Ma Gastronomie Fernand Point

An undisputed creative genius of French gastronomy and founder of the legendary La Pyramide restaurant, halfway between Paris and the Riviera, Point revolutionised French cuisine, building on its traditions and creating his own versions of the great classical dishes. His peers called him Le Roi, and during his reign there were few celebrities and no serious gourmet who didn't make the journey to dine at La Pyramide. His disciples, Paul Bocuse, Alain Chapel, and Jean and Pierre Troisgros, are among the world's greatest French chefs. As one of his three-star students, Francois Bise, said, 'Point was an artist. It's difficult to say enough about him.' In that spirit, it is not unfounded to assert that no cookbook collection is truly complete without a copy of Ma Gastronomie.

Since its first publication in France in 1969, Fernand Point's 'Ma Gastronomie' has taken its place among the true classics of French gastronomy. It is as celebrated for Point's wise, witty and provocative views on food as for his remarkable, inventive recipes, carefully compiled from his handwritten notes.

Two successful Swedish chefs combine their life stories with their culinary theories and favorite recipes offering instructions and ingredients for making delectable dishes including Swedish crayfish with late autumn flowers, roast duck glazed with white miso and salted caramel ice cream.

Featured on the Netflix documentary series Chef’s Table “Elemental, fundamental, and delicious” is how Anthony Bourdain describes the trailblazing live-fire cooking of Francis Mallmann. The New York Times called Mallmann’s first book, Seven Fires, “captivating” and “inspiring.” And now, in Mallmann on Fire, the passionate master of the Argentine grill takes us grilling in magical places—in winter’s snow, on mountaintops, on the beach, on the crowded streets of Manhattan, on a deserted island in Patagonia, in Paris, Brooklyn, Bolinas, Brazil—each locale inspiring new discoveries as revealed in 100 recipes for meals both intimate and outsized. We encounter legs of lamb and chicken hung from strings, coal-roasted delicata squash, roasted herbs, a parrillada of many fish, and all sorts of griddled and charred meats, vegetables, and fruits, plus rustic desserts cooked on the chapa and baked in wood-fired ovens. At every stop along the way there is something delicious to eat and a lesson to be learned about slowing down and enjoying the process, not just the result.

At the heart of Portland’s red-hot food scene is Toro Bravo, a Spanish-inspired restaurant whose small plates have attracted a fiercely loyal fan base. But to call Toro Bravo a Spanish restaurant doesn’t begin to tell the whole story. For chef John Gorham, each dish reflects a time, a place, a moment. For Gorham, food is more than mere sustenance. The Toro Bravo cookbook is an honest look behind the scenes: from Gorham’s birth to a teenage mother who struggled with drug addiction, to time spent in his grandfather’s crab-shack dance club, to formative visits to Spain, to becoming a father and opening a restaurant. Toro Bravo also includes 95 of the restaurant’s recipes, from simple salads to homemade chorizo, along with an array of techniques that will appeal to both the home cook and the most seasoned, forearm-burned chef.

The Way of Eating: Yuan Mei`s Manual of Gastronomy (Suiyuan Shidan) is, remarkably, the first English edition of one of the world’s most famous books about food. The Way of Eating is a treatise and a cookbook, written in the late eighteenth century by the Qing dynasty poet Yuan Mei. It includes recipes for well-known dishes such as birds nest and sharks fin, and offers modern readers an appealing perspective on Chinese history and culinary culture, and was translated and annotated by Sean J. S. Chen with editorial advice from E. N. Anderson and Jeffrey Riegel. This edition is in English but includes Chinese characters and vocabulary, and is 250 pages in length. The team’s aim was to convey the charm, humor, and erudition of one of China’s greatest writers. Also included are a glossary and a bibliography of additional sources. Chinese food expert Nicole Mones, author of the novel The Last Chinese Chef, has contributed an engaging introduction to Yuan Mei and his work. “This is far more than a cookbook: The Way of Eating is food history at its finest, a window into a fascinating and long-lost world.” Ruth Reichl, author of Save Me the Plums Translator and annotator Sean Jy-Shyang Chen is a scientific developer for computer assisted minimally invasive neurosurgery. This is his first publication outside the fields of science and engineering.