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Hello visitors. This site contains material relating to my work as a food writer and cookbook reviewer, and is no longer being updated. If you’re looking for my work in tarot and divination, press onward!
You can still find information on all my archived food writing here, as well as information about the Level Teaspoon podcast I hosted from 2016-2017.
After 15 years publishing cookbook reviews in print media everywhere (as well as NPR), I’m going to be launching a cookbook podcast next week! It’s called The Level Teaspoon and will feature cookbook reviews and interviews with ordinary folks testing brand-new recipes.
Watch this space!
Since 2013, NPR has been offering its holiday book coverage in the form of the Book Concierge, an interactive tool that lets you filter your selections (want a geeky book that’s also funny? A comic book about music? A cookbook for kids? It’s all there, and tag-searchable). I do a big chunk of the cookbook coverage on the Concierge, and I generally try to find quirky, gifty, interesting books that may not have made their way onto others’ lists. I think I chose 15 of them this year, and I’d be happy to receive any one of them if I didn’t already have them all.
This is not the same list, however, as NPR’s 10 Best Cookbooks of 2015, which I’m still pulling out my hair over (the deadline’s tomorrow! plenty of time!) That will go live next Monday, Dec. 14th, so stay tuned.
Dear readers, it’s been a hectic few weeks on the personal front here at T. Susan Chang, Inc. 2014 ended with a bang (including the Best Recipes of 2014 series and lots of NPR cookbook coverage). The next week my dad fell ill, and my family scrambled to fashion a Christmas of sorts while my sister and I tromped in and out of hospitals and nursing homes. Next week, my new food writing course for the MFA in Creative Nonfiction Program at Bay Path College begins, and a brand-new adventure for me in teaching.
There’s scarcely been a moment to draw breath, but meanwhile the news continues to publish, and while my attention’s been elsewhere three of my reviews appeared in the Boston Globe. Click on the cover images above to read them.
And if you’d like to skip straight to buying them, links are below:
Click to buy Bitter / Eat / Silk Road Vegetarian !
A cookbook might be the nicest thing you can give for Mother’s Day – it lasts longer than flowers or dinner, it’s less expensive than a trip to a spa, and it’s not as hard to pick as a scarf. Chances are, if you have a mom who loves to cook, you already know what kind of cooking she likes. So you might already have a sense of what kind of book she’d appreciate.
Just in case you’re stuck, though, I’ve compiled a list of hard-to-resist books in various categories. Beautiful books, books that read as well as cook, books that are just plain fun are all good choices. Steer clear of diet books (unless specifically requested) or books that basically say, “Feed Me” – most entertaining books; in short, or anything that might make Mom feel overworked or resentful.
Visual Feasts: You can’t go wrong with a beautiful book – especially these days, when food photography has gotten so phenomenal you can practically eat the dishes with your eyes. Books like Canal House Cooks Every Day ($45) and David Tanis’ One Good Dish ($25.95) make you want to catch your breath when you open them, and linger for an hour to browse before you rush to the kitchen.
Armchair Traveler: Charm, out-of-the-ordinary flavors, clear instructions – well-edited ethnic and regional cookbooks have it all, bringing the world’s table to your doorstep. The Little Paris Kitchen ($35) offers up sweet chic, Indian Cooking Unfolded (19.95) is colorful and accessible – and then there’s always the ever-popular Jerusalem ($35).
Tell Me A Story: Sometimes you just want to read a cookbook for its anecdotes and tales, its glimpses of culinary mishaps or delicious adventures. I’m partial to the quirky Southern charm of Screen Doors and Sweet Tea ($32.50), but who can resist a chicken romance? like Janice Cole’s Chicken and Egg ($24.95).
Down the Garden Path – For moms with green thumbs, a handful of cookbooks make great garden companions: the lavish and handsome Grow Cook Eat ($29.95) has seed-to-harvest guidance and lots of wise tips, while Eliot Coleman’s and Barbara Damrosch’s 4-Season Farm Gardener’s Cookbook ($22.95) offers up two lifetimes’ worth of cooking and growing expertise.
Treats: Some like diamonds, some like candy, but everyday indulgences like drinks and desserts make any evening a treasure as far as I’m concerned. An Illustrated Guide to Cocktails ($20)is a lighthearted guide filled with graphic flair, while Faith Durand of the Kitchn’s Bakeless Sweets ($29.95) offers a summer’s worth of cool temptations.
For lots more Mother’s Day cookbook recommendations, check out Cookbook Finder, my cookbook-rating app. You’ll find write-ups of the latest cookbooks and regular cookbook news, and links to all my Boston Globe reviews. It’s the only up-to-the-minute cookbook app anywhere!
Most of the work I do for the Globe these days is cookbook reviews, but every once in a while I’ll take on another kind of assignment.
