#bee wilson

[lovingsylvia]

!NEW RELEASE!

Title: Sylvia Plath's Tomato Soup Cake: A Compendium of Classic Authors' Favourite Recipes

Author: Bee Wilson (Foreword)

Publication date: 7 November 2024

Publisher: Faber

Pages: 144

Description:

"Dine with beloved writers in this ‘utterly charming’ (Nina Stibbe) new anthology of their very own favourite recipes, introduced by Bee Wilson. Agatha Christie’s hot bean salad. Jack Kerouac’s green pea soup. Allen Ginsberg’s cold summer borscht. Daphne du Maurier’s sloe gin. Christopher Isherwood’s brownies. Joan Didion’s Mexican chicken. George Orwell’s plum cake.

Have you ever wondered what your favourite classic authors cooked – whether as an intimate snack for one or as their showstopping dinner party special? Here’s your chance to wine and dine with the world’s most famous writers in a gorgeous new collection of their most-loved recipes, curated from their archives, letters and diaries. Whet your appetite: there are culinary treats and eccentricities in store …"

Image source (cover & description): https://www.faber.co.uk/product/9780571390366-sylvia-plaths-tomato-soup-cake/

...

I assume since the title refrences Sylvia Plath that there will be a recipe for her tomato cake in there, but I think it's a bit weird that they did not list it with the other examples. But anyway, looking forward to this book! :)

[quotesfrommyreading]

One thing is sure. We will never get beyond the technology of cooking itself. Sporks may come and go, microwaves rise and fall, but the human race will always have kitchen tools. Fire, hands, knives; we will always have these.

  —  Consider the Fork: A History of How We Cook and Eat (Bee Wilson)

[vfdinthewild]

“If you know that a country, Madagascar, say, spends 57% of its per capita consumer income on food, then you can be sure it is very far down the league tables of the wealth of nations.”

-from The Way We Eat Now by Bee Wilson, Chapter 3

[antronaut]

The Way We Eat Now

[luxe-pauvre]

For as long as people have eaten food, there have been diets and quack cures. But previously, these existed, like conspiracy theories, on the fringes of food culture. “Clean eating” was different, because it established itself as a challenge to mainstream ways of eating, and its wild popularity over the past five years has enabled it to move far beyond the fringes. Powered by social media, it has been more absolutist in its claims and more popular in its reach than any previous school of modern nutrition advice. [. . .] The founding principle of these modern wellness regimes is that our current way of eating is slowly poisoning us. “Much of the food on offer to us today is nutritionally substandard,” write the Hemsley sisters, best-selling champions of “nutrient-dense” food. It’s hard to disagree with the proposition that modern diets are generally “substandard”, even if you don’t share the Hemsleys’ solution of going “grain-free”. “All of these diets have a kernel of truth that is spun out into some bigger fantasy,” Giles Yeo says – hence their huge appeal. [. . .] In prosperous countries, large numbers of people – whether they wanted to lose weight or not – became understandably scared of the modern food supply and what it was doing to our bodies: type 2 diabetes, obesity and cardiovascular disease, not to mention a host of other complaints that are influenced by diet, ranging from Alzheimer’s to gout. When mainstream diets start to sicken people, it is unsurprising that many of us should seek other ways of eating to keep ourselves safe from harm. Our collective anxiety around diet was exacerbated by a general impression that mainstream scientific advice on diet – inflated by newspaper headlines – could not be trusted. [. . .] “The poison comes from the fact that they are wrapping the whole thing up in pseudoscience,” Yeo says. “If you base something on falsehoods, it empowers people to take extreme actions, and this is where the harm begins.”

Bee Wilson, Why we fell for clean eating

[indizombie]

For 40 years or more, the British relationship with curry houses was part of our national self-image. It was an institution that flattered us that we were more tolerant and cosmopolitan than our meat-and-potatoes grandparents. If the sad decline of the curry house tells us anything, however, it is that open palates do not necessarily lead to open minds or open borders. Even Donald Trump advertises his love of tacos.

Bee Wilson, 'Who killed the great British curry house?', The Guardian

[indizombie]

Most “Indian” restaurants, started as fish and chip shops that sold a bit of curry and rice on the side, run by Bangladeshi boatmen from the predominantly Muslim district of Sylhet, which at that time was still part of British India. This was not a region ever famed for its cuisine, which is one of the reasons that some British Asian people used to dismiss curry house food as the clumsy cooking of untrained sailors. However, food journalist Vikram Doctor, who writes for the Economic Times in Mumbai, told me that there were good cooks in Sylhet, namely the Mug or Mogh cooks who catered for the British Raj in Calcutta, whose great talent was to make inauthentic concoctions such as roast dinners jazzed up with masala spices. “I’ve always wondered,” Doctor told me last year in Mumbai, “whether the Mug cooks were among the first Sylhetis who cooked in British curry houses. It would make sense, if so, because they knew how to adapt a curry to please the British.”

Bee Wilson, 'Who killed the great British curry house?', The Guardian

[phasmidd]

The secret of better home cooking is not to be found in fancy gadgets, chefs’ tricks or hidden ingredients. The secret of cooking is the person who cooks, whoever that person may be. It is the human standing at the stove who brings the words of a recipe to life (or who summons up a meal without any recipe at all, drawing on memories so deep they seem to be instincts). Each of us carries into the kitchen our own particular tastes and values, our passions and blind spots, and our motivations for cooking – or not cooking. Whatever the meal or the occasion, the person who cooks is by far the most important element. Recipes are just ‘notes on a page, waiting for you to bring them to life’, as the Italian food writer Marcella Hazan wrote in one of her cookbooks. If we want to eat a more delicious dinner, we need to look after the cook. That means finding the ways of cooking that work for you, no matter how anyone else does things.

Bee Wilson, The Secret of Cooking: Recipes for an Easier Life in the Kitchen