Showing results by publisher "HighBridge, a Division of Recorded Books" in Food & Wine

Every great drink starts with a plant. Sake began with a grain of rice. Scotch emerged from barley. Gin was born from a conifer shrub when medieval physicians boiled juniper berries with wine to treat stomach pain. The Drunken Botanist uncovers the surprising botanical history and fascinating science and chemistry of over 150 plants, flowers, trees, and fruits (and even a few fungi).

You've seen the headlines: Parmesan cheese made from sawdust. Lobster rolls containing no lobster at all. Extra-virgin olive oil that isn't. Fake foods are in our supermarkets, our restaurants, and our kitchen cabinets. Award-winning food journalist and travel writer Larry Olmsted exposes this pervasive and dangerous fraud perpetrated on unsuspecting Americans.

The spectacular culinary creations of modern cuisine are the stuff of countless articles and social media feeds. But to a scientist they are also perfect pedagogical explorations into the basic scientific principles of cooking. In Science and Cooking, Harvard professors Michael Brenner, Pia Sörensen, and David Weitz bring the classroom to your kitchen to teach the physics and chemistry underlying every recipe.

In this book, Rob Arnold reveals how innovative whiskey producers are recapturing a sense of place to create distinctive, nuanced flavors. He takes listeners on a world tour of whiskey and the science of flavor, stopping along the way at distilleries in Kentucky, New York, Texas, Ireland, and Scotland. Arnold puts the spotlight on a new generation of distillers, plant breeders, and local farmers who are bringing back long-forgotten grain flavors and creating new ones in pursuit of terroir.

When journalist Isabel Vincent befriends Edward, both are at a crossroads: He wants to follow his late wife to the grave, and she is ready to give up on love. Isabel's friend, Edward's daughter, lives far away and has asked Isabel to check in on her dad in New York. At first Isabel is just doing her duty. But soon this charming, elegant, cultured man has become her dear friend. She gives him a reason to go on without his beloved wife of 72 years, and he gives her a renewed faith that happiness is possible.

Rachel Herz uncovers the fascinating and surprising facts that affect food consumption. Why You Eat What You Eat mixes the social with the scientific to uncover how psychology, neurology, and physiology shape our relationship with food and how food alters the relationships we have with ourselves and with one another.

Calvin Trillin proves that he is one of America's funniest food writers, while recalling his efforts to write a definitive history of the Buffalo chicken wing to his attempts to lure his older daughter back from California by finding an irresistible bagel.

NPR celebrates the joyful, inspiring, and downright delicious culture of food with this smorgasbord of radio stories, featuring visits with celebrity chefs and famous foodies Gastón Acurio, Mark Bittman, Alton Brown, Julia Child, Amanda Cohen, Dana Goodyear, Dorie Greenspan, Jeff Henderson, Christopher Kimball, Maricel Presilla, Ruth Reichl, Marcus Samuelsson, William Sitwell, and many others.

Thanks to a small but growing number of dedicated farmers, importers, roasters, and baristas, coffee quality is at an all-time high. But for nonprofessionals, achieving cafe quality at home can seem out of reach. With dozens of equipment options, conflicting information on how to use that equipment, and an industry language that, at times, doesn't seem made for the rest of us, it can be difficult to know where to begin. Craft Coffee: A Manual, written by a coffee enthusiast for coffee enthusiasts, is a comprehensive guide to improving your brew at home.

Cask Strength is more than a history book. In it, Mike Gerrard, an award-winning travel and drinks writer, investigates the making, buying, and selling of barrels and details how drinks like wine, tequila, rum, cognac, and others are enhanced by specific kinds of barrel production.

The characters in Tasting the Past include a young Swiss scientist who set out to decode the DNA of every single wine grape in the world; Middle Eastern researchers who seek to discover the wines that King David drank; and a University of Pennsylvania academic who has spent decades analyzing wine remains. The science illuminates wine in ways no critic can, and demolishes some of the most sacred dogmas of the industry: well-known French grapes aren't especially noble.

The Kingdom of Rye unearths the foods and flavors of the Russian land. Preeminent food studies scholar Darra Goldstein offers listeners a concise, engaging, and gorgeously crafted story of Russian cuisine and culture. This story demonstrates how national identity is revealed through food—and how people know who they are by what they eat together. The Kingdom of Rye examines the Russians' ingenuity in overcoming hunger, a difficult climate, and a history of political hardship while deciphering Russia's social structures from within.

All tequilas are mezcals; all mezcals are made from agaves; and every bottle of mezcal is the remarkable result of collaborations among agave entrepreneurs, botanists, distillers, beverage distributors, bartenders, and more. How these groups come together in this "spirits world" is the subject of this fascinating new book by the acclaimed ethnobotanist Gary Paul Nabhan and the pioneering restauranteur David Suro Piñera.

Ask any self-respecting Louisianan who makes the best gumbo and the answer is universal: "Momma." The product of a melting pot of culinary influences, gumbo, in fact, reflects the diversity of the people who cooked it up: French aristocrats, West Africans in bondage, Cajun refugees, German settlers, Native Americans-all had a hand in the pot. What is it about gumbo that continues to delight and nourish so many? And what explains its spread around the world? A seasoned journalist, Ken Wells sleuths out the answers.

For centuries, skeptical foreigners - and even millions of Americans - have believed there was no such thing as American cuisine. In recent decades, hamburgers, hot dogs, and pizza have been thought to define the nation's palate. Not so, says food historian Paul Freedman, who demonstrates that there is an exuberant and diverse, if not always coherent, American cuisine that reflects the history of the nation itself.

These days, high-quality coffee can taste all kinds of ways, thanks to roasting techniques that help draw out the qualities of the bean. In addition to that characteristic coffee taste, you really can find hints of fruit, chocolate, and nuts in your cup—all it takes is a little knowledge, a little practice, and the ability to slow down and savor. In How to Taste Coffee, bestselling author Jessica Easto explains why flavor notes are not always as straightforward with coffee as they are with other beverages, such as wine, beer, and spirits. 

Imagine a workplace where workers enjoyed a well-paid job for life, one where they could start their day with a pint of stout and a smoke, and enjoy free meals in silver service canteens and restaurants. During their breaks they could explore acres of parkland planted with hundreds of trees and thousands of shrubs. This is no fantasy or utopian vision of work but a description of the working conditions enjoyed by employees at the Guinness brewery established at Park Royal in West London in the mid-1930s.

Steve Almond doesn't just love candy, he unabashedly worships every aspect of confectionary culture, from the creation of an exceptional malt ball through the tragic demise of a badly conceived candy bar, from the emotion-laden memories stirred by a bite of chocolate to his near-drooling anticipation of spotting a new package on the candy shelves.

Wurgaft and White use vivid storytelling to bring food practices to life, weaving stories of Panamanian coffee growers, medieval women beer makers, and Japanese knife forgers. From the Venetian spice trade to the Columbian Exchange, from Roman garum to Vietnamese nuoc cham, Ways of Eating provides an absorbing account of world food history and anthropology. Migration, politics, and the dynamics of group identity all shape what we eat, and we can learn to trace these social forces from the plate to the kitchen, the factory, and the field.

Moscow takes us on deep dives (sometimes literally) with fisherfolk, farmers, scientists, community activists, historians, hunters, and more, bringing back stories of the communities, workers, and environments involved—some thriving, some in jeopardy, all interconnected with food.