Meals, Music, and Muses

Meals, Music, and Muses
Author: Alexander Smalls
Publisher: Flatiron Books
Total Pages: 364
Release: 2020-02-25
Genre: Cooking
ISBN: 1250241006
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Iconic chef and world-renowned opera singer Alexander Smalls marries two of his greatest passions—food and music—in Meals, Music, and Muses. More than just a cookbook, Smalls takes readers on a delicious journey through the South to examine the food that has shaped the region. Each chapter is named for a type of music to help readers understand the spirit that animates these recipes. Filled with classic Southern recipes and twists on old favorites, this cookbook includes starters such as Hoppin’ John Cakes with Sweet Pepper Remoulade and Carolina Bourbon Barbecue Shrimp and Okra Skewers, and main dishes like Roast Quail in Bourbon Cream Sauce and Prime Rib Roast with Crawfish Onion Gravy. Complete with anecdotes of Smalls’s childhood in the Low Country and examinations of Southern musical tradition, Meals, Music, and Muses is a heritage cookbook in the tradition of Edna Lewis’s A Taste of Country Cooking.

Grace the Table

Grace the Table
Author: Alexander Smalls
Publisher: Clarkson Potter Publishers
Total Pages: 328
Release: 2004
Genre: Cooking
ISBN:
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The father of Southern revival cooking serves up a delectable combination of memoir and cookbook as he recounts his life's journey from his hometown of Spartanburg, South Carolina, to the cosmopolitan cities of Europe and the homes and hearts of Manhattan's socialites and celebrities.

Between Harlem and Heaven

Between Harlem and Heaven
Author: JJ Johnson
Publisher: Macmillan + ORM
Total Pages: 375
Release: 2018-02-06
Genre: Cooking
ISBN: 1250139376
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Winner of the James Beard Award for Best American Cookbook “Between Harlem and Heaven presents a captivatingly original cuisine. Afro-Asian-American cooking is packed with unique and delicious layers of flavor. These stories and recipes lay praise to the immense influence the African Diaspora has had on global cuisine.”— Sean Brock In two of the most renowned and historic venues in Harlem, Alexander Smalls and JJ Johnson created a unique take on the Afro-Asian-American flavor profile. Their foundation was a collective three decades of traveling the African diaspora, meeting and eating with chefs of color, and researching the wide reach of a truly global cuisine; their inspiration was how African, Asian, and African-American influences criss-crossed cuisines all around the world. They present here for the first time over 100 recipes that go beyond just one place, taking you, as noted by The New Yorker, “somewhere between Harlem and heaven.” This book branches far beyond "soul food" to explore the melding of Asian, African, and American flavors. The Afro Asian flavor profile is a window into the intersection of the Asian diaspora and the African diaspora. An homage to this cultural culinary path and the grievances and triumphs along the way, Between Harlem and Heaven isn’t fusion, but a glimpse into a cuisine that made its way into the thick of Harlem's cultural renaissance. JJ Johnson and Alexander Smalls bring these flavors and rich cultural history into your home kitchen with recipes for... - Grilled Watermelon Salad with Lime Mango Dressing and Cornbread Croutons, - Feijoada with Black Beans and Spicy Lamb Sausage, - Creamy Macaroni and Cheese Casserole with Rosemary and Caramelized Shallots, - Festive punches and flavorful easy sides, sauces, and marinades to incorporate into your everyday cooking life. Complete with essays on the history of Minton’s Jazz Club, the melting pot that is Harlem, and the Afro-Asian flavor profile by bestselling coauthor Veronica Chambers, who just published the wildly successful Yes, Chef by Marcus Samuelsson, this cookbook brings the rich history of the Harlem food scene back to the home cook. “This is more than just a cookbook. Alexander and JJ take us on a culinary journey through space and time that started more than 400 years ago, on the shores of West Africa. Through inspiring recipes that have survived the Middle Passage to seamlessly embrace Asian influences, this book is a testimony to the fact that food transcends borders." — Chef Pierre Thiam

