Carmelle Safdie

Reading Charlotte Silver's new memoir, Charlotte au Chocolat: Memories of a Restaurant Girlhood is like being in an art museum, gazing at images of another time and place. And that's what Silver, 31, had in mind when she wrote this remembrance of her early years growing up in her mother's four-star restaurant, Upstairs at the Pudding. Located above Harvard's Hasty Pudding Club, the famed student society, the restaurant was the "stage set" of her childhood.

"My life was not a child's life of jungle gyms and Velcro sneakers, but of soft lighting, stiff petticoats, rolling pins smothered in flour, and candied violets in wax paper," the book begins.

In a phone interview last week, Silver told Squid Ink: "I think that like many people with unusual childhoods, I had always thought that I might write about it ... I wanted it to be a very visual book, even kind of painterly. ... I really wanted it to be a portrait of this beautiful lost world."

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Sick of hearing "yucky" when you set food in front of your offspring? Then you might need What Chefs Feed Their Kids (Lyons Press, $24.95) by Fanae Aaron, a mom who's been through all that and much more.

If you don't have kids, you still could use this book. And if you hate kids, you might want it too -- the recipes are that worthwhile. They're not cutesy, simplistic ideas that chefs think might appeal to kids, like a spinster aunt telling you how to raise your brood. Instead, the 75 recipes come from the trenches, where chefs worked to get their own kids to eat instead of mashing stuff on their plates into inedible messes, spitting out "disgusting" items, eating just one thing or nothing all.

Aaron, who lives in the Hollywood Hills, used the chefs' tips in dealing with her son Cody, now almost 6. She says: "All their stories and clever insights helped me through the rough patches when it was tricky to get Cody to the dinner table and when there to start eating. Their recipes have become Cody's favorite dishes. It made me a better parent and it made Cody a great eater."

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These days we all probably know a forager and even a kitchen drawer mushroom cultivator or two -- somewhat challenging friendships when it comes to gift-giving. (Edible backyard weeds, leftover coffee grounds for growing mushrooms?)

And so, in honor of our friends who have a somewhat "unique" cookbook and bedside reading needs, we suggest Mycophilia: Revelations from the Weird World of Mushrooms.

If fungi aren't enough, Wild Flavors: One Chef's Transformative Year Cooking From Eva's Farm. And yes, Hank Shaw's Hunt, Gather, Cook, out earlier this year, would also be an excellent choice.

Consider the "forager's pasta" recipe that follows an early holiday bonus. Then again, we're not exactly your average holiday wish-list sorts, either.

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If you have a permanent spot on your bookshelf for whatever James Waller publishes on beverages (the original Drinkology cocktail guide and his Drinkology Wine follow-up), you probably already know that the third book in his series, Drinkology Beer, has just been released.

For the Waller uninitiated, the author is known for writing about his personal explorations of the subject at hand -- and admitting that he knew exceedingly little about wine (and now, beer) when he started each book. Some may balk, but we find it a refreshingly honest confession in today's online world of everyone-is-an-expert. That novice researcher's viewpoint is exactly what makes all of Waller's books so great. Add his highly entertaining writing style, and you've got a book that is a heck of a lot more interesting to read than the beverage industry's equivalent of the Oxford Dictionary:

"Oh dear Jesus," Waller, intimidated by the beer research ahead, says in the Introduction. "A culture of beer snobbery was spreading, like a culture of E. coli in a petri dish, across the agar-agar of our land. I didn't yet know that beer snobs are nicer than wine snobs."

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You Choose

Authors David Zinczenko and Matt Goulding are releasing another edition of Eat This Not That!. The 12th edition, we are told via a press release, with new "easy swaps to help consumers lose pounds fast!" (their emphasis, not ours). Are you ready?

In the Introduction, the book begins with (surprise!) diet magazine-worthy success stories complete with before-and-after photos, then gets straight down to recent chocolate-hazelnut lawsuit business with the "Nutella's hazelnut spread gets a hazing" section. Yes, the authors acknowledge that we all knew Nutella wasn't farmers market-fresh fare, but add that "we" (they) write "nutrition books for a living."

This is a nutrition book? Who knew.

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Large-scale, photo-driven books tend to conjure images of Impressionist landscapes and Sierra Club-worthy polar bears. Pretty, but also pretty boring after the initial flip-through. But very occasionally, there is a large-scale book that is the rare exception, a book like Menu Design in America: A Visual and Culinary History of Graphic Styles and Design, 1850-1985 with as much thought-provoking brawn as stunning artistic inspiration.

