Book Reviews: Untangling My Chopsticks & Absinthe

I am squeezing in two short book reviews to complete the Books About Food reading challenge today. Interestingly, both books are centered around green beverages: green tea and absinthe. The first book, "Untangling My Chopsticks: A Culinary Sojourn in Kyoto", by Victoria Abbott Riccardi (NY: Broadway Books, 2003), recounts the author's year spent in Kyoto, Japan, learning about the art of kaiseki. Kaiseki is the traditional and highly ritualized series of foods to accompany green tea ceremonies and involves a series of small dishes of exquisitely prepared and garnished foods.

Riccardi lands in Kyoto without much knowledge of Japanese culture or language, but is fortunate to have some friends of friends to stay with until she finds other lodging, enrolls in language classes and snags a coveted spot in a prestigious tea kaiseki school where there is an American ex-pat to help her navigate the new culinary and language challenges she faces.

The kaiseki banquets she studies sound exquisite; they evolved from Buddhist monastery traditions into highly formal social dining banquets in which tastings of thick and thin whipped green tea are interspersed with samples of the freshest, seasonal dishes, exquisitely garnished. She also provides interesting glimpses of Japanese home cooking and ordinary restaurant fare, and includes many recipes easily adapted to Western kitchens.

Though this book is but a glimpse into a highly complex Japanese culinary tradition, it was a mouthwatering introduction and I will be referring back to it when attempting my own forays into Japanese cooking.



The concluding book for this Books About Food reading challenge is actually about a distilled spirit, and one which not only does not provide any nourishment butwas historically considered quite deadly in large doses. The spirit in question is Absinthe, that green spirit made from wormwood and the favorite tipple of many an artist, writer and dreamer in 19th century Europe, including Toulouse-Lautrec, Baudelaire, Rimbaud and Paul Verlaine.

The fascinating history of this often-outlawed beverage is fleshed out in "Absinthe: Sip of Seduction: A Contemporary Guide", by Betina J. Wittels and Robert Hermesch (Golden, CO: Speck Press, 2008). This revised edition is an entertaining look at the rituals of drinking this bitter spirit, which involve diluting it with water and straining it through an absinthe spoon and sugar cube to produce an opalescent, cloudy cocktail. Absinthe was perhaps the most vilified alcoholic beverage during the temperance movement that swept the West over the last century, associated as it was with the excesses of the bohemian lifestyle, but it has since become legal to imbibe in the United States and Europe again.

The book contains a wealth of illustrations of Art Nouveau posters, postcards, absinthe drinking paraphrenalia and photographs of Absinthe fans from Aleister Crowley to Johnny Depp, so this makes for an entertaining foray into the lore and truths about this infamous beverage.

This concludes my reading for this short but sweet Books About Food Reading Challenge. In addition to the two books reviewed succinctly above, I also enjoyed reading:

The Language of Baklava: A Memoir, by Diana Abu-Jaber

A Bowl of Red:The Classic Natural History of Chili Con Carne with Other Delectable Dishes of the Southwest, with Recipes and a Guide to Paper Napkin Restaurants by Frank X. Tolbert

Stealing Buddha's Dinner, by Bich Minh Nguyen

My original list of Books About Food was changed to suit my mood, but all were enjoyable and recommended reading. Now I am primed to read some more science and classics books. Off to the couch!

Book Review: Ravens in Winter by Bernd Heinrich

Ravens in Winter, written and illustrated by Bernd Heinrich (NY: Summit Books, 1989)

I just finished a great book about ravens and Nevermore will I look at these intelligent birds in the same light again. The author is a Professor of Zoology at the University of Vermont and has written other books about insects, owls, marathon running and ecology.

The book provides a great look at the social behavior of ravens and other birds, bears and creatures of the winter forest in New England, as well as an interesting glimpse into Heinrich's style of scientific observation. He displays his marathon training during the hardcore camping and activities of his first several winters of raven research. He is an Iron Man that sleeps in an unheated cabin during below zero weather, drives hundreds of miles through blizzards, gets up before dawn to shimmy up swaying pine trees to await his feathered research subjects and nonchalantly slices off pieces of raven-ravaged moose butt for supper. A more rugged scientist seems hard to imagine.

The author is dogged in his research and spends monotonous hours in his outdoor blinds watching for ravens to come to the thousands of pounds of slaughterhouse guts and roadkill carcasses he drags uphill on his weekend raven research sessions. He is equally disciplined in avoiding inferences from random observations and reading interpretations into one-time events. He attributes this to a single-minded avoidance of advancing theories without multiple evidence:

When I was very young and didn't "see" what seemed obvious to adults, I often thought I was stupid and unsuited for science. Now I sometimes wonder if that is why I make progress. The ability to invent interconnections is no advantage where the discovery of truth is an objective.

He has a somewhat dry writing style, but his heroics make for interesting reading and he certainly has a sense of humor about his unorthodox research methods. He drives through Maine during hunting season with a dead goat strapped to his hood noting that the beast, which is the same size and coloring as a deer doe, looks "good enough to tag". He enlists volunteer help in capturing and banding razor-beaked test by advertising free beer and a sheep roast at a "Raven Roundup" party.

You may not want to party with Dr. Heinrich but you have to admire his patience and determination and this book was an excellent start to my Science Books Challenge, where I intead to read six books about science in 2009 to expand my selection of reading matter and the content of my gray matter.

My Reading Goals for 2009

For the New Year, I have set out two reading goals for myself. I read entirely too many mysteries (I'm now working through Donna Leon's Inspector Brunetti series set in modern Venice; what great characters! what corruption! what great food!) so I would like to stretch myself a bit and read more widely. Here's what I plan to read in 2009 to expand my knowledge of the world and its literature:

Classic Novels:

Mrs. Dalloway, by Virginia Woolf
A Separate Peace, by John Knowles
Pere Goriot, by Honore de Balzac
O Pioneers!, by Willa Cather
Recollections, by Colette

I have never read anything by these authors before, so I will hopefully be able to proudly crow about them the next time some punk kid asks me about them at the shop.

Books about Food:

The Language of Baklava, by Diana Abu-Jaber
A Bowl of Red by Frank X. Tolbert
A Glutton for Punishment: Confessions of a Mercenary Eater by Jay Jacobs
Stealing Buddha's Dinner, by Bich Minh Nguyenn
We Are What We Ate: 24 Memories of Food, edited by Mark Winegardner

I read a lot of cookbooks and foodie novels for escapism, but I would like to know more about the social history of food, hence this challenge for myself. I have just finished Diana Abu-Jaber's book above for the Cook the Books club, and I have also found out that there is an organized Books About Food Challenge which I may join if I can get my butt in gear for the March 31st deadline.

Books about Science:

Bully for Brontosaurus, by Stephen Jay Gould
Ravens in Winter, by Bernd Heinrich
The Extinction Club, by Robert Twigger
The Barbary Plague: The Black Death in Victorian San Francisco, by Marilyn Chase
Equations of Eternity: Speculations on Consciousness, Meaning, and the Mathematical Rules that Orchestrate the Cosmos, by David Darling (this last selection will really test my resolve!)

There's a Science Books challenge for 2009 which asks readers to read only 3 books all year to help spread science literacy. I SHOULD be able to do that.

Back to the books....