Book Box: Tuck into food, glorious food
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SINGAPORE – In this week’s Book Box, The Straits Times reviews four new books that revolve around food. Buy the books at Amazon
Book review: Fuchsia Dunlop’s Invitation To A Banquet is a dizzying feast for foodies
This is the most fun and informative book about Chinese food I have ever read.
I should add the caveat that, having struggled with the Chinese language all my life, culinary texts in the original Chinese language are way beyond my ken.
So, ironically, it is British food writer Fuchsia Dunlop who has unlocked Chinese culinary secrets for this reader in the past with her practical cookbooks about the wonders of Sichuan and Jiangnan cuisines.
Fans of Dunlop’s writing will know what to expect: Conversational anecdotes about the Sinophile’s decades-long engagement with China, deep and scholarly detours into the geographical and political histories of Chinese cuisine, and lucid breakdowns of sophisticated cooking techniques.
Book review: National Dish serves up bite-sized portions of history in food-focused travelogues
This book is a good resource for food- and travel-mad Singaporeans, who can Google search and map pin a whole host of eateries across the three continents and six countries covered.
Cookbook author and food writer Anya von Bremzen is well-equipped as a travel host, feeding well-researched nuggets of anthropological, geographic, social and political history in bite-size chapters. She certainly has an ear for the quick sound bite and newsy hook that draws in not just the hardcore foodie, but also the curious passer-by.
The concept for National Dish is simple. Von Bremzen eats her way through signature dishes in each of the six countries she visits – France, Italy, Spain, Japan, Mexico and Turkey – dissecting the process by which a dish defines national identity.
Book review: Poetry and filth in A.K. Blakemore’s The Glutton set in revolutionary France
Inspired by the French myth of Tarrare, a French street performer and soldier with an insatiable appetite, A.K. Blakemore’s sophomore novel is a miasmatic re-imagination of a France in revolution, permeated thoroughly with the odour of poverty and the chaos of neglect.
Tarare – spelled with two rs in the book – is strangely afflicted with a constant hunger. His diet, including absolutely everything, ranges from tubs of tincture to live rats with fingers “frozen in an attitude of strangely human-seeming panic”.
It is a lifestyle that results in him exuding a stench impossible to mask, and he is consequently shunned everywhere, his depravity conspicuous.
Book review: Food scarcity haunts C Pam Zhang’s dystopian Land Of Milk And Honey
What’s a chef to do with no food to cook?
Years after a mysterious smog envelopes the world and destroys all crops and wildlife, an unnamed chef pursues the job of a lifetime – a private chef for an elite research institute rumoured to have brought ingredients and animals back from extinction through genetic experimentation.
The prose tantalises with rich, detailed descriptions of food and taste. But the profligate wastage of laboratory-grown produce by the chef’s rich employer and his daughter Aida is nauseating.
Recalling her first ventures into cooking, the chef says: “For myself, I made three-day braises and chose the most marbled meats, I played loose with butter and cream. My arteries were young, my life pooling before me, and I lapped, luxurious, from it.”
The Straits Times’ Weekly Bestsellers Jan 13
Atomic Habits by James Clear tops the Non-fiction list.
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