Ebook: Choice cuts: a savory selection of food writing from around the world and throughout history

Gourmets and gourmands -- Food and sex -- Memorable meals -- Favorite restaurants -- Markets -- Not eating -- Rants -- On bread alone -- The mystery of eggs -- Eating your vegetables -- A hill of beans -- The fish that didn't get away -- Poultry, fowl, and other ill-fated birds -- The meat of the matter -- Easy on the starch -- A pinch of seasoning -- Just a salad -- The thing about truffles -- Loving fat -- Bearing fruit -- The dark side of chocolate -- Their just desserts -- A good drink -- Bugs -- The French -- The English -- The Americans -- The Germans -- The politics of food -- What does it mean?;"Every once in awhile a writer of particular skills takes a fresh, seemingly improbable idea and turns out a book of pure delight." That's how David McCullough described Mark Kurlansky's Cod: A Biography of the Fish That Changed the World, a work that revealed how a meal can be as important as it is edible. Salt: A World History, its successor, did the same for a seasoning, and confirmed Kurlansky as one of our most erudite and entertaining food authors. Now, the winner of the James Beard Award for Excellence in Food Writing shares a varied selection of "choice cuts" by others, as he leads us on a mouthwatering culinary tour around the world and through history and culture from the fifth century B.C. to the present day. Choice Cuts features more than two hundred pieces, from Cato to Cab Calloway. Here are essays by Plato on the art of cooking ... Pablo Neruda on french fries ... Alice B. Toklas on killing a carp ... M.F.K. Fisher on the virility of Turkish desserts ... Alexandre Dumas on coffee ... W.H. Auden on Icelandic food ... Elizabeth David on the downward march of English pizza ... Claude LEvi-Strauss on "the idea of rotten" ... James Beard on scrambled eggs ... Balzac, Virginia Woolf, E.M. Forster, Chekhov, and many other famous gourmands and gourmets, accomplished cooks, or just plain ravenous writers on the passions of cuisine.