from Bill Varney — Fredericksburg Herb Farm

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Monthly Book Review:
November 2006

from Victoria McClure:
Best Food Writing 2006 edited by Holly Hughes

Greetings! This month’s offering is Best Food Writing 2006, edited by Holly Hughes. Hughes has edited this collection since 2000 and this year’s offering is supreme. Whether you are interested in essays about personal tastes in food, cooking at home, the lives of chefs or restaurant insanity, there is something here for you.

Hughes starts off with essays on “The Food Chain,” all of which deal with growing, finding and choosing food. My personal favorite in this section is “A Grand Experiment” by Bill McKibben. He decides to “carry out a program to eat only locally produced foods.” Throughout the course of the essay, McKibben takes the reader on a culinary safari. For seven months, the reader accompanies the author from the farmers market in Middlebury, Vermont to stock up on Roma tomatoes for canning to the apple warehouse for Cortlands, Empires and Northern Spies (the name alone is worth the trip). McKibben comes to the conclusion that the greatest cost to his experiment is time….it takes time to find the food, preserve it, if necessary, and cook fresh food. However, the end result is worth the effort. Would that we all had the abundance of locally grown food that he does, and the energy to go out and find it!

Other sections in the collection include: “Personal Tastes,” with essays like Audrey Petty’s “Late-Night Chitlins with Momma;” “Home Cooking,” and “Dining Around” with Brett Martin’s “Ho Chi Minh City.” In “Someone’s in the Kitchen”, the reader is allowed into professional kitchens for a look at the life of the chef.

Included is Anthony Bourdain’s (Kitchen Confidential, etc.) “New Year’s Meltdown,” a truly frightening essay on what happens when you combine New Year’s Eve, an overly-ambitious menu, an unprepared kitchen, and a rabid chef. The essays in this section will either make your heart beat faster and ask for your own chef’s jacket for your birthday, or make you quite happy with your current profession, whatever it might be. In either case, the essays provide a rare look behind the swinging door. All of them are full of juicy tidbits and philosophical musings from some (in)famous and emerging culinary lights.

This is a wonderful book to pick up and put down. While not all of the essays were riveting to me, all were well-written and full of interesting information. I grazed through the book over the course of about two weeks, reading when I had a few minutes and needed a break. I laughed, thought, and most of all, thanked Holly Hughes for gathering such bounty, all in one neat package.

By the way, I am always on the lookout for books to review. If you have a favorite you would like others to know about, please email me. I can be reached at: vemclure@sbcglobal.net.