Michael Ruhlman is something of a foodie phenom. A journalist who fell into cooking after writing about education and boatbuilding, he has collaborated on a series of celebrity-chef cookbooks (with Eric Ripert and Thomas Keller), contributes regularly to the New York Times and is often on TV as a panelist or judge for reality-cooking shows. He also has an extensive website, ruhlman.com, that was just named the best industry-related food blog (and best chef blog) on the internetz.
Ruhlman's latest publication is a book called The Elements of Cooking, an obvious echo of Strunk & White's The Elements of Style. After a few uninspired essays (Stock, Salt, Eggs), the book is a quasi-encyclopedia of cooking terms, from Acid to Zester. Each entry is what you'd expect if you asked a humorless, pedantic friend to explain something: "what does al dente mean?" "what's kimchi? and so on. Three categories of soup (clear, cream, puree). Cook, sous-chef and line cook get separate entries. But Half-and-Half? Spatula?
David Kamp, meanwhile, is out with the Food Snob's Dictionary, a hilarious "essential lexicon of gastronomical knowledge." You may remember Vanity Fair writer Kamp as the author of The United States of Arugula, a deliciously gossipy history of the foodie movement that also happened to name almost everyone who had ever slept with James Beard, Craig Claiborne and Alice Waters. Wide circles, though not overlapping.
Many of the two books' entries do overlap, however. But when Ruhlman is finished telling you what a brunoise is (a sauté of diced vegetables), Kamp adds "Maniacal chefs are fond of dismissing unworthy brunoises as 'Sheet!' or 'Merde!' and then demanding that the cowed apprentice chopper start over."
Like the class clown, Kamp doesn't get the teacher's respect; that goes to the super-serious Ruhlman. But they're like the Spratts: between the two of them, they lick the platter clean.
Posted by Ronald Holden at December 26, 2007 5:30 PM | TrackBack
The International Kitchen
Cooking school vacations in Italy, France & Spain.
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