Outside of cookbooks the two books on cooking that transformed my thinking and thus my life as a cook were the one I’m featuring here, “Why We Eat What We Eat” by Raymond Sokolov and “Culture and Cuisine” by Jean-Françoise Revel. I also love, “On Food and Cooking” by Harold McGee, (most every chef I know does as well) and “The Encyclopedia of Fish” by A.J. McClane. They are distinctly different books than the first two I’ve listed. The first two have so much to do with history and cultural shifts.
I bought, “Why We Eat..” in September of 1991. I was working in Key West at our restaurant, “MIRA” at the corners of Simonton and Fleming Streets. My culinary compass was shifting and becoming more purposeful. As with any young chef one follows the dictates of the chef/restaurant they work in. Be it diner, barbecue, French etc. One learns a repertoire that way. It takes years if one is serious. Like playing in bands it is hard work, low pay and almost no applause. I was too curious to settle with that. I needed to find my road map. Mr. Sokolov’s book was one of my most underlined and passages highlighted books ever. The book is subtitled, “How the Encounter Between the New World and the Old Changed the Way Everyone on the Planet Eats”. Mr. Sokolov’s day job was at the Wall Street Journal and lived in New York City. IN 1994 I had published two beautiful posters with ‘Ten Speed Press/Celestial Arts’ and sent them to him. He wrote me letter of thanks which is kept in the old book.
This is the kind of man I would have loved to have known much better. To have been able to have coffee, a meal and drinks after we both got off work. His supple intelligence surely would have rubbed off on me in that way. But I am eternally grateful for him writing this book and giving me the courage and the direction to accelerate and expand on what I came to christen, “New World Cuisine”.
“Make no mistake about it: the great preponderance of the evidence argues against a permanence in anybody’s food heritage. We have all grown up believing in the principle of culinary authenticity and tradition as an axiom of human civilization, but the norm around the world has been change, transience.” -Raymond Sokolov, ‘Why We Eat What We Eat’