"America" happens to have a decidedly heavy L.A. restaurant bias in this book, as the primary private collection (anonymous) of menus featured in the book are from an L.A. private donor (the downtown L.A. Library also has a great menu collection, by the way). Many of the menus are also from the collection of Taschen's executive editor Jim Heimann, who served as editor here. Taschen is no stranger to the high-dollar, glossy design book, but this is its first food-related topic, albeit here falling under their pop culture category. We're really hoping it's not the last.

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In today's lightweight "food memoir" era, academic publications like Turning the Tables: Restaurants and the Rise of the American Middle Class, 1880-1920 by Andrew P. Haley (University of North Carolina Press) read like a coveted Osetra caviar moment. We mean that as a compliment, so if you're not a caviar fan, insert your favorite rare culinary treat [here].

Wait, aren't academic titles by necessity dry, boring tomes? Sure, they can be. And Haley does his share of furthering that stodgy image with an impressive 88 pages of footnotes for about 230 pages of text (the book is an extension of his Ph.D. dissertation). There is also the requisite academic "Conclusion" chapter, so you could simply fast forward to get to the thesis: We owe our modern model of casual, affordable cafés and restaurants to a shift from upper class to middle class dining dominance that began in the early twentieth century.

But actually, Turning the Tables is an engaging read. Okay fine, engaging enough for an academic title. Not to mention there's a fascinating chapter on tipping ("The Tipping Evil"), and the chance to meet August J. Block, an early 20th century waiter in New York City who titled his memoir "Knight of the Napkin." Yeah, we wanted to know more about that knighted napkin, too.

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That circumstances change the way we approach our lives is hardly a revolutionary statement -- on Saturdays, farmers' market shopping feels like a luxurious escape, on weeknights grocery shopping quickly becomes that dreaded after-work chore. And so with those 405 homebrew-friendly roadblocks ahead this weekend, Try This: Traveling the Globe Without Leaving the Table by Danyelle Freeman, a first-person food "memoir" (personal essay, really) that we dismissed when it first passed our desk a few weeks ago, sounds entirely too housebound-relevant to discount this weekend.

Freeman's book is touted in promo materials as an "adventurous and accessible guide to eating out in the twenty-first century, perfect for anyone who loves food but wants to break out of a restaurant rut." (She is the founding editor of restaurantgirl.com and the former restaurant critic for The New York Post.)

For those of us lucky enough to live in L.A., where cultural diversity and tacos collide on an everyday basis, the idea of reading a book to teach us how to break out of a dining rut is pretty hilarious. But hey, it's Carmageddon weekend. So what did we think?

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Tokyo's labyrinth of city streets has always lent itself to marathon drinking sessions. Its best bars are often tucked away in tiny side streets or underneath nondescript office buildings. Simply navigating through the alleyways back towards a train station -- and, eventually, home -- can become a parade of culinary endurance. Conversations often start with "If we've come all this way" and end with sitting down for a bottle of unfiltered sake at a bar the size of a modest Midtown cubicle.

Chris Bunting's book Drinking Japan takes us along such a drinking session, one that encompassed many months and hundreds of bars throughout the country. Organizing the book by the types of alcohol served at these bars -- sake, sochu, beer, whisky and so on -- we learn not only the particularities of these establishments but about the process of producing, serving and drinking the thousands of bottles of alcohol waiting to be drunk in Japan.

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Forewarning: If you ever want to buy a grocery store tomato again, you should not read this review. Tomatoland by Barry Estabrook is a contrasting story of McMansions and crumbling shacks, the bright red, beauty pageant-worthy orbs on your $8 Angus burger versus the fruit sprayed with so many toxic chemicals they have caused serious birth defects and disfigurements, and farming empires worth millions supported by human trafficking. (Says Estabrook: "If you have ever eaten a tomato during the winter months, you have eaten a fruit picked by a slave.")

If you are hoping this is yet another story about the horrors of what we eat and how it affects us (as in, our health, our daily lives, what we feed our children), it thankfully is not. For this is not a self-centric story about us, but a story about those who suffer because of our need for a perfectly blemish-free, tasteless tomato on our shiny office cafeteria Cobb salads, sandwiched between convenient fast food burgers and lining our our well-stocked grocery stores year round. Turn the page for more.

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