Algonquin Books

The Drunken Botanist

The Drunken Botanist: The Plants that Create the World's Great Drinks opens with a tale of author Amy Stewart on a quest for ingredients to make a gin cocktail. She does this not so much because she's thirsty, but to disprove the negative perceptions a fellow garden writer had about the spirit.

A few drinks mixed with fresh jalapeño, cilantro and cherry tomatoes later, she had a gin convert and a book idea. This scene sets the tone for the rest of the edible horticulture handbook. Instead of lecturing, Stewart presents herself as a savvy drinking buddy.

The book is smaller than a textbook in size and weight -- small enough, really, to carry with you into bars and pubs if needed. Organized into three parts that trace a cocktail in several makes, The Drunken Botanist begins with common plants found in familiar wines, beers and spirits.

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courtesy: Christy Wilhelmi

Christy Wilhelmi in her garden

What is it about Christy Wilhelmi's three-minute tip-of-the-week podcast Gardenerd that makes it feel like essential listening? Is it that it's so short and informative? Or maybe that Wilhelmi's pealing bell voice makes everything garden-related -- even getting rid of pesky powdery mildew -- sound easy? Whatever it is, just as the former private school fundraiser turned full-time professional garden expert was preparing to start another draft of a gardening novel she'd been working on, Massachusetts-based Adams Media commissioned her to write a how-to handbook.

Published last month, it's called Gardening for Geeks, and has a subtitle that comes with a promise: DIY Tests, Gadgets, and Techniques That Utiltize Microbiology, Mathematics, and Ecology to Exponentially Maximize the Yield of Your Garden.

Recently we spoke to Wilhelmi, who held forth on all manner of garden-related subjects, including the best starter crop for newbie gardeners, why growing your own grain might be ultimately unsatisfying, and what she discovers during house calls.

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It's a relief to know that a writer on The New York Times food beat has kids whose tastes don't sound all that much more adventuresome than those of your own children. Given that people are obsessed with food and what the kids are up to, and perhaps more importantly, what the parents are feeding said kids, conversations around food and family have taken on different, arguably absurd, proportions.

While certainly in and of this climate, the writers featured in The Cassoulet Saved Our Marriage: True Tales of Food, Family, and How We Learned to Eat, a new collection of personal essays edited by Bay Area writers Caroline M. Grant and Lisa Catherine Harper (Roost Books), shared the anxieties and joys tied up with all of this stuff by sharing plenty of their own.

Divided into three parts categorized as Food, Family, and Learning To Eat, the stories reinforce how good food and bad food have the power to shape experience, memories, and identity in near equal measure. (But it's definitely preferable if the food is good.)

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Chronicle Books / Tamara Staples

The Magnificent Chicken

Some get excited over celebrity chef sightings; for us, it's books about chickens. The Magnificent Chicken, a follow-up to Brooklyn photographer Tamara Staples' out-of-print book The Fairest Fowl (2001), truly is magnificent.

Alongside the photos, Staples lists each breed's finer points (a good egg layer; relatively useless but beautiful and quite "pleasant") and the year it was accepted into The American Standard of Perfection (the chicken breeder's "Bible" of show hens and cocks on the competition circuit). The Introduction is an on-air interview Ira Glass did with Staples several years ago for This American Life (he accompanied Staples on one of her farm treks to photograph chickens).

Staples says some of the farmers aren't as enchanted as we are; these are professional breeders who see the bird's flaws -- a twisted comb, a wrinkled wattle, crooked toes (she profiles many of the breeders in Backyard Poultry, an industry magazine). But take a closer look at the photos that follow. Like that Silkie, an ornamental breed with fur-like plumage that Staples tells us are "low-key, gentle, and rather sedentary" (our kind of chicken) and the stunning "Blue Wheaton" Bantam cock look pretty perfect. The latter has not yet been accepted into The Standard of Perfection. But as Staples says, "with examples like this bird, it's only a matter of time."

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Phaidon

Where Chefs Eat

Where Chefs Eat, a new book from Phaidon, is a compilation of the eateries worldwide where 400 chefs like to dine (David Chang, Rene Redzepi Eric Ripert, Daniel Boulud, Anita Lo, Fergus Henderson, among them) what they order, and when they like to go (very early, or very late, most likely). Sound familiar?