The Table Comes First

The Table Comes First
Author: Adam Gopnik
Publisher: Knopf Canada
Total Pages: 291
Release: 2011-10-25
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0307399036
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Transplanted Canadian, New Yorker writer and author of Paris to the Moon, Gopnik is publishing this major new work of narrative non-fiction alongside his 2011 Massey Lecture. An illuminating, beguiling tour of the morals and manners of our present food manias, in search of eating's deeper truths, asking "Where do we go from here?" Never before have so many North Americans cared so much about food. But much of our attention to it tends towards grim calculation (what protein is best? how much?); social preening ("I can always score the last reservation at xxxxx"); or graphic machismo ("watch me eat this now"). Gopnik shows we are not the first food fetishists but we are losing sight of a timeless truth, "the table comes first": what goes on around the table matters as much to life as what we put on the table: families come together (or break apart) over the table, conversations across the simplest or grandest board can change the world, pain and romance unfold around it--all this is more essential to our lives than the provenance of any zucchini or the road it travelled to reach us. Whatever dilemmas we may face as omnivores, how not what we eat ultimately defines our society. Gathering people and places drawn from a quarter century's reporting in North America and France, The Table Comes First marks the beginning a new conversation about the way we eat now.

Mastering the Art of Soviet Cooking

Mastering the Art of Soviet Cooking
Author: Anya von Bremzen
Publisher: Crown
Total Pages: 370
Release: 2013-09-17
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 0307886832
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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 “Delicious . . . A banquet of anecdote that brings history to life with intimacy, candor, and glorious color.”—NPR’s All Things Considered Born in 1963, in an era of bread shortages, Anya grew up in a communal Moscow apartment where eighteen families shared one kitchen. She sang odes to Lenin, black-marketeered Juicy Fruit gum at school, watched her father brew moonshine, and, like most Soviet citizens, longed for a taste of the mythical West. It was a life by turns absurd, naively joyous, and melancholy—and ultimately intolerable to her anti-Soviet mother, Larisa. When Anya was ten, she and Larisa fled the political repression of Brezhnev-era Russia, arriving in Philadelphia with no winter coats and no right of return. Now Anya occupies two parallel food universes: one where she writes about four-star restaurants, the other where a taste of humble kolbasa transports her back to her scarlet-blazed socialist past. To bring that past to life, Anya and her mother decide to eat and cook their way through every decade of the Soviet experience. Through these meals, and through the tales of three generations of her family, Anya tells the intimate yet epic story of life in the USSR. Wildly inventive and slyly witty, Mastering the Art of Soviet Cooking is that rare book that stirs our souls and our senses. ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR: The Christian Science Monitor, Publishers Weekly

Rat Girl

Rat Girl
Author: Kristin Hersh
Publisher: Penguin
Total Pages: 291
Release: 2010-08-31
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 1101459026
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"One of the 25 Greatest Rock Memoirs of All Time” --Rolling Stone Magazine (#8) “Sensitive and emotionally raw… it’s also wildly funny”--The New York Times Book Review A powerfully original memoir of pregnancy and mental illness by the legendary founder of the seminal rock band Throwing Muses, 'a magnificently charged union of Sylvia Plath and Patti Smith' - The Guardian Kristin Hersh was a preternaturally bright teenager, starting college at fifteen and with her band, Throwing Muses, playing rock clubs she was too young to frequent. By the age of seventeen she was living in her car, unable to sleep for the torment of strange songs swimming around her head - the songs for which she is now known. But just as her band was taking off, Hersh was misdiagnosed with schizophrenia. Rat Girl chronicles the unraveling of a young woman's personality, culminating in a suicide attempt; and then her arduous yet inspiring recovery, her unplanned pregnancy at the age of 19, and the birth of her first son. Playful, vivid, and wonderfully warm, this is a visceral and brave memoir by a truly original performer, told in a truly original voice.

Music at Social Meals in Greek and Roman Antiquity

Music at Social Meals in Greek and Roman Antiquity
Author: Charles H. Cosgrove
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 459
Release: 2022-12-01
Genre: History
ISBN: 100920484X
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This is a captivating story of music-making at social recreations from Homeric times to the age of Augustine. It tells about the music itself and its purposes, as well as the ways in which people talked about it, telling anecdotes, picturing musical scenes, sometimes debating what kind of music was right at a party or a festival. In straightforward and engaging prose, the author covers a remarkably broad history, providing the big picture yet with vivid and nuanced descriptions of concrete practices and events. We hear of music at aristocratic parties, club music, people's music-making at festivals, political uses of music at the court of Alexander the Great and in the public banquets of Roman emperors in the Colosseum, opinions of music-making at social meals from Plato to Clement of Alexandria, and much more, making the book a treasure-trove of information and a fascinating journey through ancient times and places.

