Hello and welcome to Cooking Issues. This is Dave Arnold, your host of Cooking Issues coming to you alive from Newsday Studios in the Rockefeller Center. Joined as usual with Nastasia the Hammer Lopez. How you doing, Nastasia? I'm good.
You're good? You're good? Calling all of your qu well, if you're listening live because you're a Patreon subscriber, calling your questions to 917-410-1507. That's 917-410-1507. Joined as usual with our dueling engineers.
We got Joe Hazen here here at Rock Center. How are you doing, Joe? I'm doing great. How are you? All right, and we got Jack Insley, Jackie Molecules over there in the California booth.
What's up? It's hot here. I'm doing great, though. Yeah. Got that.
Well, you know, I feel so bad for you. I'm in LA with all the nice plants and trees. I just got a portable air conditioner today, though, so life will get better. I don't know if you know this. Uh, they do make your life better intensely inefficient.
They're intensely inefficient. Yeah. It's basically like, you know, you're spending, I guess, a little less money now, but you're burning money and throwing it out the window in terms of your electric bill. Unless you're not paying electric. If it's all like folded into your Airbnb, then portable away.
You know what I mean? Uh but anyway, so we'll talk about that. All right. So uh we got Nastasia Manning the uh phone, should anything come in. Uh Jack, you're gonna man any new Patreon andor uh what's it called, uh like chat room questions.
Uh but and hopefully we get some good ones because today in studio, and this is this is our first studio guest, like like not part of the cooking issues team guest. Here, is it? Anyway, yeah. Uh, we have with us today, friend of the show, uh Matt Sartwell from Kitchen Arts and Letters. Everybody who knows anything's favorite bookstore.
How are you doing? I'm doing well. Thank you for having me. Yeah. So the when last we had you on the show, you've been on, I think, tw twice?
Twice before this, I think, yeah. So I think the first time was when you guys were doing your your GoFundMe, right? Which was successful. It was. It was a huge success.
We were stunned. No. Well, it's because people uh love you guys. Well, thank you. I uh people really demonstrated that.
They put their money uh where their heart is. So for those of those who are new listeners, you want to just I mean, do you want to give the pitch for the store or should I give you the pitch for this store so you don't have to give it yourself? I'd love to hear your pitch for the store. So my pitch for the store, and I've told I told this the last time, so apologize for those who've listened uh before, but uh uh the the I found Kitchen Arts and Letters because at the very beginning of when you could search for everything on the internet. This is prior to uh well, you'll know when it was because it was whenever when the breadbuilders book came out.
Okay. So what was that, like 98, something like that? Might even be a little earlier than that, yeah. Yeah. Well, I think I was looking for it in like 1998.
Bread Builder's what was at the time like the book. Like there was no other book like it at the time. It's still pretty important. And and we've talked about it uh uh on air. Great book.
Uh I think one of them died, right? Alan Wing, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. No, that's I'm I'm getting that wrong.
But yeah, one of them died. The the builder. Yeah, the build. So it's a builder and a bread person. And one of the one of them was a former bio chem guy, right?
I mean, it was it's an amazing book, and it was all about uh, and it was before the it was before the amazing bread resurgence, back when the only person who was making no offense to everybody, but the person who was making the decent bread there was there was basically Jim when he when he was still at Sullivan Street, like way downtown, and a couple other people making decent bread, but it wasn't like it wasn't like today. No, there was nothing like the the frequency with which you're gonna find great bread. Yeah. And I had found on the street an old like 1930s uh oven with no thermostats in it. And uh I brought it up to my illegal loft, I plumbed it into the gas line and filled the sucker with bricks, and then started using it fundamentally as a retained heat masonry oven fired by gas in the middle of my apartment in in New York City and needed some guidance on making bread.
And I don't know how this book came to my attention, but this is like I say, early, like when Amazon was just selling books. Amazon was just a bookseller at the time, before they had uh done what they did to us and many other small businesses, right, Stas? Mm-hmm. Yeah, yeah. Uh which we won't get into.
We're not anti-Amazon anymore for for this moment, simply because they're now selling the Sears all again. So uh it's kind of like, you know, uh we're back in that abusive relationship with them. Anyway, so um I digress. So I find this book on Amazon, uh, the bread builders, and I'm like, I don't have the money to buy it. It was not an expensive book, but I had no money.
No, zero. So I was like, I don't have the money to buy this unless I know it's gonna be good. Like the way I used to be with with records. You wouldn't buy a record unless you could hear it beforehand. Because if the record's bad and you spent the money.
Right, and records were a lot of money. Yeah. Yeah. Especially if you didn't have a lot of it, you know, and and and the odds that somebody who made a record you liked last year that you like the next record is like less even than a book, right? I mean, like the odds that you like the second book.
It it makes a big difference, yeah. Uh records could blow your mind what the second, the sophomore effort was. Yeah, and you're like, oh, geez, oh, now I'm out, the money. Anyway, so I was like, I gotta go, I gotta go see this book in the real life before I buy it. And I found I found out, you know, about your store, which is on what is it, 90?
I always forget the exact cross street, 90 93rd and 94th. 93rd and Lex. And you, you do you bike? I do, although I don't bike up there. But you have the you have the it's not that bad, but you have the only real hill in all of Manhattan is right at your store.
You know what I mean? There are worse ones. Are there? Seriously, yeah. Washington Heights?
Oh, yeah, I don't bike up there. Oh, okay. Yeah. Uh actually that is true, but not okay. In Washington Heights, if you go into the parks over by the river where they go down, there are some serious hills in the park.
But I'm talking like actual city street. Is there a bigger hill than yours where you're actually driving with cars? If you're coming up from like second avenue, it's probably hard to top that. That stretch from 2nd Avenue to Lexington in the in the low 90s is killer. Yeah.
Do knuckleboard skateboard, uh, knucklehead skateboarders like bust up their domes all the time there or what? I don't think so. It must have a really bad reputation. I don't see those, I don't see skateboarders there. Huh.
Anyways, so uh so I I, you know, I make the is it the trek over there. And my intention was to buy the to look at the book, sneak out, and buy it on Amazon for cheaper. That was my mental intent. And then I I couldn't, I had to buy it from you guys because A, I was like, oh my God, this resource, I need to come here uh a lot, but I can't because I'll spend all my money. So I was like forbodent.
Like I wasn't allowed to go to Kitchen Arts and Letters, unlike my brother-in-law Wiley, who, you know, I think he just transferred a large chunk of your bookshop to his apartment. There was there was a glorious period when Wiley had uh some construction problems and he was spending a lot of time in the store to compensate. It was it was great for us. Yeah. So Wiley, like Wiley, I used to go to the store and you would have like a section that Wiley was gonna come pick up almost.
His book. And Wiley's bookshelves, by the way, I mean, just nuts. Anyways, again I digress. So I was like, you know, look at you, you know, this has to be uh supported, but again, I'm I wasn't allowed to go. Same JB Prince, also I wasn't allowed to go to JB Prince.