Edited by Joe Warwick, the book is a whopping 663 pages. Most of those pages are filled with restaurant addresses and reference info like their opening hours, type of cuisine, price range and credit card policy. Depending on your location for any given dinner, you can play a numbers game and choose the restaurant with the most chef recommendations, like El Cellar de Can Roca in Catalonia, or go with your favorite chef's recommendation (Gabrielle Hamilton recommends Otto Enoteca Pizzeria in Greenwich Village).

Locally? Ricardo Zarate is keen on Akasha for breakfast and Park's BBQ late at night. Matt Molina recommends Vincenti and Peet's Coffee -- and actually, that $2 caffeine jolt seems like an appropriate breakfast follow up to one of this city's finest, and most expensive, Italian restaurants.

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Amazon

In his new book, Thanksgiving, How To Cook It Well, former New York Times restaurant critic Sam Sifton gets to the heart of the Thanksgiving conundrum on the very first page: "You may be sharing family traditions or creating them or fighting against them or all three at once."

Sifton then goes on to give a brief history of the holiday (it is not exactly the history we've collectively come to imagine), and gives a few warnings: This is not a book for those of you looking for the latest Thanksgiving fads. It is a book about turkey and tradition.

And it's not a book for those looking to find the easy way out: there are no shortcuts or "easy Thanksgiving" recipes. This is a book about how to do the big traditional meal, with gravy (and everything) from scratch, and -- as the title says -- how to do it well.

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E. Dwass

New Springsteen biography

At 63, Bruce Springsteen is known for a legacy of great music and political conscience. He's also admired for his buff-ness and extraordinarily physically demanding performances, helped by an intense workout regimen and healthy eating. So it's surprising to learn that when he was starting out on the road to stardom, he was fueled by an addiction to junk food.

In a new biography titled Bruce, by Peter Ames Carlin, we're told that as a young man, Springsteen "had the gastronomic sophistication of a feral dog, feasting on Velveeta-and-mayonnaise sandwiches, or the glistening fried chicken at the Tasty Dee-lite drive-through. Vegetables rarely made an appearance ..."

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Sven A. Kirsten

Peter Moruzzi

Peter Moruzzi is on a crusade to save fine dining. An admirer of classic, historic restaurants since his youth, Moruzzi, an L.A.-based writer, started to become alarmed in recent years over the ever more rapid disappearance of America's dining history. So he decided to write a book about it.

Classic Dining: Discovering America's Finest Mid-Century Restaurants isn't just a history textbook, but also a living guidebook to the venerable old places that are still around today. "My hope was that a book focusing on the value of classic restaurants might inspire people to locate and frequent those survivors in their areas," Moruzzi says. "It was also to debunk the notion that white tablecloth establishments were deserving of extinction in favor of trendy restaurants with their hard surfaces and minimalist interiors."

Recently we sat down in a cushy vinyl booth with Moruzzi to learn more about his project.

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The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake

You may have read about Rose Edelstein on this site last year. The creation of USC professor and noted author Aimee Bender, this fictitious 9-year-old, a supertaster if there ever was one, learns in Bender's novel The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake, that -- magically, realistically -- she can taste the emotions and experiences of those who prepare the food she eats. Both burden and blessing, this goes for factory-farmed chicken nuggets as well as her mother's lemon-chocolate cake.

Fans of the book (and last year's Squid Ink interview with the author) will be happy to know Bender is appearing at a Friends of the USC Library Literary Luncheon on Thursday, Oct.18.

In last year's interview, Bender discusses being harangued by the "cake police," trying, with the help of therapist friends and family members, to "diagnose" Rosie, and enjoying kale chips. Presumably, she'll be able to comment on follow-up questions as well as brand-new ones.

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Max Beuchel

Luisa Weiss

If you've spent much of the last seven years reading Luisa Weiss' celebrated food blog The Wednesday Chef, as many of us have, it will not surprise you to learn that her new book is a charming read.

Nor will it surprise you to learn that she's an engaging reader in real life, as she was when she came to Los Angeles last week to read from My Berlin Kitchen: A Love Story (With Recipes), her recently published book.

What is maybe surprising is that it's Weiss' first book -- it seems like we've been reading her in print for ages -- and that it was thus not only her first book tour, but her first time doing a book reading at all. Not that you could tell.

We caught up with Weiss just before her reading at Vroman's in Pasadena, to ask her about the book, the future of her blog, how the food culture in Germany compares to that of the U.S., and what it's like cooking in Berlin, where she now lives with her husband and their 3-month-old son Hugo. Yes, she's on a book tour with an infant. And you thought blogging in your pajamas was a cushy life. Turn the page.

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