Today’s Klawchat transcript is up. I am planning to go to tonight’s Mets/D-backs game and hope to file something off it tomorrow.
The Culinary Institute of America has become the most prestigious cooking school in the country, expanding from a small, all-male class when it opened 66 years ago in New Haven, to a large campus in Hyde Park, New York, featuring four restaurants and a rolling calendar where a new set of students matriculates every three weeks. For the CIA’s 50th anniversary in 1996, writer Michael Ruhlman went through the curriculum as a student, albeit at an accelerated rate and without the required restaurant externship, and wrote a book about this first-hand experience. The Making of a Chef: Mastering Heat at the Culinary Institute of America
Ruhlman refers to himself as an “undercover” student, although the faculty are aware of his presence and role, and he cooks right alongside the students, finding himself judged and graded as they are – and often defending himself when he’s not happy with the results. These classes range from basic knife skills to butchering to sauces to pastry, concluding with a 15-week run through the four on-campus restaurants run by the CIA, which range from family dining to formal and assign each student to a different station each day, forcing them to draw on all of their prior education.
Ruhlman’s great trick in this book is finding and conveying drama in what otherwise might seem the most mundane of tasks: The preparation of food. From early classes where the object is to beat the clock and achieve a good enough result for a demanding professor to later work in the restaurants, where students’ work is served to paying customers (and, occasionally, the school’s president or a visiting celebrity chef), Ruhlman manages to evoke a sense of urgency in the reader, turning dry material into compelling prose. He achieves this primarily through dialogue, letting his fellow students (and, often, himself) communicate their rising stress levels, rather than trying to explain it directly in a way that would likely sound trite to anyone who’s never spent time in a restaurant kitchen. There’s a recurring theme in the book about the need for chefs to push themselves harder and faster than they thought possible, something hard to imagine if you’re in a job that doesn’t have the same kind of time pressures.
He also uses the open question of what type of roux (a cooked combination of flour and fat, used as the base for many major sauces, as well as for gumbo) one should use to make the poorly-named “brown sauce,” which also relies on veal stock, aromatics, and tomatoes (usually as a paste) for flavor and then itself becomes a foundation for countless other sauces. There are two answers to the question, blond or brown, but the way in which each instructor answers the question reveals much about his/her philosophy of food and, perhaps more importantly to this book, philosophy of teaching about food. The lengthy discussion of the making of consomme follows a similar path – it is not sufficient to know what consomme is or how to make it; one must understand why making it so clear that the instructor can read the writing on a dime at the bottom of a gallon of this clarified meat stock matters.
Although Making of a Chef is a book about cooking, it’s not a cookbook – there are no recipes, nothing more specific than a general description of some fundamentals like brown sauce. The story is full of unusual characters, instructors and students, but none becomes a central figure and some of the students blink in and out of the story as they leave campus for their externships at high-end restaurants – a requirement for graduation at the CIA. It’s a book about an idea, that cooking, only recently seen as a highly respectable profession in the United States, can be codified and taught to the inexpert so that they can enter the world of haute cuisine and develop their own culinary concepts. It also details Ruhlman’s own intellectual evolution from someone who enjoys food to someone who understands it, appreciates it, and, fortunately for us, can write about it in an informative and eloquent way. For a book that would seem, on its face, to lack a compelling hook, it was very hard for me to put down.
I own four other books by Ruhlman, none better or more heavily used than Ruhlman’s Twenty, an absolutely essential cookbook that I reviewed in November. It goes through twenty ingredients or techniques that are key for any home cook, with numerous foolproof recipes that often include step-by-step instructions and photographs to help the less experienced reader.
was on my wish list for a long time because it seemed like a perfect blend of the academic and applied branches of mathematics, as the irrational number φ appears in numerous places in nature and (I thought) art. Unfortunately, Livio’s book spends more time talking about where φ is not than about where it is, making this more of a book of mythbusting than of math.
, Robert Wittman’s memoir of his time at the FBI, where he founded the bureau’s Art Crime Team.
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, an exhaustively researched look at the 2008 financial crisis from the perspective of executives inside the various investment banks that were teetering on the brink of collapse, as well as the perspectives of the various government executives trying to stave off a depression. It is an outstanding work of investigation, compiled from what I assume is an enormous number of sources, but the result did very little to explain the causes of the crisis (as in, how did these very bright bankers end up in such stupid positions?) and was a very dull, clinical listen.
