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.

Yes, Chef - Gravlax

Yes, Chef: A Memoir

By Marcus Samuelsson and Veronica Chambers

336 pages, Random House, 2013

Chef memoirs can get repetitive after a while. The chef-to-be is initiated to the pleasures of cooking at a young age, either by an untrained yet gifted older relative, or through a multitude of influences. They go on to study in some culinary institution, where at some point they are yelled at, then do grunt work in a kitchen, where they get yelled at some more and learn to deal with the gruelling physical labour and surrounding machismo that come with the job. Then comes the reward, in some form or another, for all their hard work and daring.

I am, of course, exaggerating. Yet the chef’s journey, by this point, has become familiar to most readers interested in the genre. How, then, can one stand out? After all, not everyone has Gabrielle Hamilton’s insight and talent, or Anthony Bourdain’s bravado. Marcus Samuelsson’s memoir, Yes, Chef, stands out through the sheer uniqueness of its author’s personal journey, as well as the warmth and family love that pervades it.

The Telling Room - Salted Almonds

The Telling Room: A Tale of Love, Betrayal, Revenge, and the World’s Greatest Piece of Cheese

By Michael Paterniti

368 pages, Random House, 2013

An entire book, and a rather longish one at that, revolving entirely around a single cheese? How could I resist?

The Telling Room’s author, Michael Paterniti, may have started off writing this book as an outside observer, but the resulting book is a deeply personal one – and good thing, too, because I believe that is what ultimately saves the book.

Paterniti first reads about Pàramo de Guzmàn, the fabled Spanish cheese in the title, as a college student in the early nineties. Although he cannot afford to taste this wonder himself at the time, he is struck by the description of the cheese’s fabrication, a painstaking process filled with care and patience, led by a single old-fashioned cheesemaker in a tiny village in the Spanish region of Castile. The projected purity of the finished product makes a lasting impression on the author.

The Lost Art of Feeding Kids - Minestrone

The Lost Art of Feeding Kids: What Italy Taught Me About Why Kids Need Real Food

By Jeannie Marshall

240 pages, Beacon Press, 2014

When I spotted Jeannie Marshall’s The Lost Artof Feeding Kids, I felt that not only did I need to read it, I needed to go against my usual pattern of letting a new book gather dust on my bookshelf for months or even years before getting around to it. Because I have a kid I need to feed, and although I believed I was doing a decent job at it, it couldn’t hurt to get more information, or at least validation. I’ve said it before: I detest parenting books. The idea of a manual for raising your child irks me. But I have seen so many picky toddlers, so many little (and not so little) ones who seem to subsist on junk food and empty calories, that I made an exception for this one. It’s not really a parenting book anyway, more like a manifesto.

So, what did I learn? I am indeed doing a decent job at feeding my toddler. But according to this book, I could be doing better.

The Year of Eating Dangerously - Soft-shell crabs

The Year of Eating Dangerously: A Global Adventure in Search of Culinary Extremes

By Tom Parker Bowles

374 pages, St. Martin’s Press, 2007 (Ebury, 2006)

The year was 2008. I was just starting to be more seriously interested in food. While browsing in a bookstore, I glimpsed this book on the discount table (sorry, Mr. Parker Bowles) and bought it, as I often do, on impulse. I emerged from reading it a more erudite person; but would that still be the case today?

British food writer Tom Parker Bowles’ The Year of Eating Dangerously chronicles his adventures as he travels the world with a twofold goal: to see how local food cultures are standing up to globalization, and to try dishes that, while commonplace in some regions, strike the Western imagination as strange or repulsive.

Flipping through the book now, five years my first reading, I found myself wondering which has changed more in that time: food culture, or me?