A Cook's Tour: In Search of the Perfect Meal
Author: Anthony Bourdain
Dodging minefields in Cambodia, diving into the icy waters outside a Russian bath, Chef Bourdain travels the world over in search of the ultimate meal. The only thing Anthony Bourdain loves as much as cooking is traveling, and A Cook's Tour is the shotgun marriage of his two greatest passions. Inspired by the question, 'What would be the perfect meal?', Anthony sets out on a quest for his culinary holy grail.Our adventurous chef starts out in Japan, where he eats traditional Fugu, a poisonous blowfish which can be prepared only by specially licensed chefs. He then travels to Cambodia, up the mine-studded road to Pailin into autonomous Khmer Rouge territory and to Phnom Penh's Gun Club, where local fare is served up alongside a menu of available firearms. In Saigon, he's treated to a sustaining meal of live Cobra heart before moving on to savor a snack with the Viet Cong in the Mecong Delta. Further west, Kitchen Confidential fans will recognize the Gironde of Tony's youth, the first stop on his European itinerary. And from France, it's on to Portugal, where an entire village has been fattening a pig for months in anticipation of his arrival. And we're only halfway around the globe. . . A Cook's Tour recounts, in Bourdain's inimitable style, the adventures and misadventures of America's favorite chef.
Book Magazine
Anthony Bourdain's idea of the potentially perfect meal is surely not your idea. Been craving Moroccan lamb testicles lately? Didn't think so. Had a hankering for goat's head soup? Chili-roasted maguey worms? How about the beating heart of a cobra, freshly extracted from its former owner? Clearly Bourdain isn't your garden-variety gastronome. Familiarity, and fat-free cooking, breeds his contempt; derring-do is his stock in trade.
The author of last year's bestselling Kitchen Confidential, the delicious tell-all book of life in the pit of the "culinary underbelly," Bourdain has become an overnight sensation as unlikely as an upside-down tequila shot in a muffled nouvelle-cuisine dining room. In the world of celebrity chefdom, where the life of cuddly Emeril Lagasse begets a sitcom, Bourdain's would be a snuff-film screening on skid row. While England's Two Fat Ladies puttered onto the foodie scene in a kooky sidecar motorcycle, Bourdain barges in pulling screaming wheelies on a dastardly chopper straight out of the cartoon art of Big Daddy Roth.
In Bourdain's hands, "food porn" takes on an all-new, and sometimes quite literal, meaning. In this book, he uses his newfound celebrity to circle the globe, visiting some of its darkest corners in search of a sensory overload involving his mouth, his stomach and quite often his bare hands. As much a reckless travelogue as a vicarious dining experience, the book might scare off a considerable number of Bourdain's more organic-oriented fans. But then, if they enjoyed Kitchen Confidential, they can't say they weren't sufficiently warned.
The author envisioned his new book as an adventure, with himself portraying "one ofthose debauched heroes and villains" out of Graham Greene, Joseph Conrad, Francis Ford Coppola and Michael Cimino. "I wanted to wander the world in a dirty seersucker suit, getting into trouble," he claims. By and large, he fulfills the vision, even if he's sometimes wearing a cowboy hat or a tiny Speedo bathing suit instead of the seersucker.
Once again, Bourdain is laugh-out-loud funny at times, in an unapologetic, sophomoric sort of way. Of that dubious Moroccan lamb delicacy, he writes, "It was certainly the best testicle I'd ever had in my mouth. Also the first, I should hasten to say." The writing is occasionally careless—one larded meal, for instance, leaves him "feeling like Elvis in Vegas"—but mostly it matches the lurid glee that made Kitchen Confidential such a success. Describing durian (the spiny, famously pungent fruit he devoured with delight in Cambodia), he writes, "God it stank! It smelled like you'd buried somebody holding a big wheel of Stilton in his arms, then dug him up a few weeks later."
Bourdain's success as a writer is his knack for making food the centerpiece of a much broader discussion about living life on a grand scale. In fact, in A Cook's Tour, the food is sometimes relegated to a side table. In Russia, the author pounds vodka and attends an illegal, no-holds-barred cage-fighting event. In England, he offers one man's humble explanation of why the pornography there is so exceptionally bad. In Morocco, he finds himself too high on hashish to communicate with the camera crew that's documenting his travels for an upcoming Food Network series. ("God help me," he moans hilariously about getting himself entangled in that particular piece of business.)
