Food Book Fair

The food intellectual is not a new phenomenon, but it is a new cliche. The glut of rant-prone gonzo restaurant critic bloggers, armchair sustainability experts and urban chicken farming gurus reminds us that the importance of caring about food, where it comes from and who makes it has soaked deep into our collective psyche (and Twitter feeds) like milk into bread for meatballs. In less than two weeks, the first Food Book Fair will celebrate thinkers, writers and artists who make food their focus in a fairly massive marketplace of ideas set to go down at the new Wythe Hotel in Brooklyn.

Interested in intersections between food and art? Curious about how people living in cities are reaffirming their connection to the land they rarely see? Eager to tackle the concept of "food porn?" From May 4-6, the Food Book Fair will oblige with panels featuring Harold McGee, Colman Andrews, Ed Behr of The Art of Eating, Gael Greene, Peter Meehan and Dr. Marion Nestle, among the many confirmed gastro-sages, and representatives from such publications as Lucky Peach, Diner Journal, Edible Brooklyn, Gastronomica, Laphams Quarterly: The Food Issue, Meatpaper, Put a Egg on It, Remedy Quarterly, Swallow Magazine, The Runcible Spoon, White Zinfandel and Wilder Quarterly.

We know Brooklyn is pretty far away, but with a lineup like that (it's like the Coachella of writing about eating, though we doubt Prosper Montagné will be appearing via hologram), you may want to at least tell your friends to go.

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T. Nguyen

The Godmother sandwich at Bay Cities

Depending on where you live in this great big country, a submarine sandwich might be known as a Dagwood (Colorado), a wedge (parts of New York) or a poor boy (in the Gulf States, where, we once discovered, a banh mi sandwich is known as a "Vietnamese poor boy"). This is but one of the fascinating entries in D.A.R.E. -- no, not the attempt to war on drugs, but the University of Wisconsin-Madison's Dictionary of American Regional English, a multivolume dictionary that shows that there are many, many ways of looking at a sandwich, among other foods. The fifth volume, from Sl to Z, was just published last month.

The dictionary was compiled based on exhaustive interviews conducted by University of Wisconsin-Madison scholars between 1965 and 1970. According to The Wall Street Journal, chief editor Frederic Gomes Cassidy compiled more than 1,800 survey questions covering 40 topics, from the weather to tobacco to foods; researchers in "word wagons" then were dispatched to interview 2,777 people in more than 1,000 communities across the country. After the 2.3 million responses were collected, editors had the daunting task of analyzing and organizing the data into something manageable and meaningful.

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amazon

On first read, we didn't believe it ourselves when we decided to include a hybrid cookbook/anthology from an academic publisher, The World in a Skillet, and what boils down to a promotional cookbook from a cast-iron skillet maker, The Lodge Cast Iron Cookbook, in the same post. But give us a second to make our cornbread case.

The Lodge Cast Iron Cookbook, compiled and edited by Pam Hoenig, landed on our desk first. We pushed it aside as soon as we saw the "author" is Lodge Manufacturing in Tennessee, a company that has been making cast iron cookware for 116 years and has published numerous cookbooks on the subject over the decades. Sounds like yet another promotional supper.

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Kathy A. McDonald

Butterscotch pudding at the Getty Center's restaurant

Banners for the Getty's Pacific Standard Time (P.S.T.) initiative appear to be on every light pole citywide. There are 60+ exhibitions covering every aspect of Los Angeles' postwar art scene from 1945 to 1980 at art museums and galleries across Southern California. That post-war fixation extends to the Getty Center's restaurant where a special themed Pacific Standard Time menu is an ode to culinary history.

Remember the days of Steak Diane or Brie Fondue? Doubtful, but those dishes were all the rage in the 1960s and 70s -- someday those will be archival recipes too. Until then, here's a taste of the past provided by the Getty restaurant's chefs.

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Speaker, Charles Perry

Los Angeles is turning 230 years old. No, really. But what do most of us know about our city's history dating that far back? This is a town that didn't really boom until movies started getting made. Or was it? Perhaps there was life here before film. At least one aspect of that life, the food life, will be explored in Saturday's Culinary Historians event, "Dinner in the Exploding City," a lecture led by food writer, and president and a co-founder of the organization, Charles Perry.

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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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Yes, we know how much you like your tattered and demi-glace-stained copy of The Joy of Cooking, or maybe How to Cook Everything, but there is another book that you would do well to add to the kitchen library, if you don't already have it. The new edition of Escoffier's Le Guide Culinaire, the book that codified French cuisine when it was first published in 1903, is being published today by John Wiley and Sons, with new forwards by Tim Ryan, president of The Culinary Institute of America, and Heston Blumenthal, chef of The Fat Duck Restaurant and, well (to paraphrase the Coen Brothers), you know who he is.

This edition, a relative bargain at $70 and on sale at Amazon for far less (context: Larousse is $90; Modernist Cuisine is $625), is an unabridged translation of the 1921 fourth edition, and includes Escoffier's original foreward, a memoir of the chef by his grandson Pierre, and more than 5,000 recipes. Yes, they're in narrative form. So is Proust.

If your vision of a culinary history cookbook is something dusty, stodgy and covered in unappetizing yellow paper stains, you need a copy of the recently released American version of At Elizabeth David's Table.

The compendium of recipes and prose from arguably the best food writer of the 20th century was originally printed in the U.K. (and compiled by Jill Norman). In it, you will find the notoriously testy British culinary great's best, and notably still very relevant, recipes (fresh green pea soup, pork loin baked with white wine and oranges, raspberry-red currant mousse) alongside a hefty dose of her fantastically witty prose. Translation: Hilariously spot-on sarcasm.

What was that saying? Right. The more things change, the more they stay the same. Turn the page for more.

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Susan Park

The Angiuli Family: Anthony, Rocco, Vito and Johnny

Actually, Los Angeles did have a Little Italy for over a century. It started in the 1800's on Olvera Street and North Main, when Los Angeles was a Mexican puebla. By the turn of the 20th century, Los Angeles's Little Italy had expanded into present-day Chinatown and eventually to Lincoln Heights and the foothills of Elysian Park. Johnny Angiuli, owner of Eastside Market Italian Deli, can wax nostalgic for hours about the hillside neighborhood, just above Chinatown where his deli is located, that was still a thriving Italian enclave when he immigrated here in 1956 from Adelphia, Italy, at the age of twelve.

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From the Anne Taintor collection.

Bra burning, Rosie the Riveter, even the Pill: all these are symbols that come to mind when we think of women's lib. But cookbooks? We didn't realize they were on the list. However an upcoming event hosted by the Culinary Historians of Southern California will change all that.

Jan Longone, Curator of American Culinary History at the University of Michigan, will lead a lecture titled "The Old Girl Network: Charity Cookbooks and the Empowerment of Women" on April 9th at the Mark Taper Auditorium. She'll explain the legacy of "charity cookbooks," or cookbooks compiled and sold for the benefit of others, as well as how they fed into the women's movement, almost unbeknownst to men.

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