Penguins: Can We Eat Them?

The Penguin Companion to Food
Reviewed by Elliot Essman
Full Review at www.stylegourmet.com.

I grew up in a house filled with books. Even before I could read, the books fascinated me, especially the markings and tiny logos I’d note on the bindings. I’d know the books by those little logos: the Random House set of houses, for example, or the Alfred A. Knopf leaping dog. The small paperbacks, the ones I’d first come to actually open, my favorites, were the Penguins. I think I even had a name for that penguin, but it is now lost. These were the original Penguin Classics, the ones in the plain paper covers before the firm decided to go a slick black, books like Don Quixote or Crime and Punishment or The Canterbury Tales. I wouldn’t read these books until later in life, but I’d fondle them, leaf through the front and end matter, the lists of other titles, and know that they had value, and a certain evocative British-ness to boot. Penguin is part of a big international conglomerate today, but I find they still maintain a link to that original perceived value. Alan Davidson’s The Penguin Companion to Food is a perfect example.

The Companion (in its hardcover original the Oxford Companion to Food) runs more than a thousand pages and contains more than 2500 entries on every plant and animal product, every cooking tradition and technique, of any relevance to the well-schooled cook. It is universal in its scope, yet at the same time, how can I put this, British. A team of eminent culinary scholars put this one together. Now I know you’re wondering, before anything else, if that flightless bird of the Antarctic itself is edible. The answer is, with some reservations, yes. The book’s 500-word entry on its namesake ingredient shows at once the usual detail and characteristic humor of the Companion’s approach. We are told that we are often reminded of the penguin by the paperback edition of a book or by “observing at social functions those few Englishmen who still dress up to look like waiters or penguins—it is never clear which.” The problem with the technically edible penguin is that it eats only fish and hence tastes strongly like its diet. The penguin is most important in the food chain for the guano it leaves as waste, an excellent fertilizer. South Africans eat the eggs of some species of penguins. Read the Full Review at www.stylegourmet.com.

Rum: People, Passion and Pain

Rum
by Dave Broom
Reviewed by Elliot Essman
Full Review at www.stylegourmet.com.

I could kick myself for digging through a shelf of quotation books to find Lord Byron’s “There’s nought no doubt so much the spirit calms as rum and true religion.” Rum, by Dave Broom, a luxuriant keeper volume published by the Wine Appreciation Guild, has got the very same quote emblazoned on the back cover. Of course, Byron used the term “rum” to refer to all potent alcoholic beverages. If anything, the usage attests to the wide historical and social reach of rum. “Here is a drink,” Broom writes, “that has been the catalyst for the birth of nations.” The scope of Rum, the book, aided immeasurably by the superb photography of Jason Lowe, does true justice to the beverage.

Rum is distilled from sugar cane, and like sugar, it reveals a history of misery and pain. “Rum was slavery’s currency; it made some people vast fortunes and helped others forget their misery,” Broom reflects. Caribbean sugar production was so labor-intensive that it almost mandated that slaves be worked to death and periodically replaced. The rum and slave trade went hand-in-hand, enriching cities like Bristol in England and Newport, Rhode Island. American rum, sugar and slave trade with the Caribbean led to the first major commercial rifts between the American colonies and England; these soon escalated into heated debate, then gunfire and revolution. America’s founding fathers reached for rum above all other beverages when they needed to stiffen their resolve. Read the Full Review at www.stylegourmet.com.

Prosciutto

Prosciutto
by Carla Bardi
Reviewed by Elliot Essman
Full Review at www.stylegourmet.com.

My first memories of prosciutto entailed a veritable explosion in my mouth. As if hurtled in a flash to my first culinary Oz, I had the distinct realization that I was not in ham country any more. To call prosciutto “Italian Ham” is akin to calling the operas of Giuseppe Verdi “Italian Musical Plays.” Neither term properly conveys the sublime we find so often when it comes to Italy.

Carla Bardi’s Prosciutto comes to us from the Wine Appreciation Guild’s “Italian Pantry” series: luscious fully-illustrated volumes that give us the Italian A-to-Z on olive oil, pasta, cheese, and of course prosciutto and all its cousins. In truth, the book’s original title, Salumi, gives Italian food devotees a far better idea of the book’s ambitious scope; the term refers to “a vast array of different meats that have been cured with salt and spices then cooked or dried.” But even the term salumi fails to go the whole distance. Strictly speaking, salumi refers to any food (though usually pork) preserved in salt. The term insacatti refers to those meats packed into natural or synthetic animal gut. To do true justice to the book’s subject, the author is forced to resort to the unexciting but accurate phrase “Italian deli meats.” Salamis can qualify as salumi, insacatti, or both, but these distinctions are best left for the linguists. We food fanciers would rather read, salivate, and go online to book trips to Italy. Read the Full Review at www.stylegourmet.com.

Greek Salad - A Dionysian Travelogue

by Miles Lambert-Gócs
Reviewed by Elliot Essman
Full Review at www.stylegourmet.com
A satisfying chunk of black volcanic rock never leaves my desk. I picked it up personally on the Greek island of Santorini, where steam still percolates from the ground some twenty-five hundred years after the island exploded, upending the Aegean world. You can believe my powerful paperweight is the match of even the most truculent culinary book. It has certainly helped me plumb the depths of Greek Salad, a “Dionysian Travelogue” by American wine writer Miles Lambert-Gócs. Lambert roams Greece—the Aegean islands, the mainland, the Ionian islands—in an attempt to transmit, even amplify, a taste of Greece into accessible English prose. The result—even if you can taste Greece only vicariously—is the stuff of persistent reverie. Taken individually, Lambert’s 26 vignettes could only succeed in generating dramatic tension, unless, like me, you retain taste memory of a challenging retsina from Rhodes, or the best yogurt you have ever ingested.

The whole of Greek Salad, though by rights it should be at least a coffee-table book (it is a tight small-format paperback), succeeds as it satisfies. I read just yesterday that recent surveys found Greeks, both male and female, to be on average even heavier than Americans. Evidently, Greeks do a lot of eating and drinking. The way Lambert tells it, the food, the wine, the soul of Greece do not spring fully-formed from a laminated restaurant menu; they are animated by earth, sea and sky. If you find yourself in Greece, you might as well eat, and wash it down with wine that originates just a stone’s throw from your table. You can work it all off in the gym on your return. Read the Full Review at www.stylegourmet.com