This week, we’re reading about the cookbooks of Laurie Colwin and Paula Wolfert, the life of a restaurant sous chef, the current state of craft brewing, and more.
USA Today talks to Michael Gibney about Sous Chef: 24 Hours on the Line (Ballantine), a nonfiction account of a day in the life of a restaurant’s sous chef. “There's so much about cooking that I find attractive, if only it didn't hurt your feet so much,” Gibney tells the paper. (See PW’s starred review of Sous Chef).
The late Laurie Colwin’s cookbooks have “attracted a new, cultishly devoted generation of readers,” according to the New York Times. “You want to be in the kitchen with her — that is her secret,” Ruth Reichl told the Times. “She is the best friend we all want. She never talks down to you.”
Also from, the New York Times, an obituary of Barbara Gibbons, who died in late March at age 79. Gibbons was the author of The Slim Gourmet cookbooks, which began as a series of syndicated columns.
“I think the large brewers have finally concluded that craft beer is here to stay.” The Boston Globe has a brief interview with Brooklyn Brewery cofounder Steve Hindy, whose The Craft Beer Revlution pubs later this month from Palgrave Macmillan.
Portland Monthly Mag’s Eat Beat has word of a cookbook deal for local chef Joshua McFadden and writer Martha Holmberg. As yet untitled book from Artisan, which Eat Beat says “aims to be a go-to resource for modern vegetable cooking, broad and deep but accessible,” is expected to be published in spring 2016.
From PopMatters, an essay in praise of Paula Wolfert: “Wolfert’s approach is anthropological—apart from actual cooking, the best way to learn about food,” writes Diane Leach. “Her books invariably begin with maps, histories of who lived where, what was farmed, what was foraged, wars fought, won, and lost. Then she schleps up mountainsides, into rural communities, into homes, into farmhouses and restaurant kitchens.”
