Wednesday, December 10, 2008

Home Cheese Making or The Bagel

Home Cheese Making: Recipes for 75 Homemade Cheeses

Author: Ricki Carroll

The classic home cheese making primer has been updated and revised to reflect the increased interest in artisanal-quality cheeses and the availability of cheese making supplies and equipment.

Here are 85 recipes for cheeses and other dairy products that require basic cheese making techniques and the freshest of ingredients, offering the satisfaction of turning out a coveted delicacy. Among the step-by-step tested recipes for cheese varieties are farmhouse cheddar, gouda, fromage blanc, queso blanco, marscarpone, ricotta, and 30-minute mozzarella. Recipes for dairy products include crFme frafche, sour cream, yogurt, keifer, buttermilk, and clotted cream. There are also 60 recipes for cooking with cheese, including such treats as Ricotta Pancakes with Banana Pecan Syrup, Cream Cheese Muffins, Broiled Pears and Vermont Shepherd Cheese, Prosciutto and Cheese Calzones, and Grilled Vegetable Stacks with Roasted Red Pepper Sauce. Profiles of home cheese makers and artisan cheese makers scattered throughout the text share the stories of people who love to make and eat good cheese. Plus information on how to enjoy homemade cheeses, how to serve a cheese course at home, cheese tips, lore, quotes, cheese making glossary, and more.



Books about economics: Bobby Flay Cooks American or Nasty Bits

The Bagel: The Surprising History of a Modest Bread

Author: Maria Balinska

"If smoked salmon and cream cheese bring only one thing to mind, you can count yourself among the world's millions of bagel mavens. But few people are aware of the bagel's provenance, let alone its adventuresome history. This charming book tells the remarkable story of the bagel's journey from the tables of seventeenth-century Poland to the freezers of middle America today, a story of often surprising connections between a cheap market-day snack and centuries of Polish, Jewish, and American history." Research in international archives and numerous personal interviews uncover the bagel's links with the defeat of the Turks by Polish King Jan Sobieski in 1683, the Yiddish cultural revival of the late nineteenth century, and Jewish migration across the Atlantic to America. There the story moves from the bakeries of New York's Lower East Side to the Bagel Bakers' Local 388 Union of the 1960s, and the attentions of the mob. For all its modest size, the bagel has managed to bridge cultural gaps, rescue kings from obscurity, charge the emotions, and challenge received wisdom. Maria Balinska weaves together a rich, quirky, and evocative history of East European Jewry and the unassuming ring-shaped roll the world has taken to its heart.

Publishers Weekly

From the Italian ciambella in a 17th-century portrait of a young prince to the 1959 album Bagels and Bongos by pianist Irving Fields, journalist and BBC radio editor Balinska traces the cultural identity of a New York City icon from its humble beginnings in Poland to the freezer section of American supermarkets. Balinska's own interest in the bagel began with a year spent in Warsaw, Poland, as a graduate student, where she learned that her "own family history was relevant to that of the bagel." She then unearths a plethora of little-known facts about this breakfast staple, recounting its role in children's nursery rhymes, Poland's economic crisis of 1929, even its place in a McCall's magazine spread in 1963 next to Shirley Temple where the magazine encouraged its readers to "Join the stars below in this salute to Manhattan's most popular breakfast-bagels and lox." While the book may be too dry for the run-of-the- mill bagel lover, academics and dedicated foodies will appreciate Balinska's considerable research as well as her forays into the late 19th-century Jewish immigrant experience and American pop culture. Photos. (Nov.)

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Courtney Greene - Library Journal

Though the bagel is a diminutive food, its impact on culture, culinary arts, philosophy, and politics has been considerable.Balinska, a journalist and documentary filmmaker, traces the history of the bagel from its mysterious beginnings through several centuries of Polish history, the Holocaust, and American labor history, to its emergence into popular culture and current ubiquity across the world. Balinska seamlessly transitions from the serious to the frivolous, taking the reader from the Jewish ghetto of German-occupied Warsaw to the madcap marketing extravaganzas of Lender's Bagels-including a mock wedding of bagels and cream cheese held in the 1970s in upstate New York. Entertaining and engaging, this title gracefully and energetically reveals how the bagel, once clearly identified with eastern European Jewish life, became a cultural touchstone-which now has been firmly integrated into the everyday American experience. Recommended for public and academic libraries.



Table of Contents:
List of Illustrations Acknowledgements Note to Readers Introduction Ch. 1 The Family Tree 1 Ch. 2 Of Bagels and Kings 20 Ch. 3 Rituals, Rhymes and Revolutions: How the Bagel Lost its Worth but Kept its Value 44 Ch. 4 Bagel Polemics in an Independent Poland 69 Ch. 5 Boiling Over: The Immigrant Bagel and the Struggle for Workers' Rights 96 Ch. 6 'Kings of the Line': The Story of Bagel Bakers' Union Local No. 338 120 Ch. 7 The 'Bagelising' of America 148 Postscript 180 Notes 196 Further Reading 206 Index 211

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