"Lunch" break

Lucky is the lady who can stop midday to have a proper meal. Employees at Peter Miller's Seattle bookshop do exactly that. For years, they have sat down and eaten lunch together, "in every season, in all weather, no matter the work that needs to be done that day." 

In his concise and quaint volume "Lunch at the Shop: The Art and Practice of the Midday Meal," Miller celebrates all that is good about lunch with colleagues. He encourages readers to "simply (take) part of the day back into (their) own hands, making it personal and a pleasure." 

These workplace lunches steer clear of take-out, opting instead for fresh pre-made foods that can be finished on site. The author aims for healthful and tasty items. 

He and his co-workers are privy to tartines, for example, open-faced sandwiches that are easily embellished with top-notch bread and a range of ingredients. "Fool with it," Miller suggests. "Sweeten it with a little fig spread, loosen it with salsa, sharpen it with a cheese or a mustard, smooth it with butter." 

Other dishes include a variety of salads paired with different vinaigrettes, and comforting soups. 

The book serves as a charming reminder that no matter how hectic the day or week, we still need occasional respites. With practical ideas and promising recipes, Miller gives us the tools to achieve that.  

(A version of this review appeared originally at Publishers Weekly.)

 

Seeing red

Deep, deep reds in honor of the red, white and blue.

"Save the Deli"

"This is a book about Jewish delicatessen, about deli's history and characters, its greatest triumphs, spectacular failures, and ultimately the very future of its existence. 

"This book is a look deep into the world of the Jewish deli, told through the histories and experiences of those who keep it alive. It is the tale of the immigrant counterman, the no-nonsense supplier, the kvetching customer, and the fourth-generation deli owner, all of whom are balancing the tastes of tradition with the necessities of a business. 

"It is a book about the economics of a nineteenth-century trade in the modern world and the pressures delicatessens face, financial and otherwise, that have caused many to disappear."

David Sax in "Save the Deli: In Search of Perfect Pastrami, Crusty Rye, and the Heart of Jewish Delicatessen"

Good taste

"The flavor of this abundant nation resides in its homegrown specialties and its factory-made treats alike, and in the many foods that we've adopted and adapted from the tables of the world.

"It's found in pimento cheese and bandage-wrapped Cheddar, apple cider and ginger ale, miso and tortillas and knishes, Coca-Cola and peppermint stick ice cream and whoopie pie.

"America has not one taste but a panoply of them, an immense multicultural sensory anthology of good things to eat and drink, commercial and artisanal, decadent and virtuous, silly and sublime."

Colman Andrews in "The Taste of America"

"Natural" goodness

Joe Dobrow charts the remarkable growth of natural foods over the past 15-plus years in an enlightening volume, "Natural Prophets: From Health Foods to Whole Foods - How the Pioneers of the Industry Changed the Way We Eat and Reshaped American Business."

Having worked with companies such as Fresh Fields, Whole Foods, Balducci's and Sprouts, the longtime marketing exec offers valuable insight on how consumer demands evolve and the ways in which organic food producers work to meet these changes. 

Dobrow introduces key moments and players, combining history and sociology with "biographical memoir and corporate profile." He explores the influence of widespread critiques of chemical agriculture such as Rachel Carson's "Silent Spring" and, more recently, Michael Pollan's "The Omnivore's Dilemma." 

The author also profiles forerunners behind some name brands, including Mo Siegel, who started Celestial Seasonings in Colorado, and Bob Moore, who turned Bob's Red Mill "into a $120 million business selling a wide variety of wholesome stone-ground grains, flours, and cereals," among others. 

Their stories prove interesting and their continued success reflects the increasing popularity of the industry as a whole. 

(A version of this review appeared originally at Publishers Weekly.)  

 

Like liquid gold

I opened a decades-old bottle of wine the other night, wanting to see if I could drink it or if it had secretly turned into vinegar. It was months after my father's funeral, when the grief had begun to subside.


The wine was a revelation. It still is.

