[Sca-cooks] A New Book!

[Elise Fleming]

Giggly greetings to all!  The postman just left a package containing
a surprise... A new book entitled _The Wilder Shores of Gastronomy_,
20 Years of the Best Food Writing from the Journal Petits Propos
Culinaires, edited by Alan Davidson and Helen Saberi with a foreword
by Harold McGee.  I first thought it was a gift from my eldest child
who lives in Berkeley, CA, where the package came from.  Then I saw
a letter thanking me for my contribution to the book. (??!!??)  I
finally found it... I had written a letter to PPC regarding an
article in #51 which looked for recipes that included worms.  I knew
of one which happened to be in one of Prospect Books' own reprints,
and I mailed it off.  My letter was printed in a subsequent issue.
Now it is on p. 385 of this new book in the "Exotica" section.

The book literally "just arrived" so I've only had a chance to find
out why I was gifted with a copy, and then to peruse the table of
contents.  I did find an interesting article on making aromatic
sugars ("transferring the aroma of flowers to cakes and sweets"0 on
p. 429.

The book has 7 major sections, each with a number (10-12) of
articles in that general area.  The sections are:
1. Scoops and Distant Beachheads (which includes the article about
the egg cooking method shown in a Velasquez painting)
2. Culinary History (including the Bronze Age experiment, early Arab
cookery, the Arabic connection in the medieval West, and several
others intriguing articles)
3. On Your Plate (including long pepper, period and modern galettes
des rois and much more)
4. Books and Cooks
5. Exotica
6. Recipes (period strawberry recipes including beverages;
elderflowers; saunders...)
7. Notes and Queries

If you subscribe to PPC, you have all these items.  If not, the book
is US $27.95, hardcover, and cheaper than you can buy the individual
back issues of the PPCs that contain the material.  ISBN is
1-58008-417-6.  Now you know what you can do with that extra
Christmas cash!  <g>

Alys Katharine... off to get a Starbucks coffee and sit down in the
La-Z-Boy with my feet propped up and the book and a cat in my lap!