Dangerous place, exciting place. Yeah, so both Kitchen Arts and Letters and JB Prince, I I want to support them, but they're kind of, it's kind of like a drug. I can't go too often. I I hear what you're saying, yes. It's uh I feel that way when I go into Calustians.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. It's the problem with Calusteans is I love Calustians. I love it. Some of the some of the stuff, they won't do what we want them to.
Like Wiley and I have argued with them, and we both love them. But like, for instance, transglutaminase, meat glue, you have to you have to keep it in the freezer, and they just won't. I don't know why they won't do it. Hmm. I I don't know why they won't do it.
But there's no place like it on earth that I've been. Yeah, it's I mean, it it keeps getting bigger and better, and I I love going in there. And I always leave with five times as many things as I expected to bring home. Oh, true, true. I bought some stuff there.
Uh yeah, have you used the uh the boot knees fermented tea? No. I haven't either. I bought it there though, but I haven't used it because like uh my wife doesn't like to consume too much caffeine at night. Stas, are you okay with caffeine at night?
Yeah, I'm fine. Yeah. So, like, I don't want to serve her this salad made with fermented tea leaves at night and get her all buzzed up. But then on the other hand, I'm not gonna make a fermented tea leaf salad in the morning for breakfast. Anyway, I don't know.
I don't know what to do with it. All right. Uh so that's my pitch for the store. Uh, and even nowadays when so much stuff is online, I think the the level of curation and knowledge and care and thought that as you will, you know, witness in the in the rest of the show, that's brought um to kind of your job. It's kind of like you, the people at the store are as important as the books themselves.
And you don't get that. Uh you can't get that from Amazon. You're not gonna get that by reading, you know, uh those idiot reviewers who are like, um the page was creased when it got mailed to me. One star for the book. One star.
You know what I mean? Or like uh, you know, um, and a lot of people who write reviews on Amazon are, you know, some of them are are good, but uh a lot of them have like uh just wrong access to grind. You can't really trust them. And I guarantee you they're not written by someone who has spent the majority of their professional career learning what makes a good cookbook, meeting the authors, going to the fairs and all of these other things. Uh so anyway, that's the pitch.
Go to Kitchen Arts and Letters. And you're now have a large, relatively large online presence as well, right? We do. We're working on expanding it all the time, but um it's uh it's a big part of our efforts now, and we're always trying to highlight the books that are harder to find elsewhere. Right.
And so you also get, for instance, rare out of print, and you will find books for people if they can't sometimes find them. You'll keep your eye out for them. Yeah, my uh my business partner who founded the store, Knock Waxman, specializes in that now. It's it's pretty much what he dedicates himself to. And uh we do have a free service that finds out-of-print books for people, and we also periodically uh send out a newsletter that highlights some unusual things they find or he's found.
So it could be uh uh a first edition of uh of a famous cookbook. It could be um recently we had uh some really interesting reprints of cocktail books from the 1930s. Um it's always sort of a a bit of a grab bag, what he's offering in those newsletters, but it's gonna be stuff you're just not gonna really learn about elsewhere. You got any got any really really whacked out stuff recently that anything that comes to shoots to mind? Um most of that stuff vanishes pretty quickly.
So um it finds it's it finds its home. But we did have uh a reprint of Jerry Thomas's uh original book that was done in the 1930s. It was done, it was slip-cased, uh, very uh high quality edition, and that was like a $1,200 book. Like the 30s reprint. Was it $1,200 book?
Yeah, it was a really fine high-quality special limited edition. And it it found a home really fast. But I mean, as often as anything, it it can be like uh uh a church cookbook from the 1880s that is uh really sort of very much about a little place like a little village in Vermont, and there'll be a picture of a church on the front cover and recipes from people who have been dead for a hundred years, but they're uh they're there on the page, and that's a big part of what finding those older books is about. Right. So when you find a book like that, or when your partner finds a book like that, what is it?
Is it the is it the community you're looking at, the recipes you're looking at, both? Like what, like what's the main value? What's the main value in something like that? I would say that the the community that's revealed is the more interesting thing. Um the uh you can see sometimes transitions to the way in which people are writing recipes.
Uh in the later part of the 19th century, uh recipe standardization was coming to the fore. People like Fannie Farmer were insisting on precise measurements. They chose the wrong ones though, but yeah. Well, but that water under the bridge. Uh blood under the bridge.
But the uh uh just even the whole format of having the ingredients laid out in a chart before the text, all of that is is sort of happening. And so you can see how much these people are paying attention to, say, the wider community around them. Um, and you'll see what kind of foods they present as exotic and what kind of foods they present as as staple items. And it can be sometimes just small clues um in the name of the recipe. Uh and and the ingredients that they adapt to, and and it's interesting just to see what was what was commonplace enough that they could call for it.
Um so yeah, you want something that really reflects its place. They're often not books that are were produced with particularly high quality uh paper and and so forth. So you they're delicate, they don't tend to be really expensive. Um, but they are a really real piece of American. And do you look for like ingredients that are one step removed from an old ingredient or the actual old ingredient?
Like so whenever I see like uh we have an old recipe in my in my family that asks for soured milk. And so, like, I know that that recipe probably goes back to when to a pre-refrigeration time when they wanted to use old older milk. Is like that the kind of thing that you're looking for? They're like, if it's not sour, add some lemon to it. They don't, it doesn't call for buttermilk because that wasn't something that they don't usually provide that level of instruction.
The assumption is that you knew pretty much, they're not giving you the detailed kind of instruction that you might expect from a contemporary American cookbook. They assume that you have been around um a kitchen all your life and watch people cook so that there are a lot of basic processes that aren't explained. They don't tell you how to uh trust a chicken or how to cut one up and you know how to uh come up with individual pieces. So they're basically giving you a process and some ingredients with some possibly rough amounts, and assuming that you have the the know at all to complete it from that fairly spare set of instructions. You like trusting chickens?
I don't trust chickens. I don't trust chickens myself, no. I like the chicken to be free, open up and be free to roast itself with its arms or its legs, I guess, held out. Um so here's a question for a uh a set of cookbooks like that, and uh I want to kind of buy a couple, and this is weird because I have no relationship to it, but Nastasia's dad worked for ATT for a long time, right? Works.
Well, but is it still called AT? No, he worked for Bell back when it was Bell and it became ATT. What about these telephone operator cookbooks? Worth buying, not worth buying? I haven't seen any recently.
Um But like they're all over the country. Some of them are worth a lot of money and some of them are worth no money. I don't know what what's reflected in that kind of pricing. There were a lot of uh sort of uh career fraternal organization cookbooks. Um there were a lot of cookbooks by flight attendants.
Oh, are they good? Um it really depends on the on the individual books. Um That's a whole genre. Enough that I don't want to tell a tale out of too much out of school. There was someone who came to us because his mother had written a recipe that was in one of these books, and his mother had sent subsequently passed away.
