The Mad Feast An Ecstatic Tour Through Americas Food

Finalist for the Art of Eating Prize A richly illustrated culinary tour of the United States through fifty signature dishes, and a radical exploration of our gastronomic heritage. Following his critically acclaimed Preparing the Ghost, renowned essayist Matthew Gavin Frank takes on America’s food. In a surprising style reminiscent of Maggie Nelson or Mark Doty, Frank examines a quintessential dish in each state, interweaving the culinary with personal and cultural associations of each region. From key lime pie (Florida) to elk stew (Montana), The Mad Feast commemorates the unexpected origins of the familiar. Brazenly dissecting the myriad intersections between history and food, Frank, in this gorgeously designed volume, considers politics, sexuality, violence, grief, and pleasure: the cool, creamy whoopie pie evokes toughness in the face of New England winters, while the stewlike perloo serves up an exploration of food and race in the South. Tracing an unpredictable map of our collective appetites, The Mad Feast presents a beguiling flavor profile of the American spirit.

Finalist for the Art of Eating Prize A richly illustrated culinary tour of the United States through fifty signature dishes, and a radical exploration of our gastronomic heritage. Following his critically acclaimed Preparing the Ghost, renowned essayist Matthew Gavin Frank takes on America’s food. In a surprising style reminiscent of Maggie Nelson or Mark Doty, Frank examines a quintessential dish in each state, interweaving the culinary with personal and cultural associations of each region. From key lime pie (Florida) to elk stew (Montana), The Mad Feast commemorates the unexpected origins of the familiar. Brazenly dissecting the myriad intersections between history and food, Frank, in this gorgeously designed volume, considers politics, sexuality, violence, grief, and pleasure: the cool, creamy whoopie pie evokes toughness in the face of New England winters, while the stewlike perloo serves up an exploration of food and race in the South. Tracing an unpredictable map of our collective appetites, The Mad Feast presents a beguiling flavor profile of the American spirit.

With an ambitious sweep over two hundred years, Paul Freedman’s lavishly illustrated history shows that there actually is an American cuisine. For centuries, skeptical foreigners—and even millions of Americans—have believed there was no such thing as American cuisine. In recent decades, hamburgers, hot dogs, and pizza have been thought to define the nation’s palate. Not so, says food historian Paul Freedman, who demonstrates that there is an exuberant and diverse, if not always coherent, American cuisine that reflects the history of the nation itself. Combining historical rigor and culinary passion, Freedman underscores three recurrent themes—regionality, standardization, and variety—that shape a completely novel history of the United States. From the colonial period until after the Civil War, there was a patchwork of regional cooking styles that produced local standouts, such as gumbo from southern Louisiana, or clam chowder from New England. Later, this kind of regional identity was manipulated for historical effect, as in Southern cookbooks that mythologized gracious “plantation hospitality,” rendering invisible the African Americans who originated much of the region’s food. As the industrial revolution produced rapid changes in every sphere of life, the American palate dramatically shifted from local to processed. A new urban class clamored for convenient, modern meals and the freshness of regional cuisine disappeared, replaced by packaged and standardized products—such as canned peas, baloney, sliced white bread, and jarred baby food. By the early twentieth century, the era of homogenized American food was in full swing. Bolstered by nutrition “experts,” marketing consultants, and advertising executives, food companies convinced consumers that industrial food tasted fine and, more importantly, was convenient and nutritious. No group was more susceptible to the blandishments of advertisers than women, who were made feel that their husbands might stray if not satisfied with the meals provided at home. On the other hand, men wanted women to be svelte, sporty companions, not kitchen drudges. The solution companies offered was time-saving recipes using modern processed helpers. Men supposedly liked hearty food, while women were portrayed as fond of fussy, “dainty,” colorful, but tasteless dishes—tuna salad sandwiches, multicolored Jell-O, or artificial crab toppings. The 1970s saw the zenith of processed-food hegemony, but also the beginning of a food revolution in California. What became known as New American cuisine rejected the blandness of standardized food in favor of the actual taste and pleasure that seasonal, locally grown products provided. The result was a farm-to-table trend that continues to dominate. “A book to be savored” (Stephen Aron), American Cuisine is also a repository of anecdotes that will delight food lovers: how dry cereal was created by William Kellogg for people with digestive and low-energy problems; that chicken Parmesan, the beloved Italian favorite, is actually an American invention; and that Florida Key lime pie goes back only to the 1940s and was based on a recipe developed by Borden’s condensed milk. More emphatically, Freedman shows that American cuisine would be nowhere without the constant influx of immigrants, who have popularized everything from tacos to sushi rolls. “Impeccably researched, intellectually satisfying, and hugely readable” (Simon Majumdar), American Cuisine is a landmark work that sheds astonishing light on a history most of us thought we never had.

