Tag Archives: Food books

Books For Cooks

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Books For Cooks, 233-235 Gertrude St, Fitzroy. Phone: 8415 1415

As someone who has come to love the online ease with which I can get my hands on music and books, and the information about them on which to base my buying, I have lamented the lack of bricks and mortar businesses in Melbourne that cater to my specific interests.

I have learned to live without them, though.

But in the form of Tim, at the splendid Fitzroy emporium Books For Cooks, I get a superb example of just why local, homegrown businesses should be encouraged whenever possible.

As well as looking to do a story for Consider The Sauce, I have driven across town with the notional purpose of buying a Lebanese or other Middle Eastern cookbook to fill a gap in my modest home collection.

I mention to Tim a particular book, one that is listed on the shop’s website but is not in stock.

He knows the book well. He informs me of its background and its virtues and drawbacks.

He’s not trying to dissuade me from buying it as such; it’s more like he’s trying to steer me towards a purchase that will suit my needs.

We go through the same routine with another book, this one covering Persian cooking.

In the end, and somewhat to my surprise, I end up buying The Complete Middle East Cookbook by Tess Mallos.

This makes all kinds of sense.

The book is the same size and in the same format, using the same typefaces, as Charmaine Solomon’s equivalent Asian tome.

As such, it will no doubt become a cherished asset and dependable companion in our home, and duly become dog-eared, sauce-spattered and loved a lot.

As well, my new book’s concept of “Middle East” stretches from Greece at one end to Afghanistan at the other.

So there you go – I’ve ended up with a book I can use and use often, and Tim has adroitly manoeuvred me away from the allure of those that had been seducing me with flash.

“We don’t aim to sell the book with the highest mark-up as a priority,” says Tim. “We want people to have a rewarding experience with the books they buy here.”

Helping me buy a book turns out to be just a small part of an engrossing hour of conversation as Tim gives generously of his time and insights.

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Books For Cooks is in its 13th year, Tim and partner Amanda having bought the name and “some stock” from a couple of dears for whom it was a sideline to their Malvern East travel agency.

“We saw a tiny ad in The Age and ended up being the only ones interested in buying it,” Tim says. “There was no research … we bought it on credit cards – and then did a business plan.”

The seems scarcely believable to me, such is the detail Tim provides me on running the shop, the various inequities of the international postal system, the effects of the internet, the ongoing subject of a GST on online imports and much more.

He tells me about 10 per cent of the shops turnover is online but that 40 per cent comes from the custom of professional cooks.

For some reason this surprises me.

The current best-sellers are three books by Israeli-born, London-based Yotam Ottolengh – Ottolengh: The Coobook, Plenty and Jerusalem.

The shop will often stock two or three copies of a book – perhaps one will be secondhand, or another may be printed using a particular font.

Books For Cooks sources books from about 650 suppliers in England, the US, France, Spain, Italy, Germany, Belgium, Sweden, Singapore, Japan, Canada and more.

There are at least two incoming shipments a week each from the US and the UK.

The main trade, of course, is in recipe books of many different kinds, vintages, sizes, styles, genres and nationalities.

But Books For Cooks also carries titles that cover biographies, history, philosophy, anthropology, sociology, food science, humour, fiction, kitchen design, implements, wine, spirits, coffee, tea, health, etiquette and table settings.

And no doubt several more categories!

We even get around to discussing the merits (mostly Tim) and otherwise (mostly me) of MasterChef and its various offshoots.

But we end up in pretty much the same place anyway.

“Mostly I like peasant food,” Tim says. “It’s almost always brown …”

He definitely says that as if he believes it’s a good thing.

And which is why, within a few hours of getting it home, my new cookbook is prickly with stickies denoting my interest in recipes that are overwhelmingly to do with cabbage rolls, pulses of all sorts, hearty stews and simple salads.

Check out the Books For Cooks website here.

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Book review: Day of Honey

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Day of Honey by Annia Ciezadlo (Simon and Schuster)

A review copy of this book was handed my way by a mate at my previous place of employment.

He figured it would tick almost all my boxes.

And why wouldn’t he?

It’s about food, it’s about writing, it’s about – more precisely – Middle Eastern food.

