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American Terroir: Savoring The Flavors Of Our Woods, Waters, And Fields (2010)

by Rowan Jacobsen(Favorite Author)

3.96 of 5 Votes: 1

ISBN

1596916486 (ISBN13: 9781596916487)

languge

English

genre

Food & Cookbooks

publisher

Bloomsbury USA

review 1: I will be forever thankful that this book introduced me to Taza chocolate. The gritty, crumbly, rich chocolate discs are so good -- salt and pepper is my favorite -- and however ridiculous spending $5 on a small chocolate treat is, they are also that delicious.I read this book in two parts. After reading the maple syrup portion, I put it away for perhaps a year. I can't exactly remember why -- I think because I'm so uninterested in coffee that I didn't want to read that section, yet I felt weird about skipping any of it. I'm glad I picked it back up and finished it. I learned quite a bit about the foods mentioned, even ones I will never ingest (coffee -- gross; anything from bodies of water -- fascinating, but yuck; wine -- unpretentious moscato is all I can stomach). Some... more sections were better than others, but nearly all of them made me hungry.The information in it is presented in an easy-to-understand way. It's not at all dry, though I'm not always huge on the author's voice (how weird was that wine = strippers metaphor that he insisted on sticking with?). I especially liked the argument one of the interviewee's put forth that terroir was not just of the woods, waters and fields but that the economic and societal circumstances in individual places form local flavors as much as anything else. I wish the book were more complete, but I wish everything were more complete. It was an enjoyable read, informative, and now I eat Taza chocolate about once a week.
review 2: Informative, enjoyable book about great food that gets its unique flavors from the environment it comes from. Terroir is a term borrowed from the wine industry. It's also about how people apply knowledge of place with food. As Jacobsen put it:"Ultimately, it's about the human response to the deals that nature has offered. It's about the soul of the vigneron and the cheesemaker and the fisherman."The author obviously had a lot of fun exploring and tasting these foods, from various places across the Americas (north and central). I liked his poetic sensibility when describing food and/or environment. For example here is how he describes a type of mushroom, the chanterelle:"People like to say that chanterelles smell like apricots, which is mnemonically convenient because of their color. But the smelling circuitry goes straight for the limbic system; memory and emotion are often the best way to capture the essence of a scent. To me, chanterelles smell insistently wistful; they are the wet and mossy trout stream you fished as a kid."He described the chanterelle as "the Audrey Hepburn of mushrooms," because it is so enchanting.Fun book to read and it must've been a fun book to write! less

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