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Everything You Pretend to Know About Food and Are Afraid Someone Will Ask (Canada, UK)
By Nancy Rommelmann
Publisher: Penguin
Publication Date: April 1998
ISBN: 014026373XWe remember very clearly sitting in the New York office of one of the most prominent cookbook editors a year or two ago. She was talking about Sharon Tyler Herbst’s book, the Food Lover’s Companion (Canada, UK), the leading food and cooking dictionary on the market. She said that everyone in the cookbook business raves about the book, but "so much of it is wrong."
Well, every Ochef.com staff member has a copy of the Food Lover’s Companion at his or her desk. We find it an indispensable reference. And in our own work of writing about food and cooking and answering people’s cooking questions, we know that most of Herbst’s book is not wrong. The fact is, explaining the world of food is very complicated. There are agricultural, botanical, chemical, ethnic, geographical, historical, nutritional, and social issues and more involved in even some simple food questions. From country to country, region to region, and sometimes county to county ingredients vary, plant species vary, cuts of meat vary, preparation methods vary, etc., etc., so the production of a definitive work on food is pretty much impossible. Even the remarkable, eight-pound Oxford Companion to Food (Canada, UK) does not claim to be comprehensive
In preparing our daily answers column at Ochef.com, we routinely check as many as a dozen reference books and cookbooks to see if we’re on the right track in answering reader’s questions. We do find a lot of inconsistency among the leading reference books, but it is generally a question of nuance. The British tend to look at food from a global perspective; American writers generally refer to food as it is found and/or used in the US markets. So we spend a lot of time trying to reconcile what various authors have written so as to give readers a concise, thorough, correct answer.
What surprised us most about that cookbook editor’s comment was her lack of understanding of how difficult to write definitively about food and cooking.
So into this seething cauldron of back-stabbing food-reference writing and editing waltzes Nancy Rommelmann with her modest volume Everything You Pretend to Know About Food And Are Afraid Someone Will Ask. It does not pretend to be definitive, but it is very interesting.
In a series of questions and answers — Is French Toast Really French?, What is the Best Way to Store Wine?, What is a Key Lime? and the ever-popular What is Vindaloo? — Rommelmann takes you lightly through all of the major food categories: meat & game, poultry, fish & shellfish, pasta, potatoes & side dishes, vegetables & fruits, bread & pizza, desserts, coffee & tea, cocktails, wine, health food, sauces and spices, techniques & terminology, dining out, and miscellaneous that don’t seem to fit nicely into any category.
The book offers a lot of interesting information. Rommelman’s strength is her writing, which is clever, informative and interesting (although her use of the word eponymous six times in about 275 pages must surely set a record for any non-academic book).
How "correct" is the book? Pretty good. We found only two or three things that we thought were dead wrong, a dozen or so that were questionable or ambiguous. We found ourselves agreeing with most everything else and learning a bit in the process. Serious or long-time cooks will already know much of what Rommelmann says, but folks with less cooking experience will learn a lot, and everyone will learn something he or she didn’t know.
The book’s biggest flaw is that there is no index, so you can’t look things up. If you want to impress your friends with a tidbit you picked up in the fruit chapter but can’t quite remember all the details, you have to go through the chapter page by page to find it. I think there’s enough good information presented here to want to refer back to the book periodically, but, without an index, it’s not a reference book, it’s a reading book. But that’s not such a bad thing, either.
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