Are You Really Going to Eat That?: Reflections of a Culinary Thrill Seeker
Author: Robb Walsh
From the top of the Blue Mountains of Jamaica for the perfect cup of coffee to the jungles of Thailand for an encounter with the abominably smelly "stinkfruit," Robb Wals has traveled the globe, immersing himself in some of the world's most interesting culinary phenomena. In Are You Really Going to Eat That? Walsh offers a collection of his best essays over the past ten years, along with some of his favorite recipes.
For Walsh, food is a window on culture, and his essays brim with insights into our society and those around us. Whether he's discussing halal organic farming with Muslims, traversing the steep hills of Trinidad in search of hot-sauce makers, or savoring the disappearing art of black Southern cooking with a inmate-chef in a Texas penitentiary, Walsh has a unique talent for taking our understanding of food to a deeper level.
Interesting textbook: Definitive Guide to Canadian Artisanal and Fine Cheeses or Herbs
The Taste of Conquest: The Rise and Fall of the Three Great Cities of Spice
Author: Michael Krondl
The smell of sweet cinnamon on your morning oatmeal, the gentle heat of gingerbread, the sharp piquant bite from your everyday peppermill. The tales these spices could tell: of lavish Renaissance banquets perfumed with cloves, and flimsy sailing ships sent around the world to secure a scented prize; of cinnamon-dusted custard tarts and nutmeg-induced genocide; of pungent elixirs and the quest for the pepper groves of paradise.
The Taste of Conquest offers up a riveting, globe-trotting tale of unquenchable desire, fanatical religion, raw greed, fickle fashion, and mouthwatering cuisine-in short, the very stuff of which our world is made. In this engaging, enlightening, and anecdote-filled history, Michael Krondl, a noted chef turned writer and food historian, tells the story of three legendary cities-Venice, Lisbon, and Amsterdam-and how their single-minded pursuit of spice helped to make (and remake) the Western diet and set in motion the first great wave of globalization.
In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the world's peoples were irrevocably brought together as a result of the spice trade. Before the great voyages of discovery, Venice controlled the business in Eastern seasonings and thereby became medieval Europe's most cosmopolitan urban center. Driven to dominate this trade, Portugal's mariners pioneered sea routes to the New World and around the Cape of Good Hope to India to unseat Venice as Europe's chief pepper dealer. Then, in the 1600s, the savvy businessmen of Amsterdam "invented" the modern corporation-the Dutch East India Company-and took over as spice merchants to the world.
Sharing meals and stories with Indian pepper planters, Portuguesesailors, and Venetian foodies, Krondl takes every opportunity to explore the world of long ago and sample its many flavors. The spice trade and its cultural exchanges didn't merely lend kick to the traditional Venetian cookies called peverini, or add flavor to Portuguese sausages of every description, or even make the Indonesian rice table more popular than Chinese takeout in trendy Amsterdam. No, the taste for spice of a few wealthy Europeans led to great crusades, astonishing feats of bravery, and even wholesale slaughter.
As stimulating as it is pleasurable, and filled with surprising insights, The Taste of Conquest offers a fascinating perspective on how, in search of a tastier dish, the world has been transformed.
Kirkus Reviews
A muddy walk through the history of Venice, Lisbon and Amsterdam, whose heydays were all linked to the lucrative spice trade. Food writer Krondl (Around the American Table: Treasured Recipes and Food Traditions from the American Cookery Collections of the New York Public Library, 1995, etc.) debunks the myth that spices were used over the centuries to mask rancid food. He attempts to understand the demand that prompted Europeans to explore and conquer the world. Spices were a luxury, often used as payment and literally worth their weight in gold. Coming from exotic places few could reach, they represented the aroma and taste of paradise. Fantastic profits could be made in the spice trade. With its strong links to the Byzantine Empire, Venice muscled in on the Mediterranean route, and soon "pepper was the lubricant of trade." The Crusades spread the taste for spices, but the fall of Constantinople to the Turks in 1453 effectively sealed the Venetians' routes. Soon the Portuguese made incursions. King Joao I sent out looting caravels for West African gold and melegueta pepper; Portuguese explorers braved the seas around the Cape of Good Hope in search of Prester John and Indian black pepper. Vasco da Gama made a momentous advance for the Portuguese by establishing a route from Lisbon to the Spice Islands in the South Pacific. When the Portuguese crown fell to Philip II of Spain in 1580, the prosperous Dutch, inspired by Jan Huyghen van Linschoten's how-to on the spice trade, took up the slack through the corporate arms of the East India Company. Krondl scrambles and dodges to cover an enormous amount of ground, from spice wars and slavery to disease and the use of spices for medicinalpurposes. Trying to do too much, he produces a loose, unscholarly text that many will find difficult to digest. Many separate strands of this compelling story deserve to be pursued further by more focused historians.
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