Summer Culinary Reading List

Julie D. has posted her summer culinary reading list. Here are some of mine.

• Heat : An Amateur's Adventures as Kitchen Slave, Line Cook, Pasta-Maker, and Apprentice to a Dante-Quoting Butcher in Tuscany. The book is receiving a lot of favorable reviews. Here's a snippet from a review by Anthony Bourdain:
  
  First, watching the author, an untrained, inexperienced and middle-aged desk jockey slowly transform into not just a useful line cook--but an extraordinarily knowledgeable one is pure pleasure. That he chooses to do so primarily in the notoriously difficult, cramped kitchens of New York's three star Babbo provides further sado-masochistic fun. Buford not only accurately and hilariously describes the painfully acquired techniques of the professional cook (and his own humiliations), but chronicles as well the mental changes--the "kitchen awareness" and peculiar world view necessary to the kitchen dweller. By end of book, he's even talking like a line cook.
  
• The Omnivore's Dilemma : A Natural History of Four Meals. Author Michael Pollan looks at our "national eating disorder."
  
• How to Be a Domestic Goddess: Baking and the Art of Comfort Cooking, by Nigella Lawson. A gift from my sister in law a couple Christmases ago, I'm finally sitting down and marking recipes to try. There are many, confound it! One thing I really like is Lawson's low-stress approach to cooking.
  
• Falling Cloudberries, by Tessa Kiros. I commented on the book in a previous post. I think the first recipe that I try will be those cinnamon-cardamom buns.
  
• The Making of a Chef: Mastering Heat at the Culinary Institute, by Michael Ruhlman. I worked in restaurants for a number of years, and I enjoy books that go behind the scenes. Also, Julie D. recommended it!
  
• The Cooking of Southwest France : Recipes from France's Magnificent Rustic Cuisine, by Paula Wolfert. The book is considered a classic on the cuisine of the region. No doubt Master Chow will be thrilled by the book's prodigious use of pork and duck fat. I don't know that I'll be cooking much from it in the summer, but I will use it to prepare for my fall culinary experiments.
  
• The Breath of a Wok : Unlocking the Spirit of Chinese Wok Cooking Through Recipes and Lore, by Grace Young. With a name like "Madam Chow," are you surprised?