And it’s about international and current affairs, and the turbulence and conflicts and joy that accompany them, something I find endlessly fascinating, although I have rarely let that interest intrude on Consider The Sauce.

Truth is that while I stay on top of such things, they often leave me feeling down.

So why did Day of Honey sit around the house unloved and gathering dust for several months?

Why did I pick it up, read a few pages then discard it several times?

Why did it take only the most desperate boredom with every other available reading resource at hand before this book got its hooks into me?

A couple of reasons at least, I think …

One was the simple fear of confronting the horrors of the Middle East in a too-real account.

Reading about the Middle East’s trial and tribulations in news stories in newspaper and magazines or online is one thing.

There’s a certain dryness there that insulates us from the realities, brutal or otherwise.

Reading on-the-ground accounts of happenings in Baghdad and Beirut written by a gifted and eloquent writer is quite another.

I wasn’t at all sure I was up for it.

Another reason, one that was completely irrational given the nature of the subject, was that I feared the book would have a foodie-light veneer, making it a sort of Under The Beirut Sky.

About that, I turned out to be very wrong.

Once I started reading in earnest, this turned into a joyous page-turner.

I knew the author had me when she writes:

“The Mesopotamians baked a lot of their bread in a tinuru, a cylindrical clay oven with an open top and diabolically hot radiant heat inside. They rolled the dough into little round pats and left them for the gluten to relax. Then they flattened them into pancakes and slapped them onto the oven’s scorching inside walls, where they bubbled into chewy flatbreads.”

Hey, that sounds familiar doesn’t it?

Ciezadlo continues:

“Thousands of years later, Iraqis still make bread exactly this way at neighborhood bakeries … The Akkadian tinuru lives on as the Arabic tanoor, the Iranian tanura and the South Asian tandoor. Next time you order chicken tandoori at an Indian restaurant, chew on this: you are speaking a word that human mouths have been pronouncing, in one form or another, for at least four thousand years.”

Day of Honey follows the journey of Ciezadlo and her Lebanese husband Mohamad as they ply their journalistic/media trade in Baghdad and Beirut in the early-to-late 2000s.

If I skip going into any detail about the exact locations and conflicts they are involved in, it is simply because in many ways they are the background detail of the book’s major themes.

For this is a book, primarily, about people. Or more exactly, about people and how they deal with war.

And as Ciezadlo reveals, they do this largely through food.

There is a good deal of violence in the book, particularly towards the end.

But the author covers it in quite a dispassionate way, and always in the context of the people she loves, friends and family.

She simply lays out the absurdly sectarian nature of so much of life and politics and conflict in the Middle East without ever losing track of her focus.

That leaves her – and us – to revel in the food, its rituals and fabulous cast of characters who are by turns droll, hilarious, romantic, inspirational and more.

Particularly beguiling is her ongoing portrait of her mother-in-law, Umm Hassane. I’m tempted to describe her incredible and maddening wiles as “adorable” or some such, but then I don’t have to put up with her!

Through Day of Honey, I have had some of my beliefs about the Middle East buttressed.

But in many ways, I have had others shaken.

Mainly to the extent that what we read and hear about the region in the media is appallingly superficial or little more than window dressing and spin of various kinds.

Mostly, though, the book has emphasised for me how fortunate I am to be living in a part of the world where I am so free to participate in and enjoy food, food rituals and traditions, and the people who keep them alive.

And in one vivid account of a meal, Ciezadlo makes me believe more than ever that in the likes of Abbout Falafel House, Al-Alamy and so many more we have a genuine, life-affirming way of being part of what really is the greatest story ever told.

There are very many lovely examples of food anecdotes, recipes, lore and history.

At its end, the book includes more than a dozen recipes of food featured in its pages.

A lot of them seem sufficiently complex to deter me from attempting them.

But happily, the one that most intrigues – a simple Lebanese dish of onions, potatoes and eggs called Batata wa Bayd Mfarakeh – is the subject of a short video on the author’s website.

Unsurprisingly, what she creates there looks not at all like I imagined it would!

Day of Honey is a terrific book and I look forward to reading future posts on the author’s Facebook page for revealing and uplifting insights on Middle Eastern food, culture, people and – yes – politics.