A New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice Selection Named one of the Best Books of the Year by Shelf Awareness Memory, mythology, and obsession collide in this “slyly charming” (New York Times Book Review) account of the giant squid. In 1874, Moses Harvey—eccentric Newfoundland reverend and amateur naturalist—was the first person to photograph the near-mythic giant squid, draping it over his shower curtain rod to display its magnitude. In Preparing the Ghost, what begins as Harvey’s story becomes spectacularly “slippery and many-armed” (NewYorker.com) as Matthew Gavin Frank winds his narrative tentacles around history, creative nonfiction, science, memoir, and meditations about the interrelated nature of them all. In his full-hearted, lyrical style, Frank weaves in playful forays about his trip to Harvey’s Newfoundland home, his own childhood and family history, and a catalog of peculiar facts that recall Melville ’s story of obsession with another deep-sea dwelling leviathan. “Totally original and haunting” (Flavorwire), Preparing the Ghost is a delightfully unpredictable inquiry into the big, beautiful human impulse to obsess.

After eight months in his childhood home helping his mother through her bout with cancer, Matthew Frank and his wife were themselves desperate for comfort. They found sanctuary in the most unlikely place—amid a collection of outcasts and eccentrics on a plot of land miles outside their comfort zone: a “mostly medical” marijuana farm in California. Pot Farm details the strange, sublime, and sometimes dangerous goings-on at Weckman Farm, a place with hidden politics and social hierarchies, populated by recovering drug addicts, alternative healers, pseudo-hippie kids, and medical marijuana users looking to give back. There is also Lady Wanda, the massive, elusive, wealthy, and heavily armed businesswoman who owns the farm and runs it from beneath a housedress and a hat of peacock feathers. Frank explores the various roles that allow this industry to work—from field pickers to tractor drivers, cooks to yoga instructors, managers to snipers, illegal immigrants to legal revisionists, and the delivery crew to the hospice workers on the other end. His book also looks at the blurry legislation regulating the marijuana industry as well as the day-to-day logistics of running such an operation and all the relationships that brings into play. Through firsthand observations and experiences (some influenced by the farm’s cash crop), interviews, and research, Pot Farm exposes a thriving but unsung faction of contemporary American culture.

Four decades of memories from a gastronome who witnessed the food revolution from the (well-provisioned) trenches—a delicious tour through contemporary food history. When Raymond Sokolov became food editor of The New York Times in 1971, he began a long, memorable career as restaurant critic, food historian, and author. Here he traces the food scene he reported on in America and abroad, from his pathbreaking dispatches on nouvelle cuisine chefs like Paul Bocuse and Michel Guérard in France to the rise of contemporary American food stars like Thomas Keller and Grant Achatz, and the fruitful collision of science and cooking in the kitchens of El Bulli in Spain, the Fat Duck outside London, and Copenhagen’s gnarly Noma. Sokolov invites readers to join him as a privileged observer of the most transformative period in the history of cuisine with this personal narrative of the sensual education of an accidental gourmet. We dine out with him at temples of haute cuisine like New York’s Lutèce but also at a pioneering outpost of Sichuan food in a gas station in New Jersey, at a raunchy Texas chili cookoff, and at a backwoods barbecue shack in Alabama, as well as at three-star restaurants from Paris to Las Vegas. Steal the Menu is, above all, an entertaining and engaging account of a tumultuous period of globalizing food ideas and frontier-crossing ingredients that produced the unprecedentedly rich and diverse way of eating we enjoy today.

“Unforgettable. . . . An outstanding adventure in its lyrical, utterly compelling, and heartbreaking investigations of the world of diamond smuggling.” —Aimee Nezhukumatathil For nearly eighty years, a huge portion of coastal South Africa was closed off to the public. With many of its pits now deemed “overmined” and abandoned, American journalist Matthew Gavin Frank sets out across the infamous Diamond Coast to investigate an illicit trade that supplies a global market. Immediately, he became intrigued by the ingenious methods used in facilitating smuggling particularly, the illegal act of sneaking carrier pigeons onto mine property, affixing diamonds to their feet, and sending them into the air. Entering Die Sperrgebiet (“The Forbidden Zone”) is like entering an eerie ghost town, but Frank is surprised by the number of people willing—even eager—to talk with him. Soon he meets Msizi, a young diamond digger, and his pigeon, Bartholomew, who helps him steal diamonds. It’s a deadly game: pigeons are shot on sight by mine security, and Msizi knows of smugglers who have disappeared because of their crimes. For this, Msizi blames “Mr. Lester,” an evil tall-tale figure of mythic proportions. From the mining towns of Alexander Bay and Port Nolloth, through the “halfway” desert, to Kleinzee’s shores littered with shipwrecks, Frank investigates a long overlooked story. Weaving interviews with local diamond miners who raise pigeons in secret with harrowing anecdotes from former heads of security, environmental managers, and vigilante pigeon hunters, Frank reveals how these feathered bandits became outlaws in every mining town. Interwoven throughout this obsessive quest are epic legends in which pigeons and diamonds intersect, such as that of Krishna’s famed diamond Koh-i-Noor, the Mountain of Light, and that of the Cherokee serpent Uktena. In these strange connections, where truth forever tangles with the lore of centuries past, Frank is able to contextualize the personal grief that sent him, with his wife Louisa in the passenger seat, on this enlightening journey across parched lands. Blending elements of reportage, memoir, and incantation, Flight of the Diamond Smugglers is a rare and remarkable portrait of exploitation and greed in one of the most dangerous areas of coastal South Africa. With his sovereign prose and insatiable curiosity, Matthew Gavin Frank “reminds us that the world is a place of wonder if only we look” (Toby Muse).

