkling chandeliers, a decadent backdrop for childhood.
Read it here
Break out the TV dinners! From the author who gave us Cod, Salt, and other informative bestsellers, the first biography of Clarence Birdseye, the eccentric genius inventor whose fast-freezing process revolutionized the food industry and American agriculture.
Read it here
Eddie Huang is the thirty-year-old proprietor of Baohaus—the hot East Village hangout where foodies, stoners, and students come to stuff their faces with delicious Taiwanese street food late into the night—and one of the food world’s brightest and most controversial young stars.
Read it here
Baked goods that are marvels of ingenuity and simplicity from the famed Bouchon Bakery
Read it here
No other chef has been synonymous with French food as Paul Bocuse. For close to fifty years he has been at the forefront of the culinary world. Now for the first time he has compiled his recipes that have made him the face of French cooking.
Read it here
A well researched and in depth look at the life of America’s Grand Dame of Cooking.
Read it here
Insights into a endearing friendship that help to create an American masterpiece.
Read it here
A charming book, told in her own words, that captures the love and affection that Julia Child had for France and the influences that France had on her.
Read it here
It’s rare for someone to emerge in America who can change our attitudes, our beliefs, and our very culture.
Read it here