, which looked at the crisis from the perspectives of several investors who saw it coming and reaped huge rewards, and while it’s not as thorough and is significantly shorter, it was far more entertaining and yet also went more into the causes of the meltdown. Lewis is a fantastic prose writer, and even if that book shared some of the, um, sharpening tendencies he showed in 
(the book, not the film), making his villains 
, written with Yahoo!’s Tim Brown, Abbott talks about his own personal struggles with creating an identity for himself independent of his disability, of the challenges of growing up with a visible difference, and of the opportunities his success gave him to reach and sometimes inspire children growing up with similar physical issues.
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is a fantastic read that covers the subject of human creativity from two different but equally critical angles: The neurology of creativity, or how we can maximize our own individual creativity; and the sociology of creativity, or how managers can increase creativity in their groups or companies. The small miracle of the book is that Lehrer conveys all of this information – I wouldn’t call them answers, but there are enough ideas here to help you create a plan of action – in a way that’s largely entertaining by building almost the entire book around a series of real-world anecdotes, covering topics as wide-ranging as Shakespeare, Pixar, Innocentive, W.H. Auden, a programmer-turned-bartender named Don Lee, and Bob Dylan.
fits that description perfectly, with a complete lack of footnotes and scant detail even in anecdotes that should, in theory, help prove his points, and while Salatin is clearly a bright guy, he’s no writer, and whoever edited his book didn’t do him many favors. Yet despite those glaring flaws, and the clear bias with which he writes (one to which I’m sympathetic), there’s still a fair amount of value to be had from reading Folks… because of the questions his arguments on agriculture and our modern, unsustainable food supply will raise in your mind.
), so Salatin’s book did at least achieve one goal – forcing me to reexamine the food my family eats, from how it’s grown to where we get it. But had he researched and supported his book with more hard data or secondary sources, Folks, This Ain’t Normal might have become a classic in its narrow field.
– and yes, I’m aware of the controversy over his editor’s role in changing some of the text.
trilogy on sale for $49.99 (almost 60% off). Not sure how long that sale will last.
(known as Alex’s Adventures in Numberland in the U.K.) is a little lighter than the last math book I read, focusing instead of numerical oddities and paradoxes as well as the history of basic math. He keeps the tone light by revolving each chapter around one or more interesting personalities, such as the English dentist who used ϕ (the golden ratio) to design more attractive dentures or the various people involved in the invention and rise of sudoku.
, written by the very funny folks behind the 
(still on sale for $6.38 as a bargain book on amazon), Donal O’Shea, Dean of Faculty at Mt. Holyoke College and a professor of mathematics, gives a brisk history of the Conjecture with a quick mention of its solution. The first half of the book, from Euclid and Pythagoras up to Henri Poincaré and the early 20th century, was relatively fast-moving (for a math book) and easy to follow, but when O’Shea got deeper into topological discussions of the Conjecture, his explanations became shorter and I found myself getting lost.
, also rather tricky to follow because of its heavy use of topology but with a bit more drama to help the reader plow through the less scrutable parts.
, by Evan D. G. Fraser and Andrew Rimas, is a good one: Civilizations, like ours today, have risen during times of plenty, periods where favorable weather and trading booms have led to rapid growth of populations and cities, but that they tend to fall, often catastrophically, when the food supply is interrupted. We are nearing the end, they argue, of an unusually good era for agriculture, but a cataclysm approaches as climate change, irresponsible farming techniques, water waste, and profiteering all catch up to us and put our future food security at risk. These are all issues that we as consumers should consider when deciding what to eat and where to get it, but a book that’s full of histrionic statements like “cancerous is exactly the state of our twenty-first-century global food empire,” factual errors, and serious omissions isn’t the way to argue the point.
, is available used on amazon), a Florentine merchant whose disastrous eight-year trip around the world brought him into contact with many trading societies of the late 1500s and early 1600s, as the narrative hook to connect the various chapters, each describing a key variable in the construction of “food empires.” Those variables are fundamental to agriculture, husbandry, and food commerce – water, soil, distribution channels, refrigeration – with the final additions of “blood” (not just war, but subjugation and oppression in prime growing areas of the world) and money before their one chapter with an iota of hope, describing movements toward organic farming, slow food, and fair trade. The framework is here for a powerful wakeup call to anyone willing to step back and examine his larder and his table.
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