Hundreds of new books enter our shop, Barbara-Jos Books to Cooks, every year. These are just the books about food. Please note, I dont actually refer to these books as cookbooks as many of these gems are not necessarily to be purchased for their recipes. I am sure you can imagine that as a bookseller of books about food, I cringe when people say they have too many cookbooks, and they dont use the recipes in the books they already own.
Long gone are the days when the average home had one book in the kitchen, filled with text only, short recipes to get our mothers and grandmothers through the daily regime of feeding their families.So many of the books published today are dedicated to ingredients, cultural differences in food, foraging, technique, and history. Then there are books to advise you about raising your backyard chickens and goats, growing your own vegetables, keeping bees, composting, making wine, and fermentation probably the most important knowledge we can ingest today.
This short list I present to you today is a wee representation of the books I love, and am proud to sell.
Every Grain of Rice, Simple Chinese Home Cooking by Fuchsia Dunlop. Bloomsbury. British Edition $53. Fuchsia is both a brilliant cook and writer of Chinese cuisine, being the first westerner to train at the Sichuan Higher Institute of Cuisine, and travelled and cooked around China for two decades.
Burma, Rivers of Flavour by Naomi Duguid. Random House Canada. $39.95 This book is a treat for us to discover the lives of Burmese people through the food they cook and eat.
The Art of Fermentation by Sandor Ellix Katz. Chelsea Green Publishing. $45. With an introduction by Michael Pollan, and 14 chapters beginning with Fermentation as a Coevolutionary Force, everything you need to know about fermentation, is between these 500 pages.
Roots: The Definitive Compendium by Diane Morgan. Chronicle Books. $40. When I realized that I could make pesto with the greens on the carrot root, and a delicious soup from the radish leaves, I knew this incredibly educational guide to root vegetables from around the globe was the perfect book to become number 456 on my shelf at home.
Whole Larder Love Grow Gather Hunt Cook by Rohan Anderson. Powerhouse Books. $39.95 The title and sub-title say it all about this book, but the tummy began to growl when I saw the recipe for Wild Duck Arancini.
Barbara-Jo McIntosh owns Barbara-jos Books to Cooks, 1740 W. 2nd, 604-688-6755.