It was fruity and quite mellow. It tasted bright and complex. It was eye-opening. Free of the tannins that sometimes accompanied wines I had, it went down smoothly. I drank two or three glasses effortlessly. Like water from a spring. Then, of course, the alcohol kicked in. 

***

The bottle had been among those in dusty cardboard boxes inside the garage, moved not long ago from the basement of my parents' house in Chinatown to my place in the Oakland hills.


To proceed with a seismic retrofit my mother wanted, we cleared out old mattresses, tattered board games, and items from earlier renovations. We didn't know what to do, however, with cases of wine my parents had also kept there.


My brother wondered if we could donate them. But the food bank, for example, he learned, didn't accept alcohol. He considered pouring wine down the sink before tossing the empty bottles into recycling. But that seemed drastic and extremely wasteful.


He said he wasn't a drinker. What would we do with so much? I drank wine sometimes and cooked with it, too, scanning shelves at Trader Joe's for interesting, affordable bottles. My brother insisted he did not drink. Soda, certainly, and juice nearly every day. But not wine. I told him he could always start.


We negotiated and compromised the way we negotiated every little thing. I would find room for the tattered boxes somewhere in the house, I said, at least temporarily. He would not chuck any bottles down the drain just yet.

***

My father owned a liquor store in San Francisco's Haight-Ashbury neighborhood decades ago, commuting across the bridge six days a week. 

Growing up, my sisters, brothers and I spent summers there. We stocked shelves and worked the cash register. We earned money, but were rewarded mostly with candy, ice cream and comic books.


We began to recognize California wine labels: Almaden, Inglenook, Charles Krug. We learned spellings and pronunciations for words like Merlot, Riesling and Sauvignon Blanc.


A woman on the way to her boyfriend's once asked my brother to recommend a good Chardonnay. He instinctively flagged our father over before slipping away from the conversation.


A man asked me once what went well with fish. I was no more than 13 perhaps. What could I tell him? I mean, I knew as much about varietal and vintage as the next child, which was not a lot. On the other hand, if there had been talk of Life Savers candy, It's-It ice-cream or Richie Rich.

***

Sometime in the 1980s, my father lost his lease. Rather than move the business, he retired altogether. He had worked 10-hour days for as long as he could remember. He needed a break.


He returned as much inventory as he could to distributors. The alcohol he still had at the end he brought home to Oakland. My parents put cases away in a corner of the basement.


Though it saddened my mother to close the store, she understood my father's decision. Besides, my siblings and I were high-school students then, anxious to start college. Would we even want the business? Could we handle the responsibility? We said no.

***

Years later, I returned to Haight-Ashbury, curious to see if the streets had changed. The sidewalks, for example, appeared as crowded as I remembered them, peopled, as always, by a wide cast of characters.


I entered the building that used to house my father's liquor store, happy to find it had since become a bookshop, one of the few remaining Bay Area independents.


In an instant, I flashed back to childhood. In my mind, what had once been there replaced all that was actually there. Instead of shelves filled with books, I saw shelves on my right lined with wine bottles. On my left, behind the cash register, shelves crowded with liquor bottles.


An employee, a woman in a brown T-shirt, must have noticed me standing, staring into the space. She asked if she could help me locate something in particular. Oh no, I replied. Thanks. I was just looking.

***

Growing up, I did not connect much with my father. We were not as close as we could have been. The fifth in a group of six children, maybe I got lost in the scrum. I don't know.


In the throes of adolescence, I pulled away. Or was he the one who resisted? The kind of man whose actions spoke louder than words perhaps, he kept opinions and feelings to himself.


On car rides home from school, I struggled to make conversation with my father. The radio became my salvation. I craved affection long before I knew I needed it.


I meet a man with a teen-age daughter. Separated from her mother, he tries hard to spend time with his child. I want to tell him to not stop trying, to never stop really. His daughter needs her father even if she pretends she doesn't, even when she resists. She needs him to guide her. She does.

***

A scene in the movie "Sideways" stops me cold. The DVD had been playing at my brother's place. In the exchange, Virginia Madsen talks with Paul Giamatti about her attraction to wine.