Um and he wanted to find that book with the recipe of his mother's because he'd never seen it. And uh he wanted it uh when he uh was proposing to the woman he wanted to marry. He thought it was a way of sort of inviting her into the family. And we were able to find that one, the the specific book. Um you remember what the recipe was?
I don't remember what the recipe was. I think it was a dessert, but I can't be more specific than that. But it was at that point that we realized how many books of this type there were. And even he knew which airline it was from, and it turned out there were like five books from flight attendants from this airline. Huh.
Uh, published within a span of maybe 15 years. So it had a real vogue. Was that the height of when like flying was the coolest? Uh yeah, this was like the late 60s, early, you know, into the 70s. Yeah, yeah.
Back when like pilots were just like the stuff and everyone looked everyone looked real on point and everything. Hey, speaking of which, did you know that they turned the TWA terminal at John F. Kennedy into a fancy hotel? Yes. I'm gonna go to the fancy hotel.
I didn't I didn't know. I don't know anything. Until my wife's like, we're gonna we were gonna go glamping at uh so Governor's Island. For those of you that don't know, Governor's Island is a small island off the off the tip of Manhattan. Used to be a uh a Coast Guard base.
I actually got to stay on it when it was a Coast Guard base in a Motel 6 that like the it was the Motel Six, the lawn, and then the Statue of Liberty. It was crazy at a Motel Six. Anyways, so I stayed there when it was a base, but now they have little cabins and you can glamp on them, which is glam glamours camping. But it is in it's $700 a night. Wow.
It's $700 a night. Two night minimum. Well two night minimum. Two night minimum. So we were gonna do it, and I was like, I was like, I live here.
I'm not spending $1,400 to sleep in my own city. You know what I mean? I mean, like, what am I? What am I nuts? Plus at JFK, I think the bar's in that Lockheed constellation.
Oh, sick. Oh man. Oh yeah. I'm gonna I'm gonna get all sauced up. The one thing that kind of well, it doesn't irritate me because I don't like pools, and neither does Nastasia.
But you have to pay extra to use the pool. What's that all about? I don't know. Would you like it if you had to pay extra? Would it keep out the Yeah, yeah.
I still wouldn't get in, but yeah. But you you'd appreciate it more, but you still wouldn't get in. Yeah, yeah. It's the human filth that you don't enjoy, right? Yeah.
Yeah. Did I ever talk to you about the pool that my children had to learn? No. It was in the basement of a building as pools often are. And uh it was humid.
So humid. Like, like, makes Miami look dry. Humid. And there was always a layer of human grease bubbles on the top of the pool. And I could not touch my kids after they got out until they had completely defiled themselves.
All right, let's look at some Patreon questions. Oh, by the way, for those of you that don't know, whenever uh whenever Matt is here, the whole episode is Classics in the field, yeah. This is the first time we're doing classics in the field. Uh at the at the new in the new digs. Uh oh, just a little um also bookkeeping uh Jack, we're gonna have our RSS, our RSS is now a real thing, and it's gonna get populated to iTunes and all that soon, right?
It is up, yes. It is up, it's submitted to the platforms. You've if uh you actually the link to the RSS is for anybody because it's free for everyone on Friday. So even if you're not a Patreon yet, you can go to the Patreon page and see that RSS feed link, and you can add it to your favorite player and for people that will discover us through other platforms. That should be any moment now.
So cool. Thanks for your patience on that, everyone. Yeah, I mean, like uh, yeah, and so don't send me any more tweets on why the the show you can't find it, because it's gonna be on a regular RSS feed. And for those of you that don't know what an RSS feed, you go, you click it once, and then it will magically appear in your in your box every Friday. All right, here we got some questions.
Uh oh, this is not a uh I mean let me get book related questions. Uh I have a questions for uh this week's show. Only after your memorial show did I realize most of my favorite books were edited by Maria Guarnicelli. She clearly knew how to make amazing cookbooks happen. I would love to find a complete list of books she has edited so that I can expand my collection.
I haven't been able to find much information on the internet. The editor name is rarely listed with most book titles. Uh, I was wondering if anyone at cooking issues um or Kitchen Arts and Letters or the booklet had a list of all of her books or had any advice on how I might track one down uh from Zachary. Any idea on how to track down like a list of what someone has edited? Wow, that would be pretty uh impressive, particularly for a career as long as Maria's.
She didn't only do cookbooks, she did like Matthew Kw Quamen and Right. She had, I mean, there was there was a lot more going on there. Sorry, David Kwan. But um I would assume that Alex would be the person who would be most likely to her daughter Alex Grant Shelley, but whether Alex has tackled something like that yet, uh I have no idea. Right, because she also worked at at least two and maybe three major publishing houses for a long time.
Uh yeah, three major houses, but also before I mean she was a she was a Harper, she was at uh William Morrow, she was at uh Scribner's and she was at WW Norton. And I I heard a story while she was still alive. I was uh at a book launch party. Um I was at a book launch party, and the literary agent David Black was there, right? And so uh he's not my agent, but you know, I was talking to him because as you do when you're at a fabulous party.
Yeah. And Nastasia was late, so uh I couldn't just like hang out with her and make fun of all the people around. It was raining. Remember that day? Remember, we were at that party and the wrong book showed up.
It was like it they they it was a book on like hair care or something like this instead of the cookbook. It was Chris Shepherd's book. No, I don't remember. Anyways, so like uh and that yeah, they shipped the wrong book to the book party. So like he, you know, he was there and then we were all it was raining cats and dogs, and he was gonna cook this meal and like give us all a copy of the book and talk about the book.
And then it was like a book on there's nothing wrong with hair care books. I think it was a hair, it's just not what you were there for. Not what I was there for, and frankly, not something that I personally care about. You know what I mean? It's that yeah, yeah.
And and as you, well, you gotta you know keep it, keep it crisp. You gotta keep it nice and anyways. Uh so he was like, he his dad was in publishing. Uh, you know, blacks and and he was he told a story about when he was a kid, he was at his dad's office, and like a young whirlwind just blasts into his dad's office and just completely like rips him a new one, which apparently no one did back in the day, and he was like, That was Maria Guarnicelli. So it's like she her whole life was like this, you know.
She she was uh she was not a figure to be taken lightly. Uh and I mean and there are some people who are powerful forces, but behind it there's really sort of nothing else but but sort of anger and hot air, but Maria backed it up with intelligence. And so when she decided she was gonna have a strong word with you, it was worth paying attention. Yeah, yeah. When she was biting, she was funny.
She c she was smart and tough, and yeah, you were happier if you were not on her bad side. Yeah, and that's uh, you know, like I say, like my perpetual fear of being on her bad side. Although Stas, this is the Nastasia believes that now that she is gone, I will never finish my book. That's what she believes. No, I think you'll finish it.
