What Are You Reading?

Delicious reads for food lovers--even if they don't cook!

As product manager of Mariani, the 100-year-old fruit and nut purveyors in Vacaville, Lisa Goshgarian says she considered herself a foodie. “At least I thought I was until I read Bill Buford’s Heat (Alfred A. Knopf, $25.95). I’d done some catering. I subscribe to Bon Appetit magazine. I love fou-fou restaurants, much to my husband’s dismay. But this book was a revelation!
    “I don’t read a lot of nonfiction so I had to remind myself that these are real people. I thought, ‘Holy moly—I can’t believe this is happening—that this is reality.’ Mario Batali and the other chefs come off as such characters. The way Buford tells their stories makes them seem larger than life.”
    Buford’s book is part memoir, part biography and part tutorial, with narratives that blend kitchen secrets and high-end restaurant gossip. Buford’s tale begins as a tantalizing glimpse into one of America’s most-lauded Italian restaurants—Batali’s Babbo in New York City—and evolves into an amusing chronicle of Buford’s three-year plunge into the world of professional cooking. Goshgarian says Heat really spoke to her.
    “Buford’s experiences gave me insight into his humanity. You don’t realize your own humanity until you see someone else succeed or fail.” The book delivers a serious meditation on why food matters and how a culture’s history is reflected in its cuisine. While Goshgarian recommends Heat for “people who are cooks and food lovers,” there really is something for everyone: well-drawn characters, loony antics and a journey to understanding our passion for handmade food.

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In Blithe Tomato (Heyday Books, $15), local author Mike Madison delivers a behind-the-scenes look into farmers markets while unmasking the colorful personalities of vendors and customers alike. Madison has been raising organic flowers, melons, olives and apricots in Winters and selling them at the Davis Farmers Market for 20 years. He turns his keen observations into a series of essays and vignettes that paint a group portrait of the farmers market culture. The book is filled with the eccentrics, recluses and anarchists who grow our food and populate our farmers markets. Each story seems rooted in everyday scenes of a farmer’s life, often blossoming into a thought-provoking observation on what’s gone awry with Americans’ views on farming and food.
    His essays on his love of nature and the earth’s abundance add warmth and humor. Madison’s writing is tart yet sweet, robust and memorable, much like the fruit for which the book is titled. His superb storytelling is filled with passion, outrage and playful intelligence. Blithe Tomato is perfect for food fanatics, gardeners and farmers market enthusiasts.
    Food writer Gael Greene unveils her hot pursuit of food and men as restaurant critic for New York  magazine in her memoir Insatiable: Tales from a Life of Delicious Excess (Warner Books, $25.95). Greene chronicled the city’s food society, especially the emerging community of French restaurants (Le Pavillon, Lutèce, Le Bernardin) from 1968 to 2000. Her fierce wit and sensuous prose changed the way Americans thought about food, just when eating well was becoming a national obsession. This anecdote-filled memoir documents food eaten and wine drunk with breathless descriptions of dalliances, travel and favorite fashions. She spills the beans on her trysts with Burt Reynolds, Clint Eastwood and Elvis, but is remarkably circumspect about other liaisons with dozens of culinary figures.
    This is Greene’s love letter to food, written in gossipy prose. Sprinkled with more than a dozen recipes, the book delivers the goods on the life Greene invented for herself as a food critic and bon vivant, a life many of us would have loved to live. Insatiable is sexy without being pornographic—if there’s one thing Greene has plenty of, it’s good taste.
    The United States of Arugula: How We Became a Gourmet Nation (Broadway, $26) by David Kamp tells the rich, raucous and irresistible story of how America changed its views and attitudes about food. Kamp, a Vanity Fair magazine contributing editor and self-described foodie, skillfully reveals how personalities like James Beard, Julia Child and Alice Waters turned haute cuisine into social history. The book addresses the chasm between a population that relies on fast food and those who savor gourmet cooking, while uncovering how America’s diet went from time-saving and nutritionally bereft (think Wonder Bread and Shake ‘n’ Bake) to gourmet in every way.
    Kamp recounts how, in the 1960s, restaurant reviews became respectable journalism and dining out was the new status symbol. Whatever you call this food phenomenon—the American Food Revolution or Invasion of the Foodies—the people who made it happen are some of the most colorful and charismatic people in recent history. America’s transformation into a gourmet nation may be the cultural success story of our time, and David Kamp delivers it with delicious wit, style and grace.

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