Trust is inherent in travel. We ask a stranger for directions, or for a ride. We live among people whose language, culture, and motivations we don't understand. Trust binds us to another with an intoxicating energy; it is brave, giddy, joyous, and lustful. A sudden attraction careens into sexual surrender, and trust becomes unconditional. Trust laughs at danger and leaps into the unknown. The author of Abuses and Foreign Bodies, Alphonso Lingis has traveled the globe for many years, and in Trust he reflects on journeys from Latin America to Asia to Antarctica. Whether feeding chocolate sauce and tuna to the baboons who visit his campsite in Ethiopia, celebrating the millennial New Year in Mongolia, or indulging in a passionate love affair in Vietnam, Lingis evaluates what happens around him and how it affects him and others. From these experiences he gains new understandings about spirituality, masculinity, love, death, ecstasy, and change. In the tradition of such international travelers as Paul Theroux, Pico Iyer, and Ryszard Kapuscinski, and with insight reminiscent of John Berger and Joan Didion, Lingis shares both the private revelations and the universal connections he acquires on his exotic journeys. "Travel far enough," he concludes, "and we find ourselves happily back in the infantile world"-where trust is ultimate. Alphonso Lingis is author of The Community of Those Who Have Nothing in Common, Dangerous Emotions, Abuses, and Foreign Bodies. He is professor emeritus of philosophy at Pennsylvania State University.

Winner of the 13th Annual Spirited Award, for Best New Book on Drinks Culture, History or Spirits A history of the Lost Generation in 1920s Paris told through the lens of the cocktails they loved In the Prohibition era, American cocktail enthusiasts flocked to the one place that would have them--Paris. In this sweeping look at the City of Light, cocktail historian Philip Greene follows the notable American ex-pats who made themselves at home in Parisian cafes and bars, from Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Gertrude Stein to Picasso, Coco Chanel, Cole Porter, and many more. A Drinkable Feast reveals the history of more than 50 cocktails: who was imbibing them, where they were made popular, and how to make them yourself from the original recipes of nearly a century ago. Filled with anecdotes and photos of the major players of the day, you'll feel as if you were there yourself, walking down the boulevards with the Lost Generation.

“I’m drenched in cream, marinated in wine, basted in cognac, and thoroughly buttered by the end of The Alice B. Toklas Cook Book.” —Eula Biss, New York Times bestselling author of Having and Being Had A beautiful new edition of the classic culinary memoir by Alice B. Toklas, Gertrude Stein’s romantic partner, with a new introduction by beloved culinary voice Ruth Reichl. Restaurant kitchens have long been dominated by men, but, as of late, there has been an explosion of interest in the many women chefs who are revolutionizing the culinary game. And, alongside that interest, an accompanying appetite for smart, well-crafted culinary memoirs by female trailblazers in food. Nearly 70 years earlier, there was Alice. When Alice B. Toklas was asked to write a memoir, she initially refused. Instead, she wrote The Alice B. Toklas Cook Book, a sharply written, deliciously rich cookbook memorializing meals and recipes shared by Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Wilder, Matisse, and Picasso—and of course by Alice and Gertrude themselves. While The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas—penned by Gertrude Stein—adds vivid detail to Alice’s life, this cookbook paints a richer, more joyous depiction: a celebration of a lifetime in pursuit of culinary delights. In this cookbook, Alice supplies recipes inspired by her travels, accompanied by amusing tales of her and Gertrude’s lives together. In “Murder in the Kitchen,” Alice describes the first carp she killed, after which she immediately lit up a cigarette and waited for the police to come and haul her away; in “Dishes for Artists,” she describes her hunt for the perfect recipe to fit Picasso’s peculiar diet; and, of course, in “Recipes from Friends,” she provides the recipe for “Haschich Fudge,” which she notes may often be accompanied by “ecstatic reveries and extensions of one’s personality on several simultaneous planes.” With a heartwarming introduction from Gourmet’s famed Editor-in-Chief Ruth Reichl, this much-loved, culinary classic is sure to resonate with food lovers and literary folk alike.