Tag Archives: history

“The United States of Arugula” by David Kamp

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United States of Arugula coverI needed a break from fantasy, so today’s review is non-fiction: The United States of Arugula: The Sun Dried, Cold Pressed, Dark Roasted, Extra Virgin Story of the American Food Revolution. I really love both food and history (see my reviews of Curry and Fannie’s Last Supper), so this book was a natural choice for me.

In the last 40 years, the predominant food culture in America has become “gourmet”. Salsa and sushi have gone from unknown to ubiquitous, and local ingredients,  specialty cooking tools and celebrity chefs have become routine. The United States of Arugula attempts to tell the story of how this happened.

This book is a fairly fun read, although it meanders quite a bit. We start with the Big Three that popularised inventive cooking and dining – James Beard, Julia Child and Craig Claiborne, and go all the way to Emeril Lagasse’s restaurant empire. Kamp has certainly done his research, and the text is packed with all kinds of little asides and tidbits that make the events in the book come to life.

Any revolution always begins with a few people, and it is always interesting to read about those people’s motivations and understand the movement itself in context. Kamp takes this a little too far, though and the book comes off as overly gossipy. Beard and Claiborne’s (among others) sexual preferences are exhumed in detail, and there’s a lot of focus on who did and didn’t get along. For instance, Graham Kerr, a contemporary of Julia Child who also had a popular cooking show, is introduced as “Everyone in the food world agreed on one person they could hate”, even though their hate of him had no bearing on any significant events. I wish that Kamp had instead devoted that space to the events he mentions omitting in his introduction.

Another problem with this book is that it was really hard to follow. I usually read epic fantasy and have no trouble keeping hundreds of characters straight in my head, but Kamp introduces so many names that it detracts from the flow of the book. Many of the people mentioned by name are only mentioned once, which adds to the confusion (is this a person I’m supposed to know?) Adding to this is Kamp’s love of tangents, he does not stick to one person or one chronological period or even one story. Chapter 2 starts off with an introduction of Pierre Franey entering the US, but jumps quickly to Jacques Pépin’s childhood, and then to French cooks’ propensity for local foods, to an explanation of “classic French cooking”, to a biography of Antonin Carême and so on… and when the book got back to Franey’s story after he gets off the boat, I had a hard time remembering who he was.

Aside from those two issues, the book was a great primer on recent food history in the United States.

“King Leopold’s Ghost” by Adam Hochschild

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King Leopold's Ghost coverMy grasp on world history is somewhat lacking, and I’m always looking for good books so that I can fix that – Wikipedia tends to be too dry for me. I’d vaguely heard of King Leopold and his atrocities in the Congo, and I thought it was something I needed to know more about, so I was excited to find King Leopold’s Ghost a few months ago in the clearance section at Half Price Books.

If you’ve heard of King Leopold II of Belgium, I don’t need to tell you what this book is about. If you haven’t, he was the second monarch of Belgium, and at one point, the sole owner of the Congo (currently the Democratic Republic of the Congo.)

How did that happen? Belgium was surrounded by countries that held vast colonies in the Americas, Asia and Africa, and Leopold badly wanted a colony of his own. However, all around Europe, monarchs were losing power to parliament, and colonialism was losing favour. After looking all over the world and attempting to buy colonies from every major power, he set his sights on the unexplored parts of Africa, and shrewdly declared his interest as purely humanitarian and scientific. For more details, you’ll have to read this book (or some other account.)

This is a very well-written and readable book – Hochschild did an admirable job of sketching out the characters of the major players involved in the story of the Belgian Congo. I really felt like I got to know every one of them – I despised King Leopold for his avarice and ostentation, I admired Casement’s sheer passion and Morel’s determination, I rooted for Sheppard. Even though the things that happened were unspeakably horrific, it was never forceful or melodramatic. Hochschild states the facts and quotes accounts and lets you draw your own conclusions.

Hochschild clearly does have a few biases – his tone is sometimes a bit too moralistic for my taste. For instance, although King Leopold seems like an intensely loathsome person, I think his part was a result of apathy rather than an actively evil personality.

I wish I’d read this before I read The Poisonwood Bible – it would’ve given me some much needed context. Highly recommended.

“Yseult” by Ruth Nestvold

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Yseult coverI won a PDF of Yseult: A Tale of Love in the Age of King Arthur in the LibraryThing member giveaway a couple of weeks ago. After finishing White Planet, it occurred to me that I had another e-book to read and review, so I opened up Yseult to flip through it and see what kind of a book it was. I’m usually not the biggest fan of romance, even though I love fantasy and historical books, so I wasn’t really expecting to get sucked into this book like I was. I started reading, and couldn’t stop.

Yseult is a retelling/interpretation/whatever-you-want-to-call-it of the classic Tristan and Isolde story. I was vaguely familiar with the story (“basically Romeo and Juliet”), but only to the extent that I recognise some characters and plot elements. I didn’t even know that Tristan was one of Arthur’s knights

The book is much more than a love story. It is truly an epic, exploring the conflicts between paganism and Christianity, political maneuvering between the various kings of Britain and Ireland, the wars between themselves and with the Saxons, and a lot more. It reminded me a bit of The Mists of Avalon, although Yseult was much more fun to read.