"I like to think about the life of wine," she tells him, "how it's a living thing. I like to think about what was going on the year the grapes were growing, how the sun was shining, if it rained. I like to think about all the people who tended and picked the grapes. And if it's an old wine, how many of them must be dead by now...”


It is a terrific encounter, a quiet, genuine moment between two key characters. I grab a pen and some paper, and take notes.

***

I hadn't thought before about any of that, about what it might have meant.


The wine I opened, I realized eventually, had been one of the last things left from my father's store, a part of his legacy and my personal history.


It represented his commitment, the way he earned a living to support my sisters, brothers and me. His hard work, coupled with my mother's frugality, helped to raise a family. Their sacrifice sent me to college across the country. It sent me on my way.


For the longest time, I wondered if my father actually cared. Nonchalant, he remained a mystery. Indecipherable. I didn't know how he felt or what he felt. I wracked my brain. But maybe his love had been there all along. I just didn't know it. Maybe I simply hadn't figured out where to look.


It was there when he sided with me after I bought blue jeans. My father convinced my mother to let me keep them, telling her I needed denim for winters on the East Coast. He sided with me when I wanted dark colors, to my mother's floral-print chagrin.


It was there at his kitchen table. He read the local paper every day when I worked there after college, scanning it for articles I had done. Had he been proud? He never said.


When he went to produce markets in Chinatown, it was there. He heard I would be home from grad school in Oregon and knew I liked the way my mother cooked eggplant, stir-fried quickly with ground pork, water, soy sauce, sugar and chile paste. He asked her to make my favorite dish.


He shared other foods, too, over the years, inviting my siblings and me not only for birthdays and holidays. These we expected. They were reasons to feast. But he called us for ordinary meals as well, on random weeknights. Just because.


And it was there when he held my hand those days he spent in the hospital. When the doctors spoke, we listened. I held his hand. He didn't pull away. I watched as he rested. I cried when he died.


Maybe his love had been there all along, bottled like liquid gold. There in the basement for me to discover and appreciate when I was good and ready. It might take years, even decades. But I would learn.


It had been there all along waiting for me to uncork and savor.


(A version of this essay appeared originally at www.culinate.com.)

Eating out

"How we understand ourselves as modern and civilized, how we have cultivated the types of social exchanges that seem proper and conventional, and how we have developed our appetites and chosen to enact them in the public arena are the main preoccupations that frame this book. 

"The popular practice of dining out is a means for exploring these concerns, as the restaurant itself is located squarely in the space between the private and public."

Joanne Finkelstein in "Fashioning Appetite: Restaurants and the Making of Modern Identity"

In a pickle

"Despite the fact that my first two cookbooks are always shelved with the jam making and canning books, I am a fan of kitchen tinkering of all stripes. I live for drying, salting, curing, marinating and brining. I am simply fascinated by the meditative practice of taking a foodstuff and transforming it with little more than salt or sugar, heat or moisture, time and magical bacteria.

"Enter the humble pickle. Although I love all of my kitchen creations the way a mother hen loves her flock, pickles have truly captured my heart (and my stomach!). I swear, I could live on little more than hot rice and cold pickles, provided they are crisp, flavorful, pungent and bright. It is only natural that, with so many Asian flavors spilling from my dinner bowl plus so many years of traveling to Asia and living there for a spell, my interest would turn to pickles of the Asian continent."

Karen Solomon in "Asian Pickles: Sweet, Sour, Salty, Cured and Fermented Preserves"

Crispy kale

Kale Chips

from Brendan Brazier's "Thrive Energy Cookbook"

1 to 2 bunches kale
1/4 to 1/3 cup olive oil or avocado oil
fleur de sel or sea salt

Preheat oven to 350 degrees F.

Tear the kale leaves from the thick stems and tear the leaves into bite-size pieces. 

Wash kale, thoroughly dry with a salad spinner or kitchen towel, and transfer to a large bowl. 

Drizzle kale with olive oil and toss well or gently rub to thoroughly coat leaves with oil. 

