If a bad attitude could be subject to copyright, my ten years as a waiter would have left me obscenely wealthy. Working the floor, I was the Kerry Packer of passive aggression. Sullen insolence was my personal trademark, diligently honed and perfected over time. For a long list of perceived diner slights-ranging from ordering the tomato sauce separately to the fries, to calling me 'dear'-I could perform a Jekyll and Hyde switch into the most perfunctory,...

"John T. Edge, "the Faulkner of Southern food" (the Miami Herald), reveals a South hidden in plain sight, where restaurants boast family pedigrees and serve supremely local specialties found nowhere else. From backdoor home kitchens to cinder-block cafes, he introduces you to cooks who have been standing tall by the stove since Eisenhower was in office. While revealing the stories behind their food, he shines a bright light on places that have become...

"William Alexander is determined to bake the perfect loaf of bread. He tasted it long ago, in a restaurant, and has been trying to reproduce it ever since. Without success. Now, on the theory that practice makes perfect, he sets out to bake peasant bread every week until he gets it right. He bakes his loaf from scratch. And because Alexander is nothing if not thorough, he really means from scratch: growing, harvesting, winnowing, threshing, and milling...

"The de facto how-to manual of the international Food Not Bombs movement, which provides free food to the homeless and hungry and has branches in countries on every continent except Antarctica, this book describes at length how to set up and operate a Food Not Bombs chapter. The guide considers every aspect of the operation, from food collection and distribution to fund-raising, consensus decision making, and what to do when the police arrive. It...

The love for the donut in the United States is longstanding and deep-rooted. Gourmet donut shops have popped up in trendy neighborhoods across the country and high-end restaurants are serving trios of donuts for dessert, while Dunkin' Donuts, Krispy Kreme, and Tim Hortons have amassed a devoted following. In this captivating guide to the delectable dessert, culinary historian, chef, and donut lover Michael Krondl has put together an entertaining social...

"Sweet Invention is a social, cultural, and-above all-culinary history of dessert. It explores the world's great dessert traditions, from ancient India to twenty-first century Indiana. Each chapter begins in the present with the author tasting and analyzing one of the dessert icons of each tradition-baklava in the Middle East, or macarons in France for example-before spinning a more ancient tale. Readers will meet the sweet makers of Persia who gave...

"Celebrating the life of this extraordinary woman, a selected anthology collects 50 years worth of the award-winning author's essays on food, travel and the arts, which have appeared in scholarly journals, popular magazines and newspapers as varied as The New York Times, Saveur and Vogue,"--Amazon.com.