Hi everyone, I’m looking for a birthday present for my brother. He’a a very successful chef and it seems like he owns every food related book imaginable, all the Redzepi books, all the Thomas Keller books etc. I was wondering if anyone knows a cool and interesting book he might have missed I could get him. Thanks!
by Warchitecture
5 Comments
Is he interested in culinary history at all, or is there a specific cuisine that interests him?
If he’s classically trained, you could get him books by Antonin Careme or Escoffier (though he may already have them).
As a joke, you could get him a 1950s Better Homes and Gardens cookbook, the sort of thing that shows up on the Gallery of Regrettable Food website.
There’s also a 1960s food critic and author named Roy Andries de Groot; he’s best known for The Auberge of the Flowering Hearth. Check the Wikipedia articles about him. I have one of his cookbooks, and it’s pretty good.
The Sioux Chef’s Indigenous Kitchen by Sean Sherman
It’s been a few years, but I absolutely loved Pasta, Pane, Vino by Matt Goulding. It’s nonfiction, and Goulding does some really interesting things to get to the bottom of Italian cuisine (he enrolls in THE school for Neapolitan-style pizza, he spends time with a family that produces mozzarella, stuff like that).
Goulding has also written Grape, Olive, Pig about Spanish cuisine (I didn’t like this one quite as much, but there were interesting chapters on jamon and a San Sebastián-based cooking school) and Rice, Noodle, Fish on Japanese cuisine (I haven’t read this one, but it sounds pretty solid).
Hope that helps!
He probably has M. F. K. Fisher’s books, so I’ll suggest two of my favorites.
Waiting for Dessert by Vladimir Estragon. Food columns written for the Village Voice.
White Trash Cooking by Ernest Mickler. A charming book.
From Here You Can’t See Paris
I imagine he has the Provincetown Seafood cookbook but it’s highly spoken of.