Skirt Steak - Fried Apple Pie

Skirt Steak: Women Chefs on Standing the Heat and Staying in the Kitchen

By Charlotte Druckman

320 pages, Chronicle Books, 2012

It was necessary to write Skirt Steak. Reading it will make you realize just how necessary it was.

The book is as straightforward as its title suggests: food writer Charlotte Druckman interviewed 73 American women chefs on multiple aspects of their profession, and organized her findings by topic to paint a picture of the situation of women in the professional kitchen. While she does not quite manage to weave everything into a smooth narrative, Skirt Steak is a gold mine of information. The thoroughness and girth of the research accomplished by the author are commendable.

Perhaps inevitably, it sometimes feels a bit dry. There are sections where multiple direct quotes are dumped on us in succession. There are so many names dropped that, unless you are very familiar with the restaurant industry, you are likely to feel quite lost. Thankfully, there is a very useful index you can turn to, should you ever need to look up a specific chef. In this manner, this book can serve as a reference for future use.

Medium Raw - Chicken Laksa

Medium Raw: A Bloody Valentine to the World of Food and the People Who Cook

By Anthony Bourdain

281 pages, HarperCollins, 2010

It’s hard to not want to dislike Anthony Bourdain a lot of the time, but it’s harder to actually dislike him – and Medium Raw makes the latter even harder.

There were definitely things to dislike about Kitchen Confidential, the 2000 tell-all, no-holding-back, warts-and-all, *insert your own cliché* memoir/essay that made Bourdain a star. It was crude, it was arrogant, its tone often spiteful and vindictive. But it was also vigorous, playful and unapologetically, gleefully, loudly entertaining. It exposed the restaurant business as the rowdy, raucous, chaotic, macho environment we now all know it to be. Another of the book's saving graces was that, no matter how harsh Bourdain was about his peers and acquaintance­s in the business, he never set himself up to be any better. No matter what you think of his attitude and tone, the man is lucid about most things, including himself.

This trend continues in Medium Raw, a fairly disjointed series of essays about the world of food and Bourdain's journey through it. If anything, the tone is more measured, the author more humbled, more conciliatory. He explains the angry, frantic state of mind he was in when he wrote Kitchen Confidential. He addresses (and largely admits to) charges that he is no longer really a chef, and that he has been, overall, damn lucky in life. He nuances his much publicized hatred of the Food Network. He even finishes a biting chapter on Alice Waters, whom he clearly has no love for, with the concession that the lady is really probably right about most things that matter, and that she basically just annoys him. You want to know how much Bourdain has changed in ten years? There's an entire chapter devoted to how he is raising his two-year-old daughter.

About

I’m a recent PhD and scholar on Japanese popular visual culture, who also happens to have a strong interest in food. For several years, I ran the cooking blog The Chocolate Bunny, until I had my son (adorable, perfect, time-consuming little black hole that he is) and found myself with no time to test blog-worthy recipes (although I assure you, we still eat quite well).

Reading at the Table is a project I’d been mulling for a while: a blog strictly about food literature. Not cookbooks, because I have no room to store enough cookbooks to keep a blog alive, nor do I have the time to adequately test them. But essays, novels, manifestos, memoirs, comics – those are books I’ve been buying by the barrowful anyway. Reading at the Table is a space for me to keep track of these books, and reflect on them.

I don’t position myself as a critic, because I don’t take myself that seriously, nor do I consider myself an authority. But I love writing about books and food, and am just looking to pass on information and impressions. I also believe in keeping quiet if you can't say anything nice (unless something is so offensive you can't decently keep quiet). So, as entertaining as scathing reviews are, you won't find any here.

I’m not very good at keeping up with the very latest publications: I tend to buy books, then let them linger on my bookshelf (or e-reader) for a few weeks or months. Also, I became interested in food fairly late in the game. So some of the books reviewed here are in fact relatively old – which doesn’t mean they aren’t worth reading or writing about. My goal here is not to stay on top of breaking news, but rather to gradually build a portrait of food literature to this day.

I try to include a recipe and photos to go along with each review. My policy is to include full recipes written by others only if I’ve tweaked or modified them in any way; otherwise, I just give the reference. However, I make exceptions for recipes included in books that are not cookbooks, such as novels or memoirs. My rationale behind this is that people do not typically buy these books for the recipes.

Thank you for visiting!