The gist of his search is that Bourdain wants to re-create the earth-shattering oyster-eating experience he had as a boy in France, so vividly described in Kitchen Confidential. "Think about the last time food transported you," he writes, lingering over a lifetime of pivotal encounters with his taste buds—wild strawberries, an old girlfriend's leftover pork-fried rice. "Maybe it was just a bowl of Campbell's cream of tomato with Oysterettes, and a grilled cheese sandwich. You know what I mean." This kind of sweet faith in the universal pleasures of eating belies Bourdain's relentless bluster.
So does his regret, on his return to France, that he is emotionally incapable of re-creating that wondrous shellfish moment, try as he might. "I began to feel damaged," he writes in one of the book's most elegant, and vulnerable, passages. "Broken. As if some essential organ—my heart perhaps—had shriveled and died."
The closest the author comes to a conventional notion of the perfect meal is at the French Laundry, chef Thomas Keller's revered restaurant in the California wine country. And "conventional" is hardly the word. Famously, Keller's menus are astonishments of originality. The menu itself reads like pure poetry: coronets of salmon tartare, cauliflower panna cotta with Malpeque oyster glaze and Oscetra caviar, ricotta cheese gnocchi with a Darjeeling tea-walnut oil emulsion and shaved walnuts. For his "degenerate smoker" guest, Keller prepared a surprise—a course he called "coffee and a cigarette," featuring tobacco-infused coffee custard with foie gras. Bourdain is suitably overwhelmed. "It was an absolutely awe-inspiring meal, accompanied, I should point out, by a procession of sensational wines.... I remember a big brawny red in a cistern-sized glass, which nearly made me weep with pleasure. Cooking had crossed the line into magic," he gushes.
Though he would prefer not to be the sort of man to gush, the punk-rock author finds himself hearing a chorus of angels when food moves him. In spite of himself, the foul-mouthed Bourdain proves in the end to be a big ol' softie. In Morocco, he hauls himself to the top of a ridge in the desert. "A hundred miles of sand in every direction, a hundred miles of absolutely gorgeous, unspoiled nothingness," he recalls. "I was wondering how a miserable, manic-depressive, overage, undeserving hustler like myself—a utility chef from New York City with no particular distinction to be found in his long and egregiously checkered career—on the strength of one inexplicably large score, could find himself here, seeing this, living the dream." The answer seems obvious, if not to the man who's looking for it. His is a rare sensitivity divided equally among heart, mind and palate.
—James Sullivan
Kirkus Reviews
Over-the-top and highly diverting international culinary adventures, always to be taken with a generous grain of salt-and make it Fleur de Sel-and best consumed a bite at a time.
Books about: Im Like So Fat or Cults
Wine and the Vine: An Historical Geography of Viticulture and the Wine Trade
Author: Tim Unwin
The products drawn from the grape vine are among the most diverse of any agricultural crop. Aside from the influences of soils and and climate, this diversity embodies the traditions of countless genrations of wine growers and vintners. Exploring this interaction between people and environments, Wine and the Vine provides a full understanding of the growth and spread of viticulture and wine production throught human history.
"A thoroughly fascinating book offering many insights into the importance of wine in our culture and the effect of variables such as religion, government, marketing, economics, and even colonialism on the growth of the wine industry... It will give the wine lover scores of insights into aspects of wine that for decades have simply been taken for granted."
California Grapevine
Library Journal
This unique study delves into the origins of wine and grapes, tracing their use and development through the Middle Ages to the present. Reviewing the relationship between history, geography, and viticulture, Unwin discusses symbolism, society, traditions, chemistry, and wine production in each era. An extensive bibliography and a precise glossary of wine measures conclude the book. The well-organized material reads like a doctoral thesis, reflecting Unwin's scholastic research background. Too detailed and serious for casual readers, this will challenge even intellectual enologists. The chapters on trade development in Europe, the Americas, Australia, and New Zealand may interest those involved in wine marketing. An optional purchase for specialized collections.-- Carolyn Alexander, Technical Information Ctr., Ft. Hunter Liggett, Cal.
Booknews
An introduction to the historical geography of viticulture and the wine trade from prehistory to the present. Unwin discusses both the numerous symbolic roles assigned to wine and the vine by people of different religions and also the internationalization of wine production and marketing. Annotation c. Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)
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