Reading about cooking (and logistics)
Jul. 9th, 2022 10:49 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
walkitoutI’m in the middle of a bunch of unsatisfying books right now that are all teaching me fantastic things while annoying the hell out of me. I can’t recommend them for what they are, but I definitely value all of them.
Ota’s _The Kitchen_ is a deeply weird tour of historically preserved or restored kitchens and meals cooked in them by extremely talented women historians / preservationists (an occasional man makes an appearance) OR in other kitchens but in the style of the period that the kitchen was preserved from. Ota’s descriptions of the cooking equipment (sometimes multiple eras of cooking equipment) are at times off-putting, and there are only line drawings for illustration. However, it’s easy enough to find photos of all the places he went online. As a read, it has a lot of problems. But in terms of thinking about the terrain of cooking equipment and how it evolved over time, I’m not sure that I’ve ever seen a better source.
David Chang and Priya Krishna’s _Cooking at Home_ tries to help the reader identify the flavors they like, develop the confidence to work with what they have already (in terms of equipment, food, knowledge), and adapt to time and money and other constraints. That’s absolutely awesome in principal, but the implementation is super weird. DC is obsessed with salt, and at the time of writing this book was basically erasing all other flavor contributors (using neutral fat, neutral acid and neutral sweetener — of course you are going to go heavy on the salt and MSG if you zero’d out all the rest. This is like the worst D and D character ever, only in food).
Dara Orenstein’s book, _Out of Stock_ was flat out a mistake on my part (altho not just my mistake — I had a lot of help). It is a book about the politics of developing foreign trade zones, but I thought it was about warehouses and logistics. There is definitely overlap! But the focus is all on something else that I can see is relevant, but my focus is elsewhere. Reading this is like trying to figure out what all the women and children in history were doing in an Old Skool history text. It’s just not there, except by weird accident.
I don’t want to let the books off the hook for their very real problems (which I have blogged about in some detail already, and I’m sure there will be more detail to come). But I _do_ want to express my gratitude to all of these books, the authors, and the large teams of other people involved in making these books happen. I’m learning a ton, and it is wonderful. Don’t let my complaining get you down.
Ota’s _The Kitchen_ is a deeply weird tour of historically preserved or restored kitchens and meals cooked in them by extremely talented women historians / preservationists (an occasional man makes an appearance) OR in other kitchens but in the style of the period that the kitchen was preserved from. Ota’s descriptions of the cooking equipment (sometimes multiple eras of cooking equipment) are at times off-putting, and there are only line drawings for illustration. However, it’s easy enough to find photos of all the places he went online. As a read, it has a lot of problems. But in terms of thinking about the terrain of cooking equipment and how it evolved over time, I’m not sure that I’ve ever seen a better source.
David Chang and Priya Krishna’s _Cooking at Home_ tries to help the reader identify the flavors they like, develop the confidence to work with what they have already (in terms of equipment, food, knowledge), and adapt to time and money and other constraints. That’s absolutely awesome in principal, but the implementation is super weird. DC is obsessed with salt, and at the time of writing this book was basically erasing all other flavor contributors (using neutral fat, neutral acid and neutral sweetener — of course you are going to go heavy on the salt and MSG if you zero’d out all the rest. This is like the worst D and D character ever, only in food).
Dara Orenstein’s book, _Out of Stock_ was flat out a mistake on my part (altho not just my mistake — I had a lot of help). It is a book about the politics of developing foreign trade zones, but I thought it was about warehouses and logistics. There is definitely overlap! But the focus is all on something else that I can see is relevant, but my focus is elsewhere. Reading this is like trying to figure out what all the women and children in history were doing in an Old Skool history text. It’s just not there, except by weird accident.
I don’t want to let the books off the hook for their very real problems (which I have blogged about in some detail already, and I’m sure there will be more detail to come). But I _do_ want to express my gratitude to all of these books, the authors, and the large teams of other people involved in making these books happen. I’m learning a ton, and it is wonderful. Don’t let my complaining get you down.