Anyway, onto an actual description of the book. Yseult the Fair is an Irish (“Erainn”) princess descended from the Feadh Ree, the original race of Ireland.  She grows up in a time where Christianity is trying to make inroads into Ireland, and has already taken over much of Britain. The Feadh Ree, who were once universally respected, are even being attacked by some Gaul kings. War is everywhere, and any available peace seems to be temporary. Yseult tries to make the best of her situation, defending her home when necessary. Along the way, she meets Drystan, and falls in love with him. However, for political and personal reasons, she agrees to be married to his father Marcus, one of the Kings of Dummonia. She can never forget Drystan though, and he cannot forget her, either.

Both Yseult and Drystan are well-rounded and utterly likeable characters. I couldn’t help but root for them, even as they spiraled into the unavoidable tragedy that is their story, and made decisions that I knew were going to end badly. I never doubted the intensity of their love, even though I(and they) recognised that it was a terrible idea. I’m generally pretty unromantic, and even I felt this way.

But as I said above, Yseult isn’t just a love story. It’s the story of Yseult the Fair, which includes a love story, but also includes all the stories of all the other people in her and Drystan’s life – an amazing supporting cast, including Arthur and a few people associated with his story, Patriac (who I didn’t realise was St. Patrick until I read another review of this book), Yseult the Wise, Cador, and of course, Kurvenal and Brangwyn. All of them change and grow extremely believably.  The religious conflicts are very well-portrayed and almost unbiased, demonstrating the inevitability of change and the futility of fighting against it. It was also very interesting to  read about the political side of things, shifting loyalties, values or lack thereof and the kinds of risks taken. Yseult also sounds pretty historically accurate, and it was pretty fun to read about fifth century British and Irish civilisation and traditions.

Oh, and why is this a fantasy, and not just historical? The Feadh Ree and their descendants have one or more of three magical powers, the power of knowing, the power of calling, and the power of changing. These magical abilities do not dictate the course of the story, they just help enhance it.

This book is only available in English on Kindle right now (for the very reasonable price of $4.95), and I urge you to read it! The author says that she has plans to release it in paperback, and I’m definitely going to buy myself a copy when she does.

Amazon US: Yseult: A Tale of Love in the Age of King Arthur
Author Blog: http://ruthnestvold.wordpress.com/
Author Website: http://www.ruthnestvold.com/

“Fannie’s Last Supper” by Christopher Kimball

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Cover for Fannie's Last SupperI’m a big fan of America’s Test Kitchen, and I love reading about food and history, so I was really looking forward to reading Fannie’s Last Supper by its host and founder, Christopher Kimball.The book’s tagline is “Re-creating One Amazing Meal from Fannie Farmer’s 1896 Cookbook”, and is (purportedly) about recreating an elaborate dinner party from Victorian-era Boston, based on the recipes of Fannie Farmer, a famous cooking teacher and businesswoman from the time.

About the title – although Kimball was certainly inspired by his discovery of Fannie Farmer’s cookbook, I would not go as far as to say his meal was a recreation. He does not seem to respect Farmer as a cook or as a person, which makes for odd reading. His reactions to exact recreations of her dishes range from “inedible” to “truly horrible” to “rather uninspired” to “second rate.” (There is the occasional “good”, but it is rare.) This means that pretty much all of the recipes were changed quite a bit. A few of the recipes were even sourced entirely from other books, after Farmer was deemed unsatisfactory. This is all fine, but it seemed like false advertising.

The book is peppered with fascinating facts and insights into the world of the 19th century cook. The industrial revolution was changing cooking at an extremely rapid rate, plus domestic servants were no longer common. Kimball likens it to a music aficionado in the late 1990s (p. 193):

who used a turntable for his LP collection while relying on a large group of CDs and then a smattering of digital downloads from iTunes on his MP3 player.

I loved that description (although, what about cassette tapes? that’s what I used in the 90s) – I think it’s a great analogy.

I think the structure of the book could have been easier to read – part of it deals with the evolution in cooking methods and ingredients in the US, some of it is about how Boston’s food culture and how that changed (including random little details like the price of gelatin), some of it is about Fannie Farmer’s life, and then there’s the story of Kimball’s journey to making this dinner, testing recipes, finding silverware, etc. The trouble is that each chapter contains a bit of everything. I think it would’ve showcased the material far better if it had been better structured, although it is still really interesting.

I also appreciated a lot of the trouble that they went to to make the dinner accurate – mock turtle soup using calf-brains, and making gelatin from calf-feet stand out. It sounded like a horrendous amount of work.

Apparently PBS did a special to accompany the book (or vice versa), also called Fannie’s Last Supper. Here is the trailer for it. I really want to watch it, but I’m not sure how it can be obtained.

This is book 10 of 25 of my Dec 11, 2011 book challenge.