I just feel sad that she never got to see it. I've now she just wants me to feel guilty, but I've probably should feel guilty. Uh-huh. I've I have at this point, I have actual set of words. If if if a book is a set of words, I have a portion of it written, actually written, but I wouldn't call it, you know, no full chapters done yet.
Yeah. Interesting stuff. Not to you though, Stas. You will hate it. Yeah.
Um, I'm gonna try to keep it. I'm gonna try to keep this book pretty much at the same exact length and size, because I know you've already lost your copy of Liquid Intelligence. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And so I want to make it roughly the same size because I know that as we come out of the pandemic, you'll have more and more parties to go to, and you'll need you'll need that perfect that perfect size book to separate the hot and the cold stuff in your potluck. Yeah, for that potluck.
Yeah. That's what that's all she ever used it for. You know what I could do? I could just I could get you an exact liquid intelligence sized block of uh foam. No foam.
Like they make this foam for prototyping that's real tough. It's like green, and you can sand it so I can make it look exactly like a liquid intelligence. But it'll be like a tenth the weight. Mm-hmm. Yeah.
Yeah. But then if you have the liquid intelligence in between the hot casserole and the cold salad, then if you forgot to give a different gift to someone, you could be like, take this book. Right? Yeah. Because the odds they have it.
Low. Low. Uh all right. Uh okay. Uh this is a pork chop question, trying to get to okay, question from Brady Vickers.
Uh, there are a lot of crappy, I'm I'm editing for the family show aspect. There's a lot of crappy cookbooks out there. So, how do you curate a cookbook collection? In other words, what qualities make a cookbook a classic in the field from Brady Vickers in North Dakota? Well, it's a huge question because uh it depends on how you use the books.
And um, if you're cooking from them exactly, you're gonna want a different set of uh criteria than if you're the kind of person who reads a book and shuts it and uh and goes into the kitchen uh and cooks without the book. So uh you have to begin from sort of sorting it that way. There are books that like the uh original London River Cafe book that was published here as Rogers and Gray Italian Country Cooking. Famous for having not been well translated to a U.S. edition, quantities are wonky.
But if you open the book up and say, look what they did there, that's great, the way those flavors go together, and you close the book and you go into the kitchen, and you can be really happy with it on that basis. Um that kind of thing aside, does the book do what it promises you it's gonna do? Does it do it uh conscientiously, or is it sort of offering you the same 55 things that you're gonna find in any other book that's written on the subject? Um in some areas you really only have one book to choose from, and so something had become a classic just by uh being the one book that somebody bothered to spend the time to write. Uh and books like that have flaws in them.
I'm all books have flaws, but uh, but they endure and they become important just for uh the the fact that one person wrote. But uh well, how much on those kind of books do you like the individual quirky Well, I mean, a lot of individual quirky uh stuff is like that. It has it has flaws, and you go into it knowing that there are going to be flaws. Um, and you have to, I mean, anytime you come to a book, you can't just trust the book as if you know God touched the brain of the author and and communicated all this information. You constantly have to be asking yourself, who is this person?
Why are they saying this? What is their background? What are their prejudices? And you're it's up to you to be filtering that all the time. And if you're not, um, you're gonna find yourself uh disappointed a lot.
Um you earlier in an email exchange with me, you mentioned somebody like Waverly Root. Yeah, yeah. Great writer. Waverly Root is a brilliant writer on food. He uh he's a great storyteller, he has a beautiful turn of phrase, but he was a raconteur more than he was an investigator.
It's a French word for liar, right? Storyteller. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Storyteller. It's I mean, he he loved a good story.
And if somebody told him a good story about a dish or a place, he was gonna pass that along because he believed that that kind of story was part of the culture of the food. And he didn't really care whether it was true because the truth of the story wasn't important to him so much as the fact that it was a story that that everybody was telling. And if you know that about Waverly Root, when you go to read him, you don't say, oh, well, Waverly Root says that this dish is called this because you know uh Catherine de Medici, you know, wanted it to be called that when she came from uh from Florence to Paris. You know, that's probably not true. It's just a great story.
And so you don't you don't stop your research ever with Waverly Root. But it can be a place to begin. If you enjoy reading, it's a good writing. Beautiful writing, yeah. I mean, I I wish I could write that way.
But you just, you know, you know when you're reading it that it's not the last place to go. Well, and so speaking also, because uh when did he die in the 80s? I think it was like 79. Right. Uh when you're reading that kind of stuff with kind of a modern, with like modern eyes, especially someone who's just starting to read older books, like how do you kind of uh tell people to adjust in their mind the fact that people just were like more openly terrible about a lot of things back in the day?
Well, I mean, it's not just in the matter of food. I mean, you you know, every book reflects the time in which it's written and published. And um that's just part of the the entire endeavor of of reading, yeah, is to pay attention. But I mean, the thing about a cookbook though, right, is that you want to side with the person who's writing, you want them, it's almost like with a cookbook, it's like you imagine that they're with you in your house cooking with you, and you don't want your racist Uncle Larry. I mean, maybe you do.
I love Uncle Larry, if you're you're never gonna hear this. I'm I'm not I don't mean this against you. You know what I mean? But it's like, you know what I'm saying? It's like yeah, I mean, you can you can you modern life is about compartmentalizing things.
And sometimes you have to realize that the only source you have is gonna be flawed, and you have to know that the information that you're presented with has flaws in it. And it's up to you to decide that the inquiry is not complete, that it has begun, and that you have a partial viewpoint, and that viewpoint is not everything it can be. Now, sometimes when it comes to something really simple, like you know, to choose a really basic recipe like simple syrup, there aren't going to be that many variations on how I wrote I I wrote a lot about simple syrup, but but there will be some people who have something very strong to say about it. But there are other things. I mean, you know, if you go in and you start looking at uh at a lot of regional cuisines and things like that, you know, people you're gonna find a thousand different perspectives, and what you should be taking away from that is that there is no definitive version.
There are versions that are that are typical, which is different than definitive, and um, and you can uh try to understand what it is that makes for the differences in those in those regional variations, and being engaged and alert is sometimes intellectually more draining than you want, but ultimately it gets you to a richer place. And to the um listener's question, um if you're gonna start curating your own collection, you're actually on the board of a group of people who are actually doing this, making a classics in the field, but not called that, but a classics in the field thing. Yeah, I work with the um International Association of Culinary Professionals, the IACP, which uh each year selects uh books that have been published. Uh I believe our criterion is now um basically 20 years earlier or or more, uh, and highlights them, books that have perhaps started to fall a little bit out of the public eye, or books which just deserve to be called to people's attention. Uh and it's a really interesting discussion each year when we sit down now, mostly by Zoom, uh, and start trying to work out what it is that we want to call attention to.