The Flavor Thesaurus: More Flavors

The Flavor Thesaurus: More Flavors
Author: Niki Segnit
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
Total Pages: 369
Release: 2023-05-23
Genre: Cooking
ISBN: 1639731148
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The plant-led follow-up to The Flavor Thesaurus, "a rich and witty and erudite collection" (Epicurious), featuring 92 essential ingredients and hundreds of flavor combinations. “After all the combinations you think you know, the ones you've never even considered will blow your mind ... Eggplants take you to chocolate, which takes you to miso, which takes you to seaweed, which takes you to a recipe in another book or a restaurant dish you have to hunt down straight away. The curiosity is infectious, the possibilities inspiring on this ingredient-led voyage.”--Yotam Ottolenghi in The New York Times Magazine, on how he uses More Flavors for recipe development "[Segnit is] a flavor genius . . . creative, imaginative, and fun."--Mark Bittman With her debut cookbook, The Flavor Thesaurus, Niki Segnit taught readers that no matter whether an ingredient is “grassy” like dill, cucumber, or peas, or “floral fruity” like figs, roses, or blueberries, flavors can be created in wildly imaginative ways. Now, she again draws from her “phenomenal body of work” (Yotam Ottolenghi) to produce a new treasury of pairings-this time with plant-led ingredients. More Flavors explores the character and tasting notes of chickpea, fennel, pomegranate, kale, lentil, miso, mustard, rye, pine nut, pistachio, poppy seed, sesame, turmeric, and wild rice-as well as favorites like almond, avocado, garlic, lemon, and parsley from the original-then expertly teaches readers how to pair them with ingredients that complement. With her celebrated blend of science, history, expertise, anecdotes, and signature sense of humor, Niki Segnit's More Flavors is a modern classic of food writing, and a brilliantly useful, engaging reference book for every cook's kitchen.

My Ackee Tree

My Ackee Tree
Author: Suzanne Barr
Publisher: Penguin
Total Pages: 276
Release: 2022-04-05
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 0735239517
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*SHORTLISTED FOR THE 2023 TASTE CANADA AWARDS* NOMINATED FOR THE 2023 HERITAGE TORONTO AWARDS For fans of The Measure of My Powers and Notes from a Young Black Chef, a memoir about food, family, and the recipes that brought one woman home when she needed it the most. Suzanne Barr’s journey to become a chef started when she was 30. Her mother was diagnosed with cancer and she moved home to Florida to take care of her. Suzanne escorted her mother to doctor’s appointments, bathed her, and kept her company, but the hardest part of the experience was that she didn’t know how to cook for her. She didn’t even know where to begin. Fast-forward to the summer of 2017 when Suzanne became the inaugural Chef-in-Residence at the Gladstone Hotel in Toronto. She wanted to create a menu that represented who she was as a chef and it emerged as a love letter to her mother. Her Rite of Passage Menu, as she called it, changed her. It started her on a journey that has brought her closer to her mother, to her ancestors, and to her Jamaican heritage. But a lot has happened before and since. My Ackee Tree tells the story of a woman who is always on the move, always seeking; who battles the stereotypes of being a Black female cook to become a culinary star in an industry beset by dated practices and landlords with too much power. From the ackee tree in front of her childhood home, through New York City, Atlanta, Hawaii, the Hamptons, and France, Suzanne takes us on her unpredictable journey, and at every turn, she finds light and comfort in the kitchen. Told in a voice as fresh and honest as her cooking, My Ackee Tree is a celebration of creativity, soul searching, and motherhood that asks, “How can I keep the things I love?”

The Blues

The Blues
Author: Chris Thomas King
Publisher: Chicago Review Press
Total Pages: 581
Release: 2021-06-08
Genre: Music
ISBN: 1641604476
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"A fresh new perspective that will be a true revolution to readers and will open new lines of discussion on . . . the importance of the city of New Orleans for generations to come." —Dr. Michael White, jazz clarinetist, composer, and Keller Endowed Chair at Xavier University of LA An untold authentic counter-narrative blues history and the first written by an African American blues artist All prior histories on the blues have alleged it originated on plantations in the Mississippi Delta. Not true, says author Chris Thomas King. In The Blues, King present facts to disprove such myths. This book is the first to argue the blues began as a cosmopolitan art form, not a rural one. As early as 1900, the sound of the blues was ubiquitous in New Orleans. The Mississippi Delta, meanwhile, was an unpopulated sportsman's paradise—the frontier was still in the process of being cleared and drained for cultivation.? Expecting these findings to be controversial in some circles, King has buttressed his conclusions with primary sources and years of extensive research, including a sojourn to West Africa and interviews with surviving folklorists and blues researchers from the 1960s folk-rediscovery epoch.? New Orleans, King states, was the only place in the Deep South where the sacred and profane could party together without fear of persecution, creating the blues.