[CRussel]

Originally Posted by Bookworm_Girl

Charlie, there is definitely a conspiracy out there against food books, especially when priced in Canadian dollars. At least I added several delicious-sounding finds to my TBR.

I agree about the apparent conspiracy. I was getting quite frustrated there for a bit.

Even if it doesn't get selected, I'd recommend the Bruno books. The food is simply marvelous in them. And they're delightful.

Here are some of the other books that looked interesting to me:
- Anything by Ruth Reichl, the above mentioned by Charlie as well as Save Me the Plums
- The Food Explorer: The True Adventures of the Globe-Trotting Botanist Who Transformed What America Eats by Daniel Stone
- Sous Chef: 24 Hours on the Line by Michael Gibney
- The Apprentice: My Life in the Kitchen by Jacques Pepin
- The Hundred-Foot Journey by Richard C. Morais *I highly recommend the movie based on this book starring Helen Mirren*
- The School of Essential Ingredients by Erica Bauermeister
- Honey and Venom: Confessions of an Urban Beekeeper by Andrew Cote

I've read that Reichl as well, and enjoyed it. And the Jacques Pepin is wonderful. The others are unfamiliar, so to be investigated.

Also, if you come across a dead tree copy of the full Tummy Trilogy, by Calvin Trillin, snatch it up. The first of them, American Fried, and the last of them, Third Helpings, never made it into eBook format. And his About Alice, an homage to his wife, Alice, is definitely worth a read.

Spoiler:

In Calvin Trillin’s antic tales of family life, she was portrayed as the wife who had “a weird predilection for limiting our family to three meals a day” and the mother who thought that if you didn’t go to every performance of your child’s school play, “the county would come and take the child.” Now, five years after her death, her husband offers this loving portrait of Alice Trillin off the page–his loving portrait of Alice Trillin off the page–an educator who was equally at home teaching at a university or a drug treatment center, a gifted writer, a stunningly beautiful and thoroughly engaged woman who, in the words of a friend, “managed to navigate the tricky waters between living a life you could be proud of and still delighting in the many things there are to take pleasure in.”

Though it deals with devastating loss, About Alice is also a love story, chronicling a romance that began at a Manhattan party when Calvin Trillin desperately tried to impress a young woman who “seemed to glow.”
“You have never again been as funny as you were that night,” Alice would say, twenty or thirty years later.
“You mean I peaked in December of 1963?”
“I’m afraid so.”

But he never quit trying to impress her. In his writing, she was sometimes his subject and always his muse. The dedication of the first book he published after her death read, “I wrote this for Alice. Actually, I wrote everything for Alice.”

In that spirit, Calvin Trillin has, with About Alice, created a gift to the wife he adored and to his readers.