But um, there's still a lot of great books out there that need um that need to have light shown on them. And you know, but it never comes down to, oh my God, this is the best book ever written on this subject. It's more a matter of this book did something that advanced the field that it's in, that it took the inquiry in a fresh direction, or it revealed that there was an aspect to it that had been passed over before. And um, and that's often what the best books do. Um, so uh we're always looking for things like that, and we keep a pretty big list of stuff that we talk about year after year and sort of try and sift together a collection of things that represent a variety of of disciplines and and viewpoints so that it's not all like you know, cake books one year.
So that'd be a good place for for them to go and look and see these kind of books. That's a great place, yeah. And the IACP website has a list of uh culinary classics. Um other sites have them uh around too. I think eat your books.com uh has a list of the IACP culinary classics winners of.
All right, now there's a question that came in uh, and I'm gonna bend it towards a cookbook question, even though it is not. Okay. Uh Nate wrote in Curious about the best home mills for hard varieties of wheat. Any recommendations? Well, the only home wheat, the only home mills that I really use are the mock mill and the um uh I've used the mock mill uh and the um the one I have now, the coma, which are similar style.
Get the stone ones. I haven't used any of the uh bigger ones. Uh I had the one from Kitchen Aid is a nightmare, it's terrible, and I wouldn't use a micronizing one. I get a stone grinder, it's gonna get you the results closer to what you want. That said, I hear that a bunch of grain cookbooks.
So Adam Leonte's book came out a year a couple years ago, and it was about kind of home milling and milling. But I hear that like uh post-pandemic, we're about to get a wave of grain and grinding books coming out. Is that true? Um I've seen only one, and I'm gonna blank on the author's name, a book called Southern Ground, just came out uh representing a woman who has a mill in North Carolina, and I feel really badly that I'm forgetting her name. Because it's an interesting book, and she's highlighting local bakers who are using local flowers and grinding, doing a lot of their grinding their own.
Um there's nothing that I'm aware of that's on the horizon between now and the end of the year. I think those books are still a little further away, given the time that talented people sometimes need to write a good book. Uh, it may not happen instantly. Yeah, I caught the tweet from a s person in publishing. So it's probably stuff that like the pitches have been accepted and they're in process and haven't fully handed the manual.
No blads have been. So a blad is when you hand in the whole thing, like a year before they're gonna make the book, they make this mock-up of the design called a blad. Does anyone know what that stands for? No, uh we've investigated, but I hate to tell you this. They don't do blads anymore?
Blads are like dying. They're uh the in the pandemic, they've just sort of blad of the past. Blads are are a thing of the past, yeah. Oh man. That sucks.
No more blads. Anyways, uh so like the first time other people who weren't in the thing would know about something was about a year in advance. It was this thing called the blad. What do they do now? They just tell you what they're it's all online.
It's all online. They they send you an electronic catalog and they send you page mock-ups. Boring. I could spend hours talking about what a bad job they do about choosing those page mock-ups. But well, you know, I mean, I know when they did ours, uh, the book hadn't been laid out yet, so they had to just make some crap up.
And they just pick pick some images they think is gonna are gonna sell to you, and then uh, you know, anyway. Um It's worse than that, but really I could spend a lot of time talking about that. Yeah. All right. If you're if you're an author, you should have a conversation with your editor very early on about what's gonna end up in the catalog, because it's often just terrible.
And how much do you think that changes the what the initial buy is from places like uh I'll I mean, I will like take a book from a 25 to a two. If I feel like they don't understand if the choice of the images in the catalog suggests that the publisher doesn't understand what the appeal of the book is, I'm not gonna, I'm not gonna go strong on it. Huh. Yeah. It's I mean, it's it's big because I'm like, how are you telling me about this book?
What do you think is important for me to know? If you're not nailing that, if those images aren't consistent with everything else they're telling me, I I feel like they they don't know what they're doing. Ah, all right. All right, now uh you have brought some newer and some uh older classics. So let's just start uh why don't we do your your classics in the field?
What do you which one of these books do you want to talk about first? Um let's start with uh cookbooks of the Jews of Greece. Oh, nice. So um this is a book that originally appeared in Greece, not surprisingly, in 1986. And it is a uh record of the food of a community of uh rich community of Jews that uh lived in Thessalonike uh in Greece up until the Second World War, at which point um the community was pretty much destroyed, they were dispersed, those who survived.
And um in the in the 1980s, a man named Nicholas Stavrolakis began searching out and recording information about the food of these people. And um the book starts out with a really nice history of uh of the community and of Jews in that part of the world to to begin with. And every recipe is really well fleshed out with stories about who was making it, when they were making it, uh, whether the recipe he has is typical of, say, the people who had come to Thessaloniki from Crete or the ones who would come from from Spain. So it's a it's a really poignant document that's also been really well solidly edited so that it's very cookable if you're buying it to cook from it. Um it's the kind of passion project cooking that helps keep a sense of community going and a and a cultural uh level for groups of people that might otherwise be dispersed, cookbooks like this keep those people connected because the grandmothers who might have come to the United States and were cooking this food have probably passed away by now, but their uh kids and grandkids can keep using it.
And is it still in print? It is still in print. It's a small press uh called Lake Abidas, which is based in Athens. Uh a guy named John Chappell runs it. He's uh he's serious and intrepid, and uh he's kept the book going since 1986.
And you said he is an artist as well, so he illustrated it. I believe he did his own illustration, Stever Lakis did, yeah. He was uh he did exhibit in galleries and paintings and so forth. But there are photographs in here as well. So this is just like an all-around, like cool document.
It is. It's it's it's about a community that is gone, and it's a way of getting back into that community, um, stepping back into uh another world. Did any of the recipes get absorbed by the non-Jewish community that remained, and then like they're just kind of orphans and nobody knows about it? I think it's probably more true that they were, I mean, that was happening all the time. I mean, things don't develop in a vacuum, and uh they were cross-pollinating each other down through the centuries.
So some of these recipes you might find somebody who'd grown up in Thessaloniki who who wasn't Jewish who would be, oh yeah, we ate that too. Um it would be uh bizarre if if that hadn't happened, but I don't know enough to say exactly which ones. All right, cool. All right, but uh what do you want to do next? Um Creole Feast.
Oh man, we could spend the whole we can spend the whole time on Creole Feast. You want to talk about this book? Well, this is a book that first appeared back in 1978. Uh it was just re-released uh last year by University of New Orleans Press. And it is recipes with profiles of 15 chefs, black chefs, uh, from New Orleans restaurants of the time.
I would say five of them are women, which was relatively unusual for professional chef books of that time. But um you get to see, you know, sometimes there'll be three or four different recipes for basically the same dish, each of them attributed to a different chef, and you can see the individual variations in there, but also the profiles of the chefs and what they had to say about themselves, what they thought was important about what they did in their community is really interesting. Some of them are really emphasizing their professional accomplishments, some of them are emphasizing the people that they've worked with who have gone on to do things on their own. And it's a way of uh of saying of showing pride and profession that was still in the late 1970s really not happening for a lot of African Americans. Or really even chefs in like American chefs in general, yeah, individual chefs.
