Publication Date: November 10, 2009 | Series: Best Food Writing
Best Food Writing 2009 authoritatively and appealingly assembles the finest culinary prose from the past year’s books, magazines, newspapers, newsletters, and Web sites. This anthology features both established food writers and rising stars cooking up everything from erudite culinary history to food-inspired memoirs. By turns opinionated, evocative, sensuous, and just plain funny, it’s a tasty sampler to dip into time and again.
As in previous editions, Best Food Writing 2009 will include top-notch writers like Colman Andrews, Anthony Bourdain, Frank Bruni, Bill Buford, Madhur Jaffrey, Ruth Reichl, Raymond Sokolov, Calvin Trillin, Alice Waters, and many others.
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Look past the tinge of hyperbole, and Timothy Taylor makes a good point in the opening essay to this culinary collection when he asks, Who in the Western world isn’t a foodie now? He’s not complaining about crowded elbow room in the clubhouse of the elitely palated but, rather, pointing out that perhaps more than ever the simple act of consuming fuel has become a pervasive cultural obsession, bursting forth from glossy magazines, chic cookbooks, and more TV shows than an entire network devoted to food can carry. In this collection, just about every level of culinary curiosity gets a chance to shine, from Rachel Hutton’s ode to Spam to Mark Caro’s infiltration of underground foie gras cults. It’s patently ludicrous to state, as Eric LeMay does in his piece lamenting the FDA’s death grip on pasteurization, that when you eat cheese, you mainline the uncut elixir of life, but damn if it doesn’t make you want to rush to your nearest fromager, or at least make you wish you had one to begin with. --Ian Chipman
Holly Hughes writes travel guides, young adult fiction, and rock music reviews, and is the founding editor of the annual Best Food Writing anthologies. Born and raised in Indianapolis, Indiana, she graduated from Mount Holyoke College and has a graduate degree from Oxford University. She currently lives in New York City.
This is just one more in a series of wonderful, witty, thought-engaging books, culling the best food-oriented articles from a variety of sources. I have almost all of these books -- sadly, I got on the bandwagon a little too late to collect them all. Highly recommended reading -- these are excellent essays one might otherwise miss!
Honestly, I had never even heard of this book series before, but I am desperately trying to improve my writing, and on a whim picked up this book. I can honestly say, I really enjoyed this book. It contains a nice variety of essays and writings from a wide range of food writing. At times I was salivating over food being described, other times I was laughing at out at the descriptions of potlucks in the midwest making their way snaking across a room. You can read about the adventures of brining illegal cheese (meaning cheese made with raw milk) into the US, and so much more.
There are many different essays in this book varying in length so if you want to read for a few pages, or longer your appetite will be satisfied. It was wonderful to have all these food writing assembled into one book cover. I know I will be seeking out more from some of my favorite writers. I highly recommend those who love to read about food to pick this book up, you will imagine, salivate, and even chuckle as you read this book.
The Best Food Writing Series is about 10 years old and a joy to me each year. If one read all the food mags and blogs one would probably have read all these articles, but who has time for that? My favorites in the 2009 edition are: Kathleen Purvis on how country hams are made, Peter Jamison on wild mushroom foraging, and Douglas Bauer on his experiences with MFK Fisher. There is considerable variety in each edition and I enjoy re-visiting them in later years.
I have been a huge fan of the Best Food Writing anthology since the first edition came out in 2000. But this year I find that I just don't care about your adventures as a chef in a fancy restaurant, why you must be or cannot be a vegetarian, why foie gras is either nirvana or evil incarnate. I don't care about your locavore diet ot your small organic farm or what Michael Pollan thinks you should or shouldn't eat today.
In spite of my fussy mood, I still found this a satisfying collection. Instead of approaching it as a multi-course meal, as I have in past years, I treated this volume as a buffet, skipping and skimming some articles, and stopping to savor other essays.
Last year was a good one for budget dining. One of the essays here celebrated cheap steakhouses - Last of the Great $10 Steaks by Jason Sheehan. Another series of three articles from the New York Times, Kitchen Smackdown, challenged food writers to prepare a dinner party for six with a budget of no more than $50, with entertaining results. Other articles extolled the wonders of marshmallow fluff and Spam (separately), but I remain skeptical.
Two of my favorite pieces in this collection were The Last Meal by Todd Kliman and What We Hunger For by Douglas Bauer. They are similar essays, one about the author's father, the other about famous food writer M.F.K. Fisher, in which the authors reminisce about hunting for great meals together.
Another favorite essay was Too Much of a Mouthful, in which Tim Hayward rants about food that is unnecessarily difficult to eat. The sandwich which set him off was a beautiful presentation of delicious ingredients, but the roll was too large and crusty to eat without a knife and fork....
They Remember Home by Annia Ciezadlo introduced us to young Iraqis in Beirut who cook traditional Iraqi meals to keep their homesickness at bay. The Eggs and I by Francine Prose describes the simple pleasure of really fresh eggs.
This series is well worth your time if you have even a casual interest in food and food writing. As a serious reader I am usually disappointed in essay collections such as this becuase I have usually read most of the pieces previously. Not so with this series. The sources are wide ranging and the individual essays range stylistically from funny to serious, topics from obscure to well known. A great gift for food lovers.
Not one to grab books that are "collections" so to say (short stories, articles, and the like), I took the leap and picked this one up. I was not disappointed in the least. Filled with stories, ideas, and knowledge on a wealth of food related topics this read gave me plenty of inspiration and more than a few smiles, and I'll admit it, even a tear or two. I subscribe to a number of the magazines and blogs that are the source for many of the articles in here and am more often than not put off by "reviews" from out of touch (in my opinion) writers. Not the case at all in here. Fun people, speaking more often than not from the heart about something we all love very dearly. Should you have any hesitation in reading this book, ignore it, and enjoy.
I enjoy food. I enjoy eating food. I enjoy talking about food. So its only fitting that I would enjoy reading about all the different aspects of food in all its glory.
