The Great American Food Almanac

Fascinating writing and over 1,000 illustrations offer useful information on subjects from airline food to barbecue tips and maple syrup to table manners. Includes interesting lists of trivia and facts, consumer groups, information sources, mail order sources, and book recommendations.

Home cooks and gourmets, chefs and restaurateurs, epicures, and simple food lovers of all stripes will delight in this smorgasbord of the history and culture of food and drink. Professor of Culinary History Andrew Smith and nearly 200 authors bring together in 770 entries the scholarship on wide-ranging topics from airline and funeral food to fad diets and fast food; drinks like lemonade, Kool-Aid, and Tang; foodstuffs like Jell-O, Twinkies, and Spam; and Dagwood, hoagie, and Sloppy Joe sandwiches.

The Food History Almanac covers 365 days of the year, with information and anecdotes relating to food history from around the world from medieval times to the present. The daily entries include such topics as celebrations; significant food-related moments in history from the fields of science and technology, exploration and discovery, travel, literature, hotel and restaurant history, and military history; menus from famous and infamous meals across a wide spectrum, from extravagant royal banquets to war rations and prison fare; birthdays of important people in the food field; and publication dates for important cookbooks and food texts and “first known” recipes. Food historian Janet Clarkson has drawn from her vast compendium of historical cookbooks, food texts, scholarly articles, journals, diaries, ships’ logs, letters, official reports, and newspaper and magazine articles to bring food history alive. History buffs, foodies, students doing reports, and curious readers will find it a constant delight. An introduction, list of recipes, selected bibliography, and set index, plus a number of period illustrations are added value.

Do you want to turn your passion for food into a career? Take a bite out of the food world with help from the experts in this first-of-its-kind What Color Is Your Parachute? for food related careers. Maybe you're considering culinary school, maybe you're about to graduate, or maybe you're looking for an exciting career change. How can you translate your zest for flavor into a satisfying profession? Should you become a chef or open a specialty foods shop, write cookbooks or try your hand at food styling? Culinary careers are as varied as they are fascinating—the only challenge is deciding which one is right for you. Filled with advice from food-world pros including luminaries such as Alice Waters, Chris Kimball, Betty Fussell and Darra Goldstein. Food Jobs will set you behind the stove of your dream career. Chalmers provides essential information for getting started including testimonials from the best in the field, like Bobby Flay, Todd English, Gordon Hamersly, Francois Payard, Danny Meyer, Anthony Bourdain, and more.

Anyone who can understand the reasoning behind basic cooking techniques can become a creative, relaxed, and confident cook. Chalmers takes the would-be chef through how the addition or substitution of a few ingredients can transform a simple dish into a culinary masterpiece. The Confident Cook, invaluable to experienced cooks as well as to beginners, demonstrates that in fact there are only four or five basic methods of cooking food. Once mastered, these basic methods can be used with many different ingredients to create countless dishes. Chalmers shows how beef stew, braised veal, coq au vin, and a vegetable casserole, for example, are similar in their preparation; how a simple beef stew can become a hearty Mulligan, a Belgian carbonnade, a French boeuf bourguingnon, or your own less classic invention. More important, she shows how you can whip up something delectable from whatever supplies you have available without being tied to a recipe with specified ingredients. About two hundred recipes are given with logical and practical directions, and some seventy-five original line drawings clearly illustrate each technique and some of the finished dishes. But the heart of this book is the information that makes it possible to dispense altogether with recipes and to start experimenting—confidently and successfully—with your own creative cooking ideas.