At the end of the summer, I was in Manhattan with my son, who was attending fencing camp in midtown. I tooled around town on a Citibike (exhilarating, sometimes terrifying), re-visited a lot of my old food haunts, and hung around in Chinatown quite a bit.
While bopping around Canal Street, I got to re-connect with an old friend, Pearl River Mart. If you lived in Manhattan in the 80’s and 90’s in a boho tax bracket, Pearl River was a life-saver. You could get one-of-a-kind Christmas and birthday gifts for practically nothing,not to mention staples like cotton T-shirts, bamboo everything, and china galore.
Since those happy, thrifty days, Pearl River’s gone a bit more upscale, like everything in the city. It still feels like a treasure box, though, and it’s worth a visit if you’re in town.
If you look carefully at the attached 15-year-old picture, you can see an assortment of paper lanterns from Pearl River – a steal for like $1 at the time.
Click here to read today’s story about Pearl River in the Boston Globe. Hit the paywall? Click here for the PDF version.
Just over half a lifetime ago, I started my first real job at an academic publishers’ office in Manhattan. My boss, Liz, was a brilliant editor, and one thing we shared was a love of food. (I expressed mine by spending the non-rent half of my paycheck eating out by myself, as I had not yet learned to cook.) My first Christmas at the Press, Liz gave me a set of wine glasses, which got good use as I grappled with the perspective-wrenching conundrums of race, ethnicity, gender, and class which our authors presented to us daily in manuscript form. Liz, Irish-Italian, 10 years older than I, had wanted to be a Black Panther when she was young. I, American-born Chinese and educated mostly in piano, had wanted to be a cucumber. There was much talk of marginalization, but the fact is we were both pure New Yorkers – just of different sorts.
My second Christmas at the Press, I carefully wrapped a gift too. I gave Liz the new edition of the New York City Zagat dining guide – I knew she’d use it, even if only when taking authors out to lunch. Liz, for her part, handed me a heavy tome wrapped in thick gilt paper. I picked it apart (having been raised to save the paper) to find Marcella Hazan’s Essentials of Classic Italian Cooking. Liz had enclosed a note. From “my” people, it read, to “yours”. Most of Liz’s utterances arrived with a broad wink at the folly of racial stereotyping, and I spent a good deal of my first years with her laughing at jokes I didn’t quite understand. But, in the end, the laughing was the point.
I took Liz’s gift very seriously. That winter, I started cooking my way through Essentials – and not systematically. It wasn’t like Julie & Julia. I started with the pastas, which were easy. Then I progressed to the fish and meats. I bought a yard-long dowel nearly the width of my wrist to roll my own pasta dough, though I never had much success. I bought the best olive oil I could find, though I couldn’t afford it.
Every evening I came home to my one-bedroom apartment and nibbled on some good olives and a baguette while deciding what recipe to attempt. Then I poured myself a little icy glass of vermouth (another habit picked up from Liz) and set to work. Often, as I wrinkled my forehead over Hazan’s pronouncements (“Do not be alarmed by the amount of garlic this recipe requires.” “No less than 3 hours is necessary, more is better.”), Manhattan’s elegant heure bleue slipped by unnoticed. I would sit down to eat at my shabby table for one after nightfall, drowning my senses in my plate of pasta. Only afterward would I pause to wonder what I had missed – the voices, the sunset, the stilettoed shadows, the music just outside the window.
Like so much in life, my adventures with Essentials of Classic Italian Cooking were a blend of earnestness and failure, yet the effort was suffused with joy. The bargain I made on those evenings – the city’s bustling life, traded like a sack of coins for a solitary education of the senses – may or may not have proven to be the right one in the end.
A decade later, I left publishing, married and moved to the country. Publishing itself contracted into strange new forms, without the high polish and glamor public intellectuals had formerly commanded. Liz? Dead these many years, struck down at the height of her powers by ovarian cancer. And now Marcella Hazan, too, has left these earthly premises.
No one can deny that a single life, by any measure, will always be too short. But how can one even measure the impact of a single act undertaken in that life? Liz, Marcella, and that book left indelible grooves in the record of my twenties. As time carves the sides of the riverbed, so this act – the gift of a book, with a wink and a smile – subtly shaped the course of the life that followed – and I am only one. It boggles the mind to think of the hundreds, the thousands whose stories were shaped in such a way, by such an act.
My point is that to say goodbye to Marcella Hazan is only to mark a waypoint in her life. Each time the ice clinks in the vermouth glass, each time the nutmeg makes a pass over the grater – just once – to lend its virtue to the bolognese, who can say the past is gone forever? For then, I know, my friends are with me once again, in possibly the only way that matters.
