Browsing the Bookshelf I

One of the features of Kilt in the Kitchen is the Bookshelf. I’ve been a bookaholic for a long time.  In fact, my first real job (if you don’t include babysitting and bagging groceries) was working in a bookstore.  A lot of my reading these days has shifted from bound pieces of paper to the Kindle, but it’s still more or less the same thing, except for cookbooks.  I still rely on cookbooks for recipes.  Flipping through a kindle or cooking from my iPad just doesn’t have the same feel (although in all honesty, I love the Paprika recipe manager app).  If you were looking through the cookbooks in my kitchen, you could tell which ones were my favorite because they are the ones most heavily soiled – and one of the things you’d notice is that the traditional cookbooks that are mostly compilations of recipes are very clean.

I’m not a big fan of recipe cookbooks.  I don’t think I’ve cracked Mastering the Art of French Cooking or Joy of Cooking in years, but Fuchsia Dunlop’s Every Grain of Rice is a mess of stains from soy sauce, cooking oil, whatever the liquid in a jar of preserved vegetables might be, zhenjiang vinegar, and who knows what else.  This book completely transformed the way I think about Chinese cooking.  Fuchsia Dunlop (isn’t that the greatest name in the world?) is the first westerner to be trained at the Sichuan Institute of Higher Cuisine and has written five cookbooks.  I can’t speak to the other four, but Every Grain of Rice focuses on ingredients, techniques, and how each recipe works as a part of Chinese culture and cuisine.  There was a time when I thought doing a Chinese meal was cutting up a bunch of chicken and vegetables into small pieces and then tossing them all into a wok with soy sauce, peanut oil, mirin, and whatever other glop was available in the international aisle of the supermarket.  Cook hot and fast and then dump over rice.

Except that’s not how it works.  Dunlop’s recipes are usually one or two really strong flavors supporting fresh ingredients with a complete minimum of fuss and bother. When you read the stories that accompany each recipe, you can almost envision the plate being served at a family meal or a small, local restaurant.  Simple, clean, utterly contemporary, and with a history that stretches back almost forever.  If you are looking for an introduction to Chinese cooking, start here and don’t just read the recipes – read the whole thing.  The stories are as important as the ingredient lists.

That’s one of the books on my bookshelf.  There are others and I’ll be writing about them in the future.  Not all these books are going to be cookbooks, either.  I’ve been doing a lot of reading about food in culture, trade, and business, food as an element of geopolitical tension, and food history and I want share some of that too. Food is so ubiquitous in our lives that we can be blind to its importance and its history.