Ladybird Books for Grown-Ups

Penguin Books has reissued its beloved Ladybird guides for children as guides for grown-ups, with topics like The Hipster,  The Mid-Life Crisis, and The Hangover.

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Penguin Australian Lantern Cookery Classics

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Cate Blanchett as Antoine de Saint-Exupéry's Little Prince by Tim Walker for W Magazine December 2015

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Viking Penguin Australian Children's Classics

How insanely cute are these hardback Penguin children's books?  Coming on the heels of Puffin's Hardback Classics (which you can see here), most of which were English or American (there's also a Canadian and a German in there), Penguin Australia has released this adorable series of Australian children's classics.  These books are a combination of titles that range from the late 19th century to now.  I have only heard of a few of these, and I've actually read only one (Looking for Alibrandi, which was amazing), and in addition to the beautiful design of this series, I love that it brought to my attention young adult books I was unfamiliar with.  These embossed hardbacks with no dust jackets were illustrated by Allison Colpoys.  You can see more of her work here.

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Review: My Pantry by Alice Waters and Fanny Singer

Alice Waters is one of the most well-known public figures talking about food today.  She started her restaurant, Chez Panisse, in Berkeley, California, in 1971, and started a revolution.  She has, since then, written many wonderful recipes for relatively simple food (not necessarily easy to cook, though!) based on high quality ingredients.  Her last few books (Art of Simple Food I and II) have placed a greater emphasis on simple recipes, and she seems to be making a move towards a much broader audience than she has courted until now.  This book, My Pantry, follows this general direction.  My pantry is a slim and small volume.  It is very pretty and cute, and it was clearly designed to be a gift, perhaps a stocking stuffer.  It is a beautifully produced book.  It's a hardback without a dust jacket, and the beautiful design on the cover is printed directly onto the boards.  The cover and end papers are decorated with charming watercolors by Alice Waters' daughter, Fanny Singer, and the text itself is also decorated with watercolors, but sadly these are all in black and white.  Given that the book is clearly meant to be a gift, it's unfortunate that the publisher did not use full color watercolors, as it does take away from the beauty of the book.  

The subtitle of this book is "Homemade Ingredients That Make Simple Meals Your Own."  This is not entirely accurate, as the book contains recipes not just for ingredients, but also for simple dishes.  I'm not really sure why this book was designed this way...it makes the book seem like it doesn't really have a clear function.  Many of the recipes are indeed for pantry "basics" like corn tortillas, red-wine vinegar, pita bread, and fresh cheeses.  This recipes follow the trend for making everything, even "basic" ingredients, from scratch.  Waters' recipes, though, do seem to be simpler and more no-nonsense that books like Homemade Pantry, et. al.  Waters' recipes are always extensively tested and are quite refined, so I am more inclined to trust her book rather than other books.  There are also, inexplicably, recipes for things like Brown Rice and Herb Salad, Lentil Soup, and Oat Pancakes.  These are very clearly not "homemade ingredients" or pantry items.  

Overall, this is a lovely book and a nice gift for either an Alice Waters fan, or a newish but ambitious cook.  It's not as well-thought out as Waters' past books, but its recipes are surely as trustworthy as her recipes always are.

(I received this book from Blogging for Books in exchange for an honest review.)

Review: The Woman Who Would be King by Kara Cooney

Kara Cooney's brilliant biography of Hatshepsut, an ancient Egyptian woman who became pharaoh in a highly patriarchal society, is newly out in paperback.  As such, it would be a perfect book for a book club.  It is, of course, a fascinating look into ancient history, culture, and politics.  If you are interested in ancient society, this is an excellent and engrossing account of a relatively little known part of ancient history.  But it is more than that.  As an account of the life and times of a female pharaoh, one would expect this book to be pretty interesting.  But Cooney makes this a book that is about more than one woman.  It is also an excellent insight into female rulership and how one woman dealt with the rules and values associated with a type of leadership that had always been assumed to be male.  Cooney is a professor of history at UCLA, and she therefore clearly has the academic chops to do the research and analyze this figure.  Her research is certainly trustworthy.  But that does not mean this is a dry recounting of events.  Cooney is that rare type of academic--one who is an engaging writer.  To be fair, most academics are not writing for a popular audience, and Cooney clearly is.  This is therefore not the definitive work on Hatshepsut for a researcher or student, but it is a wonderful introduction to and analysis of a fascinating figure in history for the general reader.  This book is along the lines of books like those of Amanda Foreman (who blurbed the book and is the author of Georgiana: Duchess of Devonshire) and Stacy Schiff, author of a similar type of book on Cleopatra, and more recently, one on the Salem Witch Trials.  All of these well-written and entertaining books make a very welcome and indeed long overdue contribution to the general knowledge and interest in women in western (and Near Eastern) history.  Cooney's book is a great addition to this group of books.

(I received this book in exchange for an honest review for Blogging for Books)

Review: Mark Bittman's Kitchen Matrix

Mark Bittman's newest cookbook, Kitchen Matrix, is an original recipe book for sure.  It is made up predominantly of images, and not the food porny type of images we've become accustomed to.  The photographs are straight-on and no-nonsense.  As the title of the book suggests, the images and the text essentially come together to form diagrams.  As different looking as this book is from Bittman's previous cookbooks, it actually draws its content and general concept from his articles and earlier books.  Bittman's recipes often include a simple model recipe and then multiple possible variations on it.  Kitchen Matrix basically does the same thing, but with the addition of photographs instead of purely textual explanations.  I really like the way Bittman writes his recipes, and I think the idea behind this book is interesting and original.  However, even though the images are supposed to make the basic concept of Bittman's recipes even easier to understand, I find that it actually makes for a cluttered and at times confusing book.  Perhaps with time one would get used to the structure, but I for one find it unnecessarily fussy.  There are so many little boxes of tiny recipes without ingredients separated out, and some sections have a master recipe in a small font at the very bottom of the page and then photos of different groups of types of ingredients.  The theory is that you can pick and choose between those groups of ingredients, but in the process of reading the book, I found myself searching all over the page to find the ingredients.  Some sections just include straight-forward recipes.  Others include four basic cooking types (baked, braised, mashed, fried, for potatoes) and then under each type one main recipe and then under that two variations.  Does that sound confusing? It is.  The book includes too many different types of layouts, and that exacerbates what is already an unfamiliar and strange layout for recipes.  I think it's an interesting idea, but generally, it's too fussy for me, and particularly given that it's supposed to be especially simple.

(I received this book from Blogging for Books in exchange for an honest review.)