The Man Who Ate Everything
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- $14.99
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- $14.99
Publisher Description
Funny, outrageous, passionate, and unrelenting, Vogue's food writer, Jeffrey Steingarten, will stop at nothing, as he makes clear in these forty delectable pieces.
Whether he is in search of a foolproof formula for sourdough bread (made from wild yeast, of course) or the most sublime French fries (the secret: cooking them in horse fat) or the perfect piecrust (Fannie Farmer--that is, Marion Cunningham--comes to the rescue), he will go to any length to find the answer.
At the drop of an apron he hops a plane to Japan to taste Wagyu, the hand-massaged beef, or to Palermo to scale Mount Etna to uncover the origins of ice cream. The love of choucroute takes him to Alsace, the scent of truffles to the Piedmont, the sizzle of ribs on the grill to Memphis to judge a barbecue contest, and both the unassuming and the haute cuisines of Paris demand his frequent assessment.
Inevitably these pleasurable pursuits take their toll. So we endure with him a week at a fat farm and commiserate over low-fat products and dreary diet cookbooks to bring down the scales. But salvation is at hand when the French Paradox (how can they eat so richly and live so long?) is unearthed, and a "miraculous" new fat substitute, Olestra, is unveiled, allowing a plump gourmand to have his fill of fat without getting fatter.
Here is the man who ate everything and lived to tell about it. And we, his readers, are hereby invited to the feast in this delightful book.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
This book ministers to readers who, over the past eight years, have missed former lawyer Steingarten's informative yet hilarious food columns in Vogue. Starting with a piece on fighting his own food phobias so as to qualify as an omnivore for the magazine job, he reads the scientific literature on human food selection and manages to expunge his repulsions by eating "at least one food that I detested" every day for six months. He applies a similar modus operandi to other food problems--collect expert opinion and do one's own experiments--and reports his findings on, among other things, the cheapest survival diet ( a day), the fat substitute Olestra ("the first nearly successful virtual pleasure") and the best recipes for ribs, fruitcake, choucroute, turkey, French fries and pie-crust, to name a few. Above all, in these reprinted articles, the author emphasizes the advantages of eating well-prepared, healthy food, noting that France, with its delicious albeit high-fat diet, has the world's second-lowest (after Japan) rate of death by heart attack. Besides its sensible advice and some intriguing recipes, this book serves up generous helpings of laughter.
