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Canwest News Service
Martha Stewart's Dinner at Home
By Martha Stewart
(Porter; 272 pp.; $43)
Don't sneer at the obviousness of this choice for the most cook-pleasing book this holiday season. We receive dozens of cookbooks at this time of the year, but the one that's been drawing the most covetous looks around the Books department is this one. Not surprising, really, because they don't get more foodie friendly than our Martha. Which is to say, her recipes really work — and there are 52 of them in this volume.
Over the course of the year, we also liked these food-oriented books:
Cooking Dirty: A Story of Life, Sex, Love and Death in the Kitchen
By Jason Sheehan
(Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 355 pp.; $26)
Sheehan, a food writer in Denver, has cooked in about 30 restaurants, and this is his account of his life in the kitchen — from washing dishes at a pizza parlour in his hometown of Rochester, N.Y., to working at Jimmy's Crab Shack in Florida. Sheehan's hilarious and profane memoir is as finely honed as the expensive knives he carries with him to each new job. Vick Mickunas, Dayton Daily News
Everything But the Squeal: Eating the Whole Hog in Northern Spain
By John Barlow
(Farrar, Straus and Giroux; 306 pp.; $27.50).
The story of food writer and memoirist John Barlow's yearlong mission to travel around the Spanish province of Galicia, and sample every part of the pig. He goes to a boiled hog's head festival, discovers that the famed Celtic pig is not extinct and attends a matanza, a multi-family pig kill. He plumbs the very soul of the Galician pork-eater, and it is a satisfying exploration." Liane Faulder, Edmonton Journal
Sex, Death and Oysters: A Half-Shell Lover's World Tour
By Robb Walsh
(Counterpoint; 288 pp.; $32.50)
This is noted food writer Walsh's quest to understand the oyster cultures of the world, and to taste every oyster-producing nation's half-shelled treasures. To this end, he travels from the Gulf Coast, where most of America's oysters come from, to the coast of Ireland, where he drank Guinness and ate thoroughly decent oysters with "a bunch of crazy Irishmen." He figures that if you want to understand Western culture, you must first understand the oyster. Ariel Barkhurst, San Antonio Express-News
Drink: A Cultural History of Alcohol
By Iain Gately
(Gotham; 478 pp.; $33)
The British author calls alcohol the "equivocal liquid," and his exploration of our love-hate relationship with it is by turns entertaining, inspiring, sobering, informative and simply fascinating. From the archeological evidence of fermented potables in northern China nearly 10,000 years ago to the notion that American rap culture has been the salvation of France's Champagne and Cognac industries with its taste for both pricey libations, Drink covers it all. Janice Kennedy, Ottawa Citizen
