http://www.tastybooks.co.uk reviewing good food writing Mon, 04 Jan 2010 17:37:21 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en Jamie Oliver is important. I'll admit that's not the first word that pops into my head when he comes up in conversation but upon some recent reflection, I think that he is. He defines an era of sorts and at the turn of a decade, it seems a better time than ... http://www.tastybooks.co.uk/2010/01/jamies-america/ This is not a gastro-book. Neither is it an escapist holiday page-turner about the joys of food. It's much better than that. It is a thorough, well-researched, broad-reaching and entertaining essay about how we in Britain have come to have our current relationship with food. This relationship is carefully characterised with ... http://www.tastybooks.co.uk/2009/09/hungry-city-how-food-shapes-our-lives-by-carolyn-steel/ You have to give Michael Booth some serious credit for this escapade. Rather than just refusing to use recipe books, he ritualistically burns all those he owns (except one) and moves along with his young family to Paris, a notoriously difficult and inhospitable place in itself to live or even ... http://www.tastybooks.co.uk/2009/09/doing-without-delia-tales-of-triumph-and-disaster-in-a-french-kitchen-by-michael-booth/ This is not about coffee. Nor is it about its tastes, its modern gourmet guise or its effects on us. It is about big business, and how one came to dominate high streets throughout the world, driven by the design and determination of one man. It is about how one ... http://www.tastybooks.co.uk/2009/06/starbucked-a-double-tall-tale-of-caffeine-commerce-and-culture/ I don't think there's anything I can say about Elizabeth David that has not already been said; by contemporary food writers, by reviewers, by columnists, by documentary makers or by the dramatists who depicted her as a sex-obsessed high society maverick who was careering around the restaurants of the continent ... http://www.tastybooks.co.uk/2009/03/an-omelette-and-a-glass-of-wine-by-elizabeth-david/ If you have read Part One, you'll know that I have been troubled recently; suffering from cake envy. After my last poor attempts to make one, every time I eat someone else's sponge creation, I slather and chomp but with an underlying niggle that I wish I could do the ... http://www.tastybooks.co.uk/2009/03/recipe-roadtest-the-proof-of-the-pudding/ I'm not a huge fan of celebrity chefs. In fact I'm not a huge fan of celebrity. To me, the recognition that the bloke in that film we're watching was also in that other thing we saw at the cinema, (and I think he's married to that other girl who ... http://www.tastybooks.co.uk/2009/03/levi-roots-reggae-reggae-cook-book/ Fair Trade has been around for a few years now and for most of us has had to share voice in the public domain with the competing virtues of organic, carbon-neutral, free-range and non-GM amongst others. If you want to know what it stands for, where it started, how it's doing ... http://www.tastybooks.co.uk/2009/02/fighting-the-banana-wars-and-other-fairtrade-battles-a-book-and-lecture-by-harriet-lamb/ We all love a bit of cake, don't we? And it's pretty cheap to buy: even a posh, moist, rich chocolate cake from a stall or bakery would set you back less than a tenner. So why would we want to make one? Well if you enjoy your cooking, the feeling that you couldn't make a Victoria ... http://www.tastybooks.co.uk/2009/02/recipe-roadtest-my-first-cake-nigel-vs-delia/ 1: An Omelette and a Glass of Wine by Elizabeth David This is simply the most evocative collection of food writing of the 20th Century. The inimitable pioneer of food-writing may have taken her influence from the author of the first modern recipe book, the Victorian Eliza Acton, but she brought ... http://www.tastybooks.co.uk/2009/02/top-ten-list-format/