Category: book Nook
Tasty memoirs are on the menu this season
By Carol Memmott, USA TODAY
Chefs and food critics are serving up a veritable feast of words this
spring.
A groaning sideboard of memoirs is being published, beginning with My Life
in France by Julia Child with Alex Prud'homme (Knopf, $25.95), on sale
Tuesday.
Grandnephew of Child's husband, Paul, Prud'homme began working on the book
with Child in 2003 when she was 91. She died the next year. Prud'homme
finished
the book last year with Child's longtime editor, Judith Jones.
My Life in France is Child's story of moving to Paris with Paul in 1948, her
studies at the Cordon Bleu and writing her most famous book, Mastering the
Art of French Cooking, which was published in 1961.
Julie Powell, 32, author of last year's best-selling memoir Julie & Julia:
365 Days, 524 Recipes, 1 Tiny Apartment Kitchen, which chronicles a year she
spent cooking all the recipes in Mastering the Art of French Cooking, says
enduring interest in Child can be traced to her love of life and the joy she
discovered in cooking.
"Mastering the Art deeply influenced the generation that was in its early
20s when it was first published," she says. "It was a watershed moment in
the
way people viewed cooking. It was no longer seen as a chore but as an art,
and that you could get great joy from it.
"The pleasure she took from life was inspiring. We may not be able to cook
like she could, but it is her great enthusiasm and joy that affects us."
Also coming up:
•Insatiable: Tales from a Life of Delicious Excess by Gael Greene (Warner,
$25.95, Thursday). New York magazine recounts Greene's eating and erotic
adventures,
as well as her encounters with some iconic chefs, including James Beard and
Craig Claiborne.
•The Reach of a Chef: Beyond the Kitchen by Michael Ruhlman (Viking, $27.95,
May 18). Best-selling author of The Making of a Chef and The Soul of a Chef,
Ruhlman delves into the kitchens and minds of celebrity chefs, including
Emeril Lagasse, Rachael Ray, Masa Takayama, Bobby Flay and Thomas Keller.
•The Nasty Bits: Collected Varietal Cuts, Useable Trim, Scraps, and Bones by
Anthony Bourdain (Bloomsbury, $24.95, May 24). He wowed foodies with 2000's
Kitchen Confidential: Adventures in the Culinary Underbelly. Bits is dish on
celeb chefs, butchering a seal and "fanatical animal rights activists."
•Heat: An Amateur's Adventures as Kitchen Slave, Line Cook, Pasta-Maker, and
Apprentice to a Dante-Quoting Butcher in Tuscany by Bill Buford (Knopf,
$24.95,
June 13). A staff writer for The New Yorker, Buford spent three years
working as an unpaid apprentice at Mario Batali's New York restaurant Babbo
where
he began as a "kitchen bitch" and graduated to line cook.
Posted 4/3/2006 10:28 PM
Siounds cool.