Reading Wednesday
Aug. 3rd, 2016 04:56 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
brigdhWhat did you just finish?
Eight Flavors: The Untold Story of American Cuisine by Sarah Lohman. A nonfiction book about the history of American cooking. Lohman organizes the book around eight popular flavors, arranged chronologically as to their appearance in mainstream American food: black pepper, vanilla, chili powder, curry powder, soy sauce, garlic, MSG, and sriracha. Each has a chapter dedicated to it, which Lohman fills with stories of the people involved in the invention or popularizing of a flavor, such as Edmond Albius, a young slave on Madagascar who discovered how to artificially pollinate vanilla, allowing it to be farmed; Ranji Smile, a celebrity chef in the late 1800s/early 1900s who promoted Indian food; William Gebhardt, a German immigrant to Texas who was the first to sell commercial chili powder; and others. Some of the stories here are probably ones you've heard before if you read a lot of food writing (the Chili Queens of San Antonio, "Chinese restaurant syndrome" being not a real thing), but others were completely new, at least to me: I knew very little about soy sauce, and had absolutely no idea that sriracha was invented in California (did other people know that? I totally thought it was made by a Thai company!).
I was surprised at first by her inclusion of MSG, which feels to me to be much less common in the US than in other countries; when I was in India, for example, I saw a lot of kitchens with a bottle of MSG like a shaker of salt, and I have never seen that in an American kitchen. But Lohman's historical research showed that once happened in the US too, which was cool to learn. My favorite part might have been the final chapter, "The Ninth Flavor", where Lohman attempted to guess the next big trend in American food. Her suggestions all seemed reasonable to me, and predicting the future is always a fun game.
Lohman also includes recipes, some by current chefs and some adapted from historical cookbooks. I haven't had a chance to test any of them, but I was particularly attracted by Black Pepper Brown Sugar Cookies (based on a recipe from Martha Washington), Country Captain Chicken (an American "curry" popular in the 1800s), and Garlic Soup (a French recipe that became popular with the "Lost Generation" expats). The writing was unobtrusive and included lots of personal anecdotes in between the research and recipes. Overall a fun book with lots of interesting information.
I read this as an ARC via NetGalley.
Black Dragon River: A Journey Down the Amur River at the Borderlands of Empires by Dominic Ziegler. Travel nonfiction about the Amur River, which – to be completely honest – I had never heard of before this book. Apparently it is the ninth longest river in the world (well, depending on how you measure it), starts in a mountain range in Mongolia, forms the border between Russia and China, and finally flows into the Pacific. It's also known as the Heilongjiang, which translates directly into "Black Dragon River" – thus the title. Ziegler is the type of travel writer that I prefer: very little memoir-like accounts of his personal experiences or background, and lots and lots of interesting research on the area, in his case mostly history with a bit on the environment (descriptions of local plants and animals, accounts of the destruction wrought by humans, you get the jist).
Much like my experience of the river itself, I knew practically nothing about the history Ziegler covers. He starts with Genghis Khan, who was (probably) born in the same mountain range as the Amur, and that wasn't too new. But then Ziegler goes on to cover the Russian exploration and colonization of Siberia in the 1600s, primarily for the fur trade, led by the Cossacks; the movement of Tibetan-derived Buddhism into the local people; the recapture of the Amur by the Qing Dynasty, leading to the Treaty of Nerchinsk, the first major treaty between China and a European power; the Decembrist revolution and their exile; the reconquering of the Amur by Russia as China was being carved up by various imperialist powers in the 1800s; and the 1969 battle over Damasky Island, as Russia and China vied for control of a small island in the river and the rest of the world freaked out about two nuclear powers fighting. A lot of this history was depressing, involving the usual sort of torture, murder of unarmed innocents, rape, and more that you can always expect from stories of colonization and war. But the history of the Russian Far East was a topic that I had absolutely no awareness of previously, and so I found it fascinating. I can't comment on Ziegler's accuracy or political slant since, again: new to me. I have to leave that to better-informed reviews, though I can say it all seemed well-researched and reasonable.
The book was a bit slow at the beginning, but once I was engaged, I plowed through the rest of it quite quickly. It was very readable, with unobtrusive prose. It's an unusual topic, at least in English, but I'm glad that I know slightly more about it now.
I read this as an ARC via NetGalley.
What are you currently reading?
The Gentleman by Forrest Leo. A comedy about a Victorian poet who accidentally sells his wife to the Devil, then sets out to rescue her. I'm not very far into it yet, but it's amusing so far!