I mean, there were famous people writing, right? But that we hadn't had the apotheosis of the chef yet, right? So African American voices not often heard, women not often heard professionally, and but also like individual chefs, not really either. Yes. This was been, you know, the the things that Andrew Friedman talks about in uh Chef's Drugs and Rock and Roll, the whole uh mystique developing around the the chef as sort of uh as a as a rock icon.
This was before that. And these were people who had um a lot of them started out with the most basic kitchen jobs. They started out as dishwashers, and they ended up running restaurants that were famous not only in New Orleans but throughout the country. Right. And uh some of them, some of them were owners, some of them owner chefs, some of them were were chefs.
The co-author, uh Burton, right, who is featured, he's on the cover of the original. Why didn't they use the original cover when they did the re-release? They decided it was, I'm I'm sure some art department somewhere thought, oh, we need something fresh and new. Why? The original cover of the book is like this classic like 70s writing creole feast, brown on the outside with like white piping and like the like the the chef with his with his you know outfit on, right?
And this and he may have his token. I think he's standing like outside of a restaurant with uh filigree balcony in the background. Yeah, look at looking like badass New Orleans chef. You know what I mean? It's like, well, why would you why would you throw away something like that?
What is this? What is that, a potato on it? What is this? Are they mushrooms? Rice?
Garlic. Garlic, what is this? Maybe it's a rice. Rice. What is this?
It's no offense to the art department, but come on, offense. It it doesn't really characterize the content of the book the way the other one did. But and you say though that they didn't butcher the inside of it. No, I I think that they were really true to it. They um uh they were fortunate enough to get an introduction from Leah Chase uh before she passed away.
Um, in the reprint. In the reprint, yeah. So I think that's a nice, uh a nice addition to it. Uh she loom's large in the in the book. She's I think the third chef profiled.
Yeah, she's definitely in there. She's significant. And she's talking about, you know, about her early career. It's it's I mean, it's a great way of looking at how people made their way in the world. And uh the what I what I like about it is, as you say, there's a short bio of the of the chefs, or it's not always a straight bio.
Like, like a lot of them are like um I have to do it from memory though, uh, because the uh museum has my copy of the book, but the it was like uh they're just talking about like where they learned from what you know, kind of the people they grew up with, other other uh cooks that they admire and like you know what they were what they were good at, you know, like, oh that guy knew how to cook eggs. That guy could cook eggs better than anybody. You know what I mean? Like they're paying tribute to the people who came before them. Yeah, yeah, right.
And so it's just like it's a great read. I will say, however, that like uh I you know I went to Duke Chase's and I've said this on the air before. I had the shrimp clementsau. I also had uh Willie May Scotch house chicken and uh Dookie Chase chicken on the same day within an hour and a half of each other, which is kind of an interesting side by a rare sideby. Uh but the shrimp clements so was the real money maker for me at Dukey uh Chase's.
There are three recipes. I looked them up right before we started God on air in here, one of which is Leah Chase's, and I've seen her recipe published elsewhere because I think she used to make it whenever she would do the circuit of whatever she would do. And that recipe does not make the product that they that they serve. The product that they the recipe that is printed will not make something with the taste of the product that they serve at the restaurant. They have reserved some special secret something that turns the butter that they cook the shrimp and the potatoes and the mushroom and the peas into some sort of drug that requires like you must eat it all.
You have to keep asking for bread to eat it until it is done and you'll pour it over anything. Like and uh the the recipe, unless it unless it's miracle shrimp that they're getting out of the gulf there, which let's be honest, the Gulf shrimp are fine. They're fine. There's nothing wrong with the Gulf shrimp. Gulf hoisters.
Uh no. Crap on them. That's why they have to be cooked. Gulf oysters are trash oysters. Like gulf shrimp are fine, right?
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. You don't like golf oysters, though, do you? I'm not a strong oyster eater, so my opinion there is weak.
Uh anyways. Uh so yeah, check out that book. That's a definite uh classic in the field and easy to get now because it's been reprinted. Although look for the old field copy. If you come across an old copy, you'll understand exactly why Dave is so partial to it.
Yeah. The recover is has impact. It's also, I mean, again, I wasn't able to put my hands on it, but um, for those of you who are of a certain age, it it is it has a good form factor. So it is the pages are relatively um, they're they're thin but they're thin but stout. They don't feel flimsy, but it's thin enough such that the but the covers are a relatively wide thickness relative to the thickness of the of the book as a whole, considering how many pages it's.
I'm not being clear, but it's good a good object. The book itself feels like a good object in your hand, but it's not big. It's got a good book form factor, I think. You know, I have I'll have to go. We have a copy back in the store.
I'll have to go back and my memory is it's only about yay thick, but it's got decent boards. Oh yeah, you can see on the air, right? It's not like the the new one with the kind of this like fluffy paper that everyone uses now is a good bit thicker than the original, but also smaller, right? The original one has a it's just more book like the original form. Well, hardcover I think is always more satisfying.
Yeah, unless you're traveling, then you know I I like if I'm gonna fly with a book, it's a paperback. Yeah. Or if I don't care and I just need to absorb the information, paperback. But yeah, hardcover, hardcover all the way. Do you cook out of books or do you leave your books pristine?
I cook out of books. My books are noticeably cooked from. Yeah. Yeah. And I'm I at one point I felt that I had some obligation to uh to preserve them.
But then I just realized I was getting so distracted from the cooking that uh uh I really was not enjoying myself. So I mean, there are plenty of things that I I now make off the top of my head. But when I'm work cooking for something from the first time, when I'm really sort of getting down with the book and getting to know it, I'm gonna have it open and I'm gonna be reading the instructions and evaluating them. And yeah, it's gonna get me messy. There will be splashes and stains and nice.
Uh Jack, did you say we had another Patreon question that was regarding uh books? There, the last one we got here is yes. So the question was are there any sorbet-focused cookbooks that go into heavy technique? Jeff has a half a page which mostly describes what sorbet is. And I just read through Hello, my name is Ice Cream, which is wonderful, but as I should have known, has nothing in the way of sorbet.
I use.3% Cremodin 64. And target a bricks of 25 to 30, but find that my results are wildly inconsistent, with some sorbets being scoopable directly from the freezer and others being a bit icy even when tempered to negative 10 Celsius serving temperature. I'm reviewing churning techniques and even just purchased a home blast chiller to optimize the process, but would really like a resource with good recipes, blueprint ratios, and a discussion of more obscure additives like sugar, alcohol. It's such a resource exists. All the best, Andrew.
Who makes a home blast freezer? I want one. I don't have space for it. Um I mean, is there one specifically on sorbet? Is that I mean, obviously, this is more technical.
R buckle was redone by the University of Guelph people, right? Yeah, I haven't seen it though. Can't um do you like the original R buckle? Did that go into Sorbet? It's been a long time.
