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Looking for a last minute X-mas gift for the foodie in your life?
Then we at ELV suggest you hightail it to Sur La Table or Barnes and Noble to pick up a copy of John Mariani’s updated edition of The Encyclopedia of American Food and Drink.
It’s been fourteen years since Mariani first published this seminal work, and no one can doubt there’s been a sea change in the way the world looks at food. Mariani puts it all in perspective with expanded entries on everything from the DIY movement to “molecular cuisine” – which Mariani accurately traces back to an Italian nut job named Filippo Marinetti: a cookbook author, poet and political rabble rouser who advocated eating things like pineapple and sardines while inhaling spritzes of cologne and gazing upon sculpted food to the noise of airplane engines….in 1932! Take that Grant Achatz!
The book is chock full of gems like that, and you’ll learn more about food and food history (and mind-blowing trivia*) in an hour of gazing at its pages than you will in a year of reading some blowhard food blog.
Despite what many think, the pleasures of flipping through pages as interesting as this will never go out of style.
The Encyclopedia of American Food and Drink should be an essential part of every foodie’s library. For food professionals it is mandatory; for the casual food or restaurant reader, it will make you smarter and increase your food IQ, in all sorts of delicious ways.
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* Who knew that a freed slave named Emmanuel “Manna” Bernoon opened an oyster and ale house in Providence, Rhode Island in 1736….90 years before the Union Oyster House opened its doors in Boston?