Spread kale in a single layer on a baking sheet; some slight overlapping is okay. Sprinkle with fleur de sel or sea salt to taste.

Bake until the edges are brown but not burnt, 10 to 15 minutes. Makes 2 servings.

"The Food Section"

Though James Beard and Craig Claiborne were widely known in food-writing circles, their female contemporaries went largely unrecognized. University of Central Florida associate professor Kimberly Voss hopes to rectify this. 

In her volume "The Food Section: Newspaper Women and the Culinary Community," she sheds substantial light on the contributions of newspaper food editors in the United States from the 1940s through the '70s, "when food was changing significantly due to developments in technology and a changing American palate."

Most of these journalists at the time were women. They wrote "about local stores, local restaurants, and local cooks." They reported on national food news as well, on poverty, nutrition, health standards and government policies. 

And they connected with their audiences. For instance, "exchange columns in which readers requested recipes were some of the most common, popular, and long-lasting features of the newspapers acting as a kind of early social media."

Unfortunately, the author veers occasionally into less-interesting territory. A discussion, for example, on "the first industry conferences for food editors and journalists" gets somewhat dull. As does one on the history of home economics as a course of academic study. Further focus on food sections in newspapers today would also have been appreciated. 

But these are small quibbles about an otherwise cogent examination of remarkable female journalists who served "an important role for their communities" over the years, women who effectively "reached consumers and cooks" and "covered the intersection of food and governmental regulation."

(A version of this review appeared originally at Publishers Weekly.)

The monster mash

Mashed Cauliflower

from Brooke McLay's "Almonds Every Which Way: More Than 150 Healthy & Delicious Almond Milk, Almond Flour, and Almond Butter Recipes"

1 large cauliflower
2 cloves roasted garlic (optional)
1 Tbsp. nutritional yeast, butter or Earth Balance
1/4 cup unsweetened almond milk
1/2 tsp. salt
1/2 tsp. coarsely ground black pepper

Cut the florets from the cauliflower.

Place the cauliflower florets in a large pot and cover them with water. Cover the pot and bring the water to a boil over high heat. Allow the cauliflower to boil until very tender, about 25 minutes.

Drain the cauliflower completely in a strainer, transfer to a large bowl, and add the garlic (if using), nutritional yeast, almond milk, salt and pepper to the bowl.

Use a hand blender to puree. If you don't have a hand blender, puree half of the cauliflower with the roasted garlic and almond milk in a blender, then transfer it to a stand mixer and beat the pureed cauliflower and remaining cauliflower together until it's reached the texture of mashed potatoes. Makes 4 servings.

Mom and me

An assortment of fond kitchen memories from across the country, Phyllis Pellman Good's "Mom and Me in the Kitchen: Memories of Our Mothers' Kitchens" reads like an extended Mother's Day card. 

It is an earnest reminder of relationships forged early on and the influences our parents have. But this sentimental look back, with so many different voices in such brief instances, proves unsatisfying. 

Reminiscences abound of mothers and mealtimes — when "stuffed shells, lasagna, chicken and rice dishes, and homemade tuna casserole made many appearances" — of itinerant childhoods and immigrant flavors. 

The women discuss everything from birthdays and cooking blunders: a seven-year-old gets a sunshine cake, "three layers with a wonderful custard between the layers" and soft yellow frosting; elsewhere a teenager asked to follow a recipe that called for a clove of garlic adds ground cloves and garlic instead. 

What Good's book does not provide, however, is significant context for the women's stories, so we never gain a strong enough sense of who they are as individuals. The collection doesn't lack for breadth but sorely lacks depth. It presents a composite sketch of motherhood that inevitably leaves us wanting more. 

(A version of this review appeared originally at Publishers Weekly.)

On opening Delancey

"Brandon was twenty-seven years old when we opened Delancey. I was thirty. I was married to him, but in a sense, I hardly knew him. 

"I didn't know that he had a head for business, or that he could lead people, or that, after going through the multi-year rigmarole of opening a restaurant, he would even still be interested in it. 