Eight Flavors: The Untold Story of American Cuisine by Sarah Lohman. A nonfiction book about the history of American cooking. Lohman organizes the book around eight popular flavors, arranged chronologically as to their appearance in mainstream American food: black pepper, vanilla, chili powder, curry powder, soy sauce, garlic, MSG, and sriracha. Each has a chapter dedicated to it, which Lohman fills with stories of the people involved in the invention or popularizing of a flavor, such as Edmond Albius, a young slave on Madagascar who discovered how to artificially pollinate vanilla, allowing it to be farmed; Ranji Smile, a celebrity chef in the late 1800s/early 1900s who promoted Indian food; William Gebhardt, a German immigrant to Texas who was the first to sell commercial chili powder; and others. Some of the stories here are probably ones you've heard before if you read a lot of food writing (the Chili Queens of San Antonio, "Chinese restaurant syndrome" being not a real thing), but others were completely new, at least to me: I knew very little about soy sauce, and had absolutely no idea that sriracha was invented in California (did other people know that? I totally thought it was made by a Thai company!).
I was surprised at first by her inclusion of MSG, which feels to me to be much less common in the US than in other countries; when I was in India, for example, I saw a lot of kitchens with a bottle of MSG like a shaker of salt, and I have never seen that in an American kitchen. But Lohman's historical research showed that once happened in the US too, which was cool to learn. My favorite part might have been the final chapter, "The Ninth Flavor", where Lohman attempted to guess the next big trend in American food. Her suggestions all seemed reasonable to me, and predicting the future is always a fun game.
Lohman also includes recipes, some by current chefs and some adapted from historical cookbooks. I haven't had a chance to test any of them, but I was particularly attracted by Black Pepper Brown Sugar Cookies (based on a recipe from Martha Washington), Country Captain Chicken (an American "curry" popular in the 1800s), and Garlic Soup (a French recipe that became popular with the "Lost Generation" expats). The writing was unobtrusive and included lots of personal anecdotes in between the research and recipes. Overall a fun book with lots of interesting information.
I read this as an ARC via NetGalley.
Black Dragon River: A Journey Down the Amur River at the Borderlands of Empires by Dominic Ziegler. Travel nonfiction about the Amur River, which – to be completely honest – I had never heard of before this book. Apparently it is the ninth longest river in the world (well, depending on how you measure it), starts in a mountain range in Mongolia, forms the border between Russia and China, and finally flows into the Pacific. It's also known as the Heilongjiang, which translates directly into "Black Dragon River" – thus the title. Ziegler is the type of travel writer that I prefer: very little memoir-like accounts of his personal experiences or background, and lots and lots of interesting research on the area, in his case mostly history with a bit on the environment (descriptions of local plants and animals, accounts of the destruction wrought by humans, you get the jist).
Much like my experience of the river itself, I knew practically nothing about the history Ziegler covers. He starts with Genghis Khan, who was (probably) born in the same mountain range as the Amur, and that wasn't too new. But then Ziegler goes on to cover the Russian exploration and colonization of Siberia in the 1600s, primarily for the fur trade, led by the Cossacks; the movement of Tibetan-derived Buddhism into the local people; the recapture of the Amur by the Qing Dynasty, leading to the Treaty of Nerchinsk, the first major treaty between China and a European power; the Decembrist revolution and their exile; the reconquering of the Amur by Russia as China was being carved up by various imperialist powers in the 1800s; and the 1969 battle over Damasky Island, as Russia and China vied for control of a small island in the river and the rest of the world freaked out about two nuclear powers fighting. A lot of this history was depressing, involving the usual sort of torture, murder of unarmed innocents, rape, and more that you can always expect from stories of colonization and war. But the history of the Russian Far East was a topic that I had absolutely no awareness of previously, and so I found it fascinating. I can't comment on Ziegler's accuracy or political slant since, again: new to me. I have to leave that to better-informed reviews, though I can say it all seemed well-researched and reasonable.
The book was a bit slow at the beginning, but once I was engaged, I plowed through the rest of it quite quickly. It was very readable, with unobtrusive prose. It's an unusual topic, at least in English, but I'm glad that I know slightly more about it now.
I read this as an ARC via NetGalley.
What are you currently reading?
The Gentleman by Forrest Leo. A comedy about a Victorian poet who accidentally sells his wife to the Devil, then sets out to rescue her. I'm not very far into it yet, but it's amusing so far!
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no subject
Date: 2016-08-04 01:27 am (UTC)What is "Chinese restaurant syndrome"?
It's basically the same thing as 'MSG sensitivity' – complaints of headaches/migraines, sweating, chest pain, overly fast heart rate, and a bunch of other vague symptoms. It was the nickname given to the safety concerns around MSG back in the late 1960s and 70s, because supposedly a bunch of people noticed it after eating at Chinese restaurants. It probably really comes partly from an overdose of regular salt (what with soy sauce and the regular intense salting of restaurant food) and partly from general food paranoia. It is, theoretically, possible to be allergic/sensitive to MSG, but the actual rate must be much lower than the reported rate, since it would require one to also be allergic to most meats, milk, a lot of cheeses, green tea, tomatoes, potatoes, and a bunch of other things that never get blamed.