Anyone with a hankering for hash of snails or powdered duck or a host of other centuries-old British cookery should be plenty pleased with this year’s James Beard Foundation cookbook of the year.
However, for the rest of us — by which I mean, virtually every last one of us — the selection of Heston Blumenthal’s Historic Heston, a US$200, 431-page epic exploration of mostly antiquated recipes, will be a head-scratcher.
It is one of those books so fabulously out of touch with any cook who does not have an army of sous-chefs at his side, one has to ask for whom this book was written.
Actually, the answer is obvious. It was written by and for Blumenthal, a talented writer and brilliant chef with a host of restaurants in England. In that regard, it is a masterpiece.
Blumenthal has a knack for ferreting out the genealogy of a dish, a skill he has put to fascinating use in previous books, including his 2006 In Search of Perfection.
However the selection of his latest tome as cookbook of the year — announced on Friday evening during a ceremony in New York — is puzzling.
Blumenthal takes recipes already made obtuse by history — salmagundy, anyone? — and instead of translating them into terms contemporary readers could appreciate or at least learn from, he filters them through an equally inaccessible lens of modernist — think whiz-bang science-driven cooking — techniques.
Moreover, the book got two awards, also beating out David Kinch’s Manresa: An Edible Reflection and Rene Redzepi’s Rene Redzepi: A Work in Progress in the “cooking from a professional point of view” category.
Of greater interest to most home cooks is likely to be the foundation’s naming of Diana Kennedy to its Cookbook Hall of Fame. Kennedy has spent much of her life learning and preserving the traditional cooking and ingredients of Mexico, a mission that sends her across the country in search of elusive recipes.
Her first cookbook, The Cuisines of Mexico, was written based on research with home cooks across Mexico and established her as the foremost authority on the cuisine.
It remains the seminal work on the subject.
The Beard Foundation’s awards honor those who follow in the footsteps of Beard, considered the dean of US cooking when he died in 1985.
Friday’s ceremony named winners in media and publishing; A separate ceremony is to be held on Monday for chefs and restaurants.
Some familiar faces nabbed broadcast awards on Friday.
Martha Stewart was honored for her public television series Martha Stewart’s Cooking School in the studio-based television category, while Anthony Bourdain took the top honor for on-location television for The Mind of a Chef, also on public television.
Outstanding food personality or host went to Food Network’s Ina Garten for her Barefoot Contessa: Back to Basics.
The big winner in the journalism awards was David Chang’s Lucky Peach, a quarterly launched in 2011 that quickly became one of the top food magazines.
Though the magazine itself was not honored on Friday, its writers netted awards in five different categories — humor, food and culture writing, personal essay, profile and the MFK Fisher Distinguished Writing Award.
FORUM: The Solomon Islands’ move to bar Taiwan, the US and others from the Pacific Islands Forum has sparked criticism that Beijing’s influence was behind the decision Tuvaluan Prime Minister Feletei Teo said his country might pull out of the region’s top political meeting next month, after host nation Solomon Islands moved to block all external partners — including China, the US and Taiwan — from attending. The Pacific Islands Forum (PIF) leaders’ meeting is to be held in Honiara in September. On Thursday last week, Solomon Islands Prime Minister Jeremiah Manele told parliament that no dialogue partners would be invited to the annual gathering. Countries outside the Pacific, known as “dialogue partners,” have attended the forum since 1989, to work with Pacific leaders and contribute to discussions around
END OF AN ERA: The vote brings the curtain down on 20 years of socialist rule, which began in 2005 when Evo Morales, an indigenous coca farmer, was elected president A center-right senator and a right-wing former president are to advance to a run-off for Bolivia’s presidency after the first round of elections on Sunday, marking the end of two decades of leftist rule, preliminary official results showed. Bolivian Senator Rodrigo Paz was the surprise front-runner, with 32.15 percent of the vote cast in an election dominated by a deep economic crisis, results published by the electoral commission showed. He was followed by former Bolivian president Jorge “Tuto” Quiroga in second with 26.87 percent, according to results based on 92 percent of votes cast. Millionaire businessman Samuel Doria Medina, who had been tipped
Outside Havana, a combine belonging to a private Vietnamese company is harvesting rice, directly farming Cuban land — in a first — to help address acute food shortages in the country. The Cuban government has granted Agri VAM, a subsidiary of Vietnam’s Fujinuco Group, 1,000 hectares of arable land in Los Palacios, 118km west of the capital. Vietnam has advised Cuba on rice cultivation in the past, but this is the first time a private firm has done the farming itself. The government approved the move after a 52 percent plunge in overall agricultural production between 2018 and 2023, according to data
ELECTION DISTRACTION? When attention shifted away from the fight against the militants to politics, losses and setbacks in the battlefield increased, an analyst said Recent clashes in Somalia’s semi-autonomous Jubaland region are alarming experts, exposing cracks in the country’s federal system and creating an opening for militant group al-Shabaab to gain ground. Following years of conflict, Somalia is a loose federation of five semi-autonomous member states — Puntland, Jubaland, Galmudug, Hirshabelle and South West — that maintain often fractious relations with the central government in the capital, Mogadishu. However, ahead of elections next year, Somalia has sought to assert control over its member states, which security analysts said has created gaps for al-Shabaab infiltration. Last week, two Somalian soldiers were killed in clashes between pro-government forces and
RSS