Outlaw Cook
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
In essays ranging from his earliest cooking lessons in a cold-water walk-up apartment on New York's Lower East Side to opinions both admiring and acerbic on the food writers of the past ten years, John Thorne argues that to eat exactly what you want, you have to make it yourself. Thorne tells us how he learned to cook for himself the foods that he likes best to eat, and following along with him can make you so hungry that his simple, suggestive recipes will inspire you to go into the kitchen and translate your own appetite into your own supper.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
``I think you don't have to be a good cook . . . to be an interested cook,'' opines John Thorne ( Simple Cooking ) in this enlightening collection of essays, which illustrate, through their range and idiosyncrasy, exactly the sweep of that ``interested'' cook. Composed primarily of selections from the newsletter Simple Cooking , which Thorne writes with his wife, Matt, the book offers a series of extended comments on foods that interest him for their simple perfection, like avocados, for their relation to a national people, like boeuf aux carottes to the French during WW II, or for their place in his personal history (the metaphysics of bread, and its baking, led him to build his own outdoor wood-fired bread oven). The thoughtful selection of recipes includes Spanish meatball soup, ``plowman's lunch'' and fresh raspberry cake, reflecting the bent of an erudite, self-made cook. As in other collections of short, previously published works, the voice and pace of the essays may wane on repetition. But in moderate spells, the essays delight with passion and originality. This is one of few recent books that can successfully encompass the history of the recent enshrinement of pesto, an analysis of Martha Stewart's need to be loved and a culinary awakening caused by Gunter Grass's The Tin Drum.
