Favorite food books

Shared by the Culinary Institute of America spokesperson

As communications manager for the Culinary Institute of America in St. Helena for the past 13 years, Cate Conniff knows a lot about food books. “I’m around food and chefs so much, I want my food books to be well-written and to tell a good story.” Conniff grew up outside of Chicago and spent much of her adult life in Boston, working for Bread & Circus, a Boston-area chain of stores selling natural foods and wooden toys (thus the name). Conniff says she’s frequently tempted by new books in the CIA’s Marketplace. “It’s a fabulous store with more than 1,700 book titles, including reference books and cookbooks, lots of them signed by the author. The CIA serves home cooks as well as professionals coming through our classes. The Marketplace offers a huge selection oriented toward the home cook.” As for her book recommendations, Conniff says she chose these three books because they put food in a larger context and each tells a great story. 

---

Conniff praises Michael Pollan’s The Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals, now in paperback (Penguin, $16). “I love Michael Pollan’s writing on issues of food and sustainability. He’s very informative without being preachy. Omnivore’s Dilemma offers such a strong narrative. It’s a page-turner and you learn a lot about the food chains in America and how they reflect upon our culture. We seem to have lost touch with where food comes from and how we bring food to the table in this country. This book gave me a new consciousness about where my food comes from and how it got to my kitchen.” Pollan’s book focuses on three issues: industrial farming, organic food as big business as well as on a relatively small farm, and what it’s like to hunt and gather food for yourself. Each section culminates in a meal. To Pollan the omnivore’s dilemma is twofold: what we choose to eat, and how we let our food be produced. This compelling read is an eater’s manifesto that covers a wide variety of subjects from food fads to taboos.

Conniff loves Alice Waters & Chez Panisse (Penguin Press HC, $27.95) by Thomas McNamee. Conniff says Waters created a phenomenon by giving us new ways to think about food and the pleasures of the table. “Some people think that eating seasonally, eating organic, eating locally is all very ‘been there, done that.’ But in the early days of Chez Panisse, no one had been there and done that yet. This book gives you a good view of how much has changed in 35 years and how pivotal Alice was in inspiring people. It was part of the politics and ethos of the time. Europe was opening up to Americans. College kids were looking for alternatives to the highly commercial food scene in the U.S. This was the time of the whole back-to-the-land movement, and the awareness that the food we eat is a reflection of our relationship to the natural world.” McNamee melds a gossipy history of Berkeley’s famed restaurant with a biography of the woman whose passion for food created California cuisine, a style devoted to simplicity, freshness and seasonality. Conniff also loved the recipes in the book. “They’re more visceral, experiential. They give us the sense that we don’t have to follow some rules. And they show that what was coming into the kitchen was setting the stage for what was cooked.” This book is an inspiration for anyone with a passion for food.

Conniff calls The Last Chinese Chef (Houghton Mifflin, $24) by Nicole Mones a little book in novel form. She was drawn to it because the CIA’s annual Worlds of Flavor conference in November will focus on Asia. “Worlds of Flavor will have a significant emphasis on Chinese cuisine. I don’t know much about Chinese cuisine but it seems to be where Italy was 25 years ago. Chinese cooking goes way beyond sweet and sour pork. This book helped me dig into the differences in regional cuisines and they are all very different from each other. During the Chinese Cultural Revolution, all restaurants were closed and chefs were imprisoned or exiled. Because they were doing Imperial cuisine, anything with an Imperial connotation was considered bourgeois and against the state. This novel takes place in modern times when China is much more of an open market. It tells the story of how this young half-Chinese/half-American man in Beijing is trying to bring back the traditional cuisines, and the modern contemporary realities of what that means. Chinese cuisine takes an incredibly thoughtful approach to how foods and flavors are combined and how something looks. I also learned something about the history of China through the food.” Mones delivers a novel that’s practically a love letter to China, its people, and authentic Chinese cuisine.

Do you like what you read? Subscribe to Solano Magazine »