Made in Morocco: A Journey of Exotic Tastes and Places
Author: Julie Le Clerc
Email is today's number one preferred method of communication. But at home and at work we struggle to sort the emails we want from those we don't. Conquer Your Email Overload is written in plain English with a simple problem/solution format. This book offers over 400 tips, shortcuts and expert strategies to help you take back control of your inbox. It shows you how to: set up your inbox to avoid email overload, find missing emails, make your inbox work for your business and fix common business email problems.
New interesting book: Where the Dove Calls or Cases in Cost Management
Fried Butter: A Food Memoir
Author: Abe Opincar
"In this short intense memoir, the author ranges freely as he looks back on the food in his life and how it has intersected and toyed with his emotions. The writing is off-beat, achieving the trick of seeming at once grounded and untethered. . . . Elemental acuity and burlesque combine here to delicious effect."-Kirkus Reviews, starred
The New Yorker
It's hard to understand how something that tastes sweet in one person's mouth, in another person's mouth can taste so bitter," a friend tells Abe Opincar, whose memoir, Fried Butter, explores the ways in which memory dictates gustatory preference. For others, it's a matter of social class. In Rosemary and Bitter Oranges, Patrizia Chen's grandfather banned onions and garlic for their rusticity; years later, Chen served him a dish laced with the forbidden seasonings. He praised her culinary genius. "But Nonno never found out about my Machiavellian deviousness," she writes. "I loved him too much to show him, at the end of his life, how his inflexibility had deprived him of one of life's great pleasures.
In South India, as Shoba Narayan relates in her memoir Monsoon Diary, food is enriched by ritual importance, from the choru-unnal (the first meal of an infant) to the elaborate feast that commemorates a marriage. When she left Madras to attend school in the United States, Narayan craved bowls of yogurt and rice to ease her homesickness: "While the foreign flavors teased my palate, I needed Indian food to ground me." Rather than seeking refuge in food from home, Victoria Abbott Riccardi, a New Yorker, learned to refine her taste buds during a year in Kyoto. In Untangling My Chopsticks, Riccardi recalls her exploration of chakaiseki, a ceremonial meal of simple, seasonal courses that reflect the ritual's monastic origins. "Like a junkie, I initially craved my stimulants," she writes. "But then, ever so slowly, I started tasting -- really tasting -- the ingredients. It was like entering a dark room on a sunny day." (Andrea Thompson)Publishers Weekly
In this debut volume, Opincar delivers an evocative book filled with reminiscences conjured up by food. Traveling between past and present, he recollects ingredients from the black radishes that take him back to waiting in Paris with his friend Sophie as she anticipates her husband's return, to the taste of a Chateau d'Yquem that reminds him of a dying Dalia, who was responsible for his overseas education and pushing him out into the world. In turn, recollections generate memories of food, When Opincar was sent to school in France at 15 he learned proper French table manners, though he mis-speared an under-ripe peach to disastrous effect, an anecdote he recounts as farce. Not all memories are his own; some are from such friends and acquaintances as Iranian Reza (of saffron), as well as from Niang (with her sad memories of childhood and yams in China); and Opincar's mother remembers the soothing smell of eggs frying in butter when she was pregnant with him. While each group of memories forms an interconnected chapter, the volume lacks an overall structure, sometimes seeming as if the stories were picked at random. Despite this slight drawback, the book is a charming read and a nice addition to the world of food writing. (Apr.) Copyright 2003 Cahners Business Information.
Kirkus Reviews
Food as memory, memory as food, experienced with the unexpectedness of déjа vu, knocked between melancholy and humor, as summoned by newcomer Opincar. In this short, intense memoir, the author ranges freely as he looks back on the food in his life and how it has intersected and toyed with his emotions. The writing is offbeat, achieving the trick of seeming at once grounded and untethered. With twisted charm, Opincar will praise the hen for its "inexplicable, almost comical" selflessness, or, in the process of buying basil plants, note that most of the plant professionals he has met are "thin, strange, and practical." He offers a savvy little disquisition on turmeric, a sweet vignette of a taco stand in Tijuana, and a funny description of the curious cheese fleur de maquis, which "looks like something an animal buried in the forest . . . like something only a brave person might poke with a stick." Opincar is just the man for the job. Example follows savory example of all the instances when food triggers memory: an aunt hurling cornmeal mush at his father, saffron evoking the sadness of exile, an abortion tied to chocolate and cinnamon, black radishes conjuring up rainy days, and garlic reminding him of the affection of his parents, while the non-garlic-eating couples filed for divorce, Opincar remembers "my mother in a loose shift dress, my father in shirtsleeves
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