"And I didn't know that he would be right: that it would, in fact, realize everything that matters to us. I learned that only by letting him do it – 'letting' in the very loosest interpretation, through clenched teeth and with a certain amount of screaming."

Molly Wizenberg in "Delancey: A Man, a Woman, a Restaurant, a Marriage"

"Jennifer's Way"

"I now knew food was the key, but I was beginning to discover exactly how crucial it was - and how complex. It wasn't just gluten. It was dairy, and I suspected even more. I must have some food allergies, too. 

"The more I researched, the more I found out how common this is with celiac disease. When your immune system is in an elevated and hyperactive state, it can react to all kinds of foods. 

"I needed my immune system to calm down. I had a feeling it wouldn't be easy - but that it would start with food."

Jennifer Esposito in "Jennifer's Way: My Journey with Celiac Disease - What Doctors Don't Tell You and How You Can Learn to Live Again"

French eating

"The longer I lived in France, the more I ate. And the more I ate, the more questions I had. I yearned to discover French regional cuisine, and, I soon realized, the only way to truly understand it was to visit the regions themselves, to be curious, explore, taste, learn.
 
"In France dining is meant to be a special, pleasurable part of the day; food offers not only fuel for the body but also a connection - between the people who have joined you at the table, between the generations who have shared a recipe, between the terroir (the earth) and the culture and cuisine that have sprung from it. Separate from cooking, the very act of eating is in itself an art to master."
 
Ann Mah in "Mastering the Art of French Eating: Lessons in Food and Love From a Year in Paris"

Weekday cake

"A party without cake is really just a meeting." 

Julia Child

Beyond gluten

"I now knew food was the key, but I was beginning to discover exactly how crucial it was - and how complex. It wasn't just gluten. It was dairy, and I suspected even more. I must have some food allergies, too. 

"The more I researched, the more I found out how common this is with celiac disease. When your immune system is in an elevated and hyperactive state, it can react to all kinds of foods. I needed my immune system to calm down. I had a feeling it wouldn't be easy - but that it would start with food."

Jennifer Esposito in "Jennifer's Way: My Journey with Celiac Disease - What Doctors Don't Tell You and How You Can Learn to Live Again"

Hot cross bun

One a penny, two a penny...

His life in restaurants

"I grew up in restaurants. I don't mean that my parents owned or ran them - my father was a Hollywood screenwriter, my mother a onetime ingenue turned housewife and society dame - but they practically lived in restaurants themselves, and when they went out to eat, they often took me with them.

"Some of my earliest memories are of perching on a booster seat in a red or green leather booth at a table covered in thick white napery and crowded with silverware and glasses, and being waited on and fed and plied with Shirley Temples and told to sit up straight.

"I can still summon up a sensory impression of those evenings, romanticized, of course, and with the particulars of each occasion blurred hopelessly together, but vivid nonetheless: the ceaseless motion all around me, a choreography of waiters and busboys, arriving and departing guests; the reassuring clamor that suggested room-wide concord and contentment; the aromas intertwining in the air - cigarette smoke, Sterno, sizzling meat, coffee, the iodine-scented whisky in my father's glass, the floral sweetness of my mother's best perfume. 

"It all washed over me, and never really went away."

Colman Andrews in "My Usual Table: A Life in Restaurants"

"Paris to Provence"

"Although my family only lived a little more than two years in Provence with the goats and making cheese before returning to California where my parents became high school teachers, we returned every summer to our old stone farmhouse, leaving as soon as school got out, traveling there by various routes, and once settled in, exploring our world with day trips to the sea, to lakes, and to neighboring villages and castles. 

"It was there, during those long, lazy summers with my family, that I learned the smells of the forest as we gathered wild herbs, the taste of truly fresh fish and vegetables, and the pleasures of lingering over the table.

"Thus began my journey from Paris to Provence, starting and ending in Paris."

Ethel Brennan (with Sara Remington) in "Paris to Provence: Childhood Memories of Food & France"