I don't recall that it had a great deal about it, but it's been 15 years since I had a copy in my hand. Um I would go to Magoya's Frozen Desserts uh looking for that information. I don't absolutely know that it's there, but it would be a place I would check. And then there's a book by um Carolyn Liddell and Robin Weir that's been published both as frozen desserts and um ice cream sorbets and gelato. Um they have sorbet scattered through the book, but a good reference section at the back about bricks and sugar ratios and things like that.
Um it's not the uh, it's not targeted at a professional situation the way the Magoya is, but uh Test and Blue Month all says it was the book that got him interested in making ice cream. So when was the Magoya when did the Magoya book come out? Wow. Um off the top of my set head, I would say 2005, but it hasn't been re re up because like a lot has happened. Like um, like unfortunately, like um, you know, t technology knowledge goes forward so fast now that old books sometimes are great documents, but on the technical side, they can seem they can seem like they need a rebuff, you know what I mean?
Yeah, I mean, I I would also think that maybe Angelo Corvito's uh Secretos del Alado or Secrets of Ice Cream has sorbs in it, but it's also going to be about 15 years old. Um that's bilingual, it's really focused on using a Paco Jet. Is it Montagued? It is. Uh is it as poorly translated as uh as the Roca books was were, or no?
Um it's about the same. Yeah. So great books, but they don't as much care. Oh, look, uh again, talking out of school, like you were saying earlier, they don't as much care about the English. So, like, you know, uh there was the the one that really caught me on the the first sous vide book in English was the Rokas book translated by Montague Press.
Beautiful, great from El Clark Tenroca before they got their three stars. Great, very influential book, hated by Bruno Gusot, and uh they translate um dried cod as cod. And so all these people were trying to cook fresh cod at like 104 degrees Fahrenheit or whatever it was, and that's that's an abomination. That's a horror show. Yeah, we we've had words, and I should correct myself, it was not uh the Corpito book is actually from Bilbo, which is another Barcelona publisher specializing in professional books, but similar problems with translations.
Yeah. Yeah, is it just that they is it cost too much or that they just don't care about us? I also I mean, my suspicion, and nobody will verify this for me, is that I think sometimes somebody says, Oh, yeah, my cousin was an exchange student in Indiana and for uh for a year, and so I'll get my cousin to do it. And they just don't bring people in who have uh equivalent technical expertise in English to do the translation. Yeah, I mean, how do you translate bacalau as cod without adding the word salt?
I mean it it could be just sort of uh one of those things that is taken for granted that you know the difference. But yeah, it would be it would be helpful if if it were reviewed by somebody who who had experience in the kitchen. Speaking of the uh R buckle ice cream book, and I know you said you're not like you know so with the R buckle ice cream book. What do you think about this thing where people will take a reference that people have used for decades and then you know, do a new edition, and if the author's been dead more than X number of years, just remove the name. What do you think about that whole thing?
Uh I think that's pretty low. Um sometimes it's it's done by publishers for whom the original work was a work for hire, and the publisher owns the work and they can you know hire whoever they want to do an update. But I mean, to be honest, the book wouldn't have its standing in the field if that original person hadn't been involved and they should be credited, even if somebody else's name now comes first. Right. They should keep it on there.
I I think the R buckle was redone by one of the better-known people from the University of Guelph who has like an amazing dairy program, but again, I don't think they're gonna focus as much on Sorbet because they're so heavily dairy focused. But they're fantastically knowledgeable about dairy. No, no, no. Yeah. All right, what's your next uh what's your next book you got here?
Um so I think I would like to call some attention to uh speaking of technical sourdough panettone and vianoiserie. Uh this is a recent publication, a book that came out in 2020 by Thomas Teffrey Chambellade, who is a French baker and instructor who is fascinated by the qualities of wheat. Um and this is the most detailed book I have ever seen in my life on the creation of Panettone, uh, which is something of uh an elusive subject for for bakers. These specialty enriched uh dough uh have incredible keeping qualities. They're culturally important, they're significant for holidays, and this is the first thing that I've seen dedicated to it.
And unlike those cases where sometimes they you sort of have to make do with the only book because it is the only book. This is a a book that uh I think really delivers the kind of incredible technical detail you would want if you were setting out to create your own panettone program. Right, program. In other words, like this is not at all at all like dumbed down so that like, you know, one at home can knock out a passable panettone for themselves and be like, look what I made. It's not that at all.
No, yeah, this is this is production quantities. Uh this is uh this assumes you have a sheeter. It's you know, it's you're you're you're in there at a at a really high level. I like the flow charts. It has incredible information on uh which yeasts are most commonly found in uh in sourdoughs in Italy, uh, which uh bacterias are are commonly found, how to encourage them.
Uh it talks about processes that I have not seen documented anywhere else uh like refreshing or following the refresh of a dough, you'll you'll bathe it in a sugar water solution for 30 to 40 minutes uh to reduce the acidification. Um it's and it combines recipes from seven, I believe, uh leading practitioners in uh in Italy and France and one American. So another thing about Kitchen Arts and Letters, which I'm not gonna make you call people, I mean you probably wouldn't want to, so I'm not gonna ask you to call people out on on air, but another thing you get if you go there in person is uh they sell books like this to all of the to the professionals in New York and around the world who ask for this kind of book from them, and they also get feedback. So, for instance, I don't know if this is new, so I don't know if you've had it yet, but like often I would ask you, well, I know that people have been buying this book. What feedback have you been getting from people who've taken these books back to their kitchens or read them?
What kind of feedback are you getting? Have you been getting any feedback uh from the community on this yet? The most direct feedback we've had on this is that uh that bakeries that have bought one have come back for come back for more. Um so I usually take that as a pretty good sign that somebody feels that the book has advanced their game. Uh I have not had an over-the-counter conversation with somebody who's used it.
Uh I'm waiting for that day. I'd love that to happen, but I don't have that kind of feedback yet. Yeah, yeah. But in general, I think that's another benefit you get from dealing with real people is, you know, they can say, well, you know, as you're the again, they're not gonna call up, but I've had these conversations with you before where you're like, oh, I sold that to X, Y, and Z and they didn't get that much out of it. Or, you know, but they did get something out of this and blah, blah, blah.
So it's useful information to have. Yeah, I mean, and we we absolutely welcome that. I mean, you know, whether it's uh by email or phone call, I mean, uh people call up and they say, hey, I need some new books, and I bought this last time, and you know, it didn't quite do what I needed it to do. And maybe it's a failure on our part, and we're learning about how to talk to people about the books. But sometimes you learn that some books are prettier than they are useful.
Oh, you want to call one out? No. Uh no. What about one that's really ugly but is really awesome? Oh God, that's um I'm sure, you know, I I've I've completely blanked on that.
But I mean, there are, I mean, that's sort of true of a lot of classic cookbooks, that they're they're not beautiful things. I mean, I can't get people to buy Marcella Hazan because it doesn't have photographs. Really? Breaks my heart. Really?