I can’t remember exactly where I first saw the magnetic spice tins. It was probably some kind of kitchen or lifestyle website, the kind with the empty countertops, the spotless backsplashes, the shining faucets. All I can tell you is that when I saw them, I just sat there for a while looking at them, jaw slack, mind spinning.
Breaching the spice cabinet of a recipe tester is not for the faint of heart. Over the years mine had evolved into a beetling, pungent jungle of condiments that defied categorization, was housed in a motley assortment of boxes, tins, and jars, and fell out in bits and pieces every time I tried to find something. I had become so ignorant of what I had in there that when I finally made a stab at organizing it a couple years ago, I found I had three containers of asafoetida. I had 16 kinds of salt and 17 kinds of pepper. I had bishops’ weed and fenugreek leaves, cubeb and kalonji. I did my best, going at it with a labelmaker and a box of old glass stopper jars, making separate neighborhoods for seeds, leaves, mixes, and so on. But the whole thing remained, more or less, impenetrable.
But when I first saw magnetic tins, the elegance of the solution left me poleaxed with awe: to be able to see everything, all at once! free of the pedantic requirements of gravity! Nothing hidden behind anything else! This was not home organization – this was Art. I priced it out as a DIY project and determined I’d be better off signing up for discount emails from Pfaltzgraff, the housewares site, and buying them ready-made, on sale. So that’s what I did.
I filled my tins and slapped them on the fridge and then just looked at them for a while – the colors and textures an analog for the brilliant world of smell and taste safely closed within – in a kind of fugue state of bliss. I sort of wanted to leave them unlabeled, but I’m not quite that arrogant. There was, after all, a sporting chance I might swap out ajwain for caraway, or mace for dried lime powder, which would be a recipe-testing misdemeanor at the very least. So I decided to label them on the floor-facing curve of the lid, alphabetically . . . and in Latin.
Now, it would not be entirely untrue to say I have a sort of reflexive aversion to doing things the normal way. But labeling in Latin wasn’t just an attempt to be different, and it wasn’t a matter of pretense either. It’s a simple fact that spice and herb nomenclature is a taxonomist’s nightmare. Some spice cultures named things after the leaves, some after the seed, some after what the thing does to you when you eat it. Every language has at least one name for the same spice, and to privilege one language over any other in a rigorously post-tribal kitchen seemed rife with ethnocentric assumptions.
It seemed simpler to just go straight to the closest thing we have to a lingua franca in all of this – the botanical name of the plant from which the condiment derives. If that means I have to have two Myristica fragrans – one for the nutmeg, one for the mace – fine. I can see the difference, after all. And what’s more, Latin is equally inconvenient for everybody. It’s democratic!
So that’s how my spices look now – arranged on the side of the fridge, 6 feet away from the countertop and stove, alphabetically from Apium graveolens to Zingiber officinale. My birthday’s still a month away (I don’t suppose it’s obvious I’m a Virgo or anything), but I have to say this is about the best present-to-self I’ve ever pulled off.
As to the other problem – won’t my spices have a shorter lifespan from being kept in daylight, exposed to indirect solar radiation? I can only answer: Probably. But after all, even a cookbook reviewer has to make some sacrifices for Art.
Mostly, my work for NPR can be found in the mouthwatering weekly Kitchen Window series. But yesterday, after collaborating with the terrific NPR books team, I released a story for another NPR series I love, ” Three Books”. It’s not my first; I did one some years ago on “stone soup” books – books on cooking with bare-bones ingredients during lean times.
This one is kind of the opposite. They’re “let them eat cake” books that are so frivolous that I’ve always felt actually making something out of them is strictly optional – cakes like Colette Peters’ magnificent trompe l’oeil stack of cushions, pictured at right.
It’s not that lean times have deserted us – far from it. But even in lean times, you still have to feed your imagination, too, don’t you?
Click here to read Feast for the Eyes: 3 Cookbooks Just for Looking, from NPR’s 3 Books series.
It’s 11 days till Mother’s Day, which means you still have time to order and ship a cookbook to give someone special. Need some recommendations? Sure you do! You’ll find them on CookShelf, my new cookbook-rating app. Download it here!
When you’ve got it, click on the upper left corner menu and scroll down to “Mother’s Day gifts!” Voilà! a whole list of charming, whimsical, great-value books that will endear you even more to the person who already loves you best. (for more about Mother’s Day, check out my post on Eat Your Books.)
Somehow, in all the excitement of the “Surprise! Apple’s approved your app!” launch of CookShelf last Friday, I never quite round to doing a formal announcement here on the website.
So… CookShelf, my cookbook-rating app (and the project which took over my life for the last 2.5 months), is now available for iPhone and iPad for a mere piffling $2.99. And Android users? Never fear! CookShelf will be coming to you next week.
cookbooks for dinner 