I have pounded my head on the desk after conversations with people because Marcella Hazan doesn't have photographs. Huh. Huh. People still just need the photos, huh? They I mean it's more than ever.
Instagram has changed the world. All right, well, what's the what's the last book you what's the last book you bought? Um I brought up a book called Curries and Bugles. Uh it's a cookbook of the British Raj by Jennifer Brennan. Uh she grew up in a third generation family.
Uh her grandparents had come to Britain or to India uh at the height of the British power, and she's documenting a way of life that pretty much vanished um in the 1940s there. Um it's it's this bizarre mix, fascinatingly bizarre mix of things like discussions of the difficulty of obtaining ham for a proper uh English breakfast to uh traditional Indian recipes that became a part of everyday life there. Um there are stories about life at the club, and it's just uh it's a time and a place that's that's gone. It probably deserves to be gone. I mean, I don't think anybody wants it to come back, but um it's a told without a lot of sentiment.
Uh she's not asking for it to be returned, but it's um how how old is she? When was it when did this come out? Book came out uh in 1990. Jennifer's got to be in her late 80s at this point. Okay, so she was uh she was a like a teenager when all this was going down.
Yeah, it's probably born, I would guess, mid-1930s. Yeah. But she's you know, she's got the stories from her parents and her grandparents. And all right. Now I do have to do this.
Uh Travis Hawkins asked what brand of ski kitchen scale I use. It doesn't have a brand. I bought it on eBay because it was cheap and it was being sold as an off-brand unit, but I'll I'll put it on Patreon. I'll find the eBay link that I did and we'll put it on a Patreon for you. Uh I just want to say Nesta Nastasia is gonna get a chance to make fun of me on Friday.
We went to go see the premiere of Fry's the movie, and Nastasia had to watch me on the air uh on the on the movie screen, and literally, like Eric McPear was there, like a bunch of people were there. And every time I came on, Nastasia would loudly go, boo, so that everyone in the audience could hear. That sounds like a checks out, Jack. Yeah. Or I'd say, this guy again.
Yeah, yeah. This guy again. And we were all in our pod. It was uh, it was uh, let's see, who is with us? It was uh Ariel.
Our friend Nick Golem. Who's gonna come on the show? Yes. So do you like olive oil? I like olive oil.
So this guy, this guy, uh Nick, he he goes around the world chasing the harvest. So he doesn't grow his own trees or even like produce, but he calls himself an ole, what does he call himself? An oleogenist? What does he call himself? He doesn't want to call himself anything anymore.
It's oh, so he needs new cards then. No, he just wants to be the guy that knows olive oil. The guy that knows olive oil. So we're gonna have him on and do like a multi-olive oil tasting. He's gonna bring, get this people, you ready to get excited?
Southern hemisphere new crop oils, which are just coming out now, which I've never even had someone ship me a southern uh a new crop Southern Oil. No experience, you know. No, no experience. Yeah. And uh next week, and this you gotta get this guy's book in your store.
Uh, next week on the show, send in your questions about knives. We are gonna have on uh for I was you know researching for the book uh sharpening books, and I'd always used old, outdated um a book called uh The Razor's Ed's Guide to Sharpening, which is a paperback that a lot of people bought because the guy can shave, the guy used to sharpen axes and then shave with them. That was his his thing. Uh and I was never much for the kind of super hardcore, you know, pristine Japanese whetstone kind of thing of a jig. So I was researching um, you know, oh, what's the current state of knives?
Knives and knife sharpening. And it was one of those things that, like coffee, if you haven't paid attention to it in the past 10 years, it's just shot way beyond your knowledge. Like it's just, it's just way beyond anything that you could imagine. And so this guy has a blog, uh, Larry Thomas does, called Knife Steel Nerds. And on it, he just debunks a lot of old myths on knife steel, but he has a lot to say about sharpening.
He has a boat ton of research. He wrote a self-published book called Knife Engineering. It's self-published, and I think you should get it at the store. I should have brought my copy of it to see whether you'd be interested in it. But you check it out, uh, check out the thing on it because right now it's only on Amazon, but I know that you probably have a lot of chefs who are interested in knives.
And this is very in the weeds. It's not about how to choose your favorite chef knife. It's more about what is the actual effect of edge angle on cutting ability. I want that. Yeah, what is the difference between powder metal powder metallurgy steel and knot, between the stainless and knot, new style, old style, Wootz uh Damascus, all the things like and full of micrographs of the steel and and how uh different treatments and steel sizes have different carbides, how that leads to like blade chip-out at the end, like just very in-depth technical.
And he is a steel, he is an automotive steel metallurgist by trade, but his dad is a well-known Damascus blade maker and has been for years, and his passion is uh knife steals. And so we can all so send in your questions for Patreon uh or you know, uh via Instagram or Twitter uh to cooking issues uh on uh anything you want to know about knives. So we're cutting geometry. You he has he has a lot to say about whether single blade uh bevels are gonna cut more at a particular angle than uh double will, and it's not what I thought necessarily, although I'm gonna have to have words with him about uh exactly what that means. Um initiating a cut versus not, serrated versus not, micro serrated versus not, what grit the sharpen with.
So it's fascinating stuff if you really want to get in the weeds on knives, which a lot of cooks do. Yeah. Uh so yeah, send us questions on that, and and I'll you know, I'll shoot you his info. You gotta check out his book. You should have it.
I absolutely yeah. Uh well, uh so we're we're we're done. I thought you were gonna make you gonna make more fun of me for the fries. We're over time. Well, I thought we should have our new Patreon before we leave too.
What do we got? Ready? Let's see if I botch these names. Uh by the way, do you know Harold McGee is one of our Patreon subscribers? Oh, isn't that nice?
Yeah, yeah. The Harold McGee. The McGee. Timothy Helmuth, Ross Brown, Ted Anderson, Ben Pasquale, Schmidt and Bender, Matthew Murphy, David Jensen, Adam Squadowitz. Oh, that's I didn't get that one.
Andrew Monks, Inconceivablist, Howard Mintz, Alex Cheshire, Benjamin Dweck, Dirk Doe, and Matt Sporer, who subscribed during the show. Oh, nice. Thanks. We appreciate it. Thanks, guys.
Thanks for helping us out. Uh, spread the word that we're here now at New Sand Studio, uh, New Stand Studios at Rockefeller Center. And uh they knew RSS is gonna be on your iTunes slash Spotify slash stitching or whatever in the heck people do now is stuff. Good news. It is, it is now, Dave.
So we're live. So tell tell your buddies. I don't want to hear, I don't want to hear any more about oh, cooking issues. Did you stop recording? No, we're here.
Joe, are we here? We're here. There you go. All right. Uh Mac, thanks so much for coming on as usual.
Uh I appreciate it. Uh hopefully we'll have you have you on again sometime. Thank you. All right. Cooking issues.
Timestamps may be off due to dynamic ad insertion.