Where Flavor Was Born or Year of Eating Dangerously

Where Flavor Was Born: Recipes and Culinary Travels along the Indian Ocean Spice Route

Author: Andreas Viestad

This extraordinary cookbook from celebrated author Andreas Viestad explores the culinary wonders along the legendary spice route, from Zanzibar to India to Bali and everywhere in between. Part travelogue, part cookbook, this colorful volume captures the spirit of each region and reveals the origins of the spices now used in everyday cooking across the globe. Nearly 100 recipes, a glossary of spices, source list, and unforgettable color photographs document the people, places, and best of all the irresistible cuisine at every stop on the journey. Where Flavor Was Born brings the exotic flavors and cultures of the Indian Ocean into the home kitchen.

Interesting textbook: Holy Simplicity or Walden or Life in the Woods

Year of Eating Dangerously: A Global Adventure in Search of Culinary Extremes

Author: Tom Parker Bowles

Fugu. Dog. Cobra. Bees. Spleen.  A 600,000 SCU chili pepper.
All considered foods by millions of people around the world.  And all objects of great fascination to Tom Parker Bowles, a food journalist who grew up eating his mother’s considerably safer roast chicken, shepherd’s pie and mushy peas.  Intrigued by the food phobias of two friends, Parker Bowles became inspired to examine the cultural divides that make some foods verboten or “dangerous” in the culture he grew up with while being seen as lip-smacking delicacies in others. So began a year-long odyssey through Asia, Europe and America in search of the world’s most thrilling, terrifying and odd foods.
 
Parker Bowles is always witty and sometimes downright hilarious in recounting his quest for envelope-pushing meals, ranging from the potentially lethal to the outright disgusting to the merely gluttonous—and he proves in this book that an open mouth and an open mind are the only passports a man needs to truly discover the world .  
 
 

Kirkus Reviews

One gastronome's worldwide pursuit of perfect-and perfectly awful-cuisine. A veritable culinary Odysseus, food critic Bowles (E is for Eating: An Alphabet of Greed, 2004) set out from and returned to his native London to regale foodies and common omnivores alike with tales of exotic specimens from all ranges of the food spectrum. Over the course of "twelve months, four continents, 20,000 air miles and two inches on [his] waist," he managed to shove a lot into his thrill-seeking maw. Yet his project was "not so much about picaresque derring-do (although there's a little of that, albeit rather windy)," claims the author, "but a fascination with the world's diverse cuisines." As his adventure took shape, he "started to think about the relativity of dangerous foods, how one man's pea is another man's tripe," and ended up concluding, "it's our perception . . . that's usually the biggest obstacle to trying new things, not the taste itself." In some cases, however, as with the elvers (baby eels) of Gloucestershire or the gooseneck barnacles (percebes) dotting Spain's Atlantic-pummeled coast, Bowles found that the harvesting of these unlikely delicacies could be as dangerous as consuming them. By and large, though, many of the foods he tasted-from Japan's potentially lethal fugu (blowfish) to the merely unsavory silkworm pupae and posintang (dog soup) of Korea, to the bon waan (wood stew) of Laos and "bowel-shattering" American hot sauce-simply push the envelope of the Western palate and invite us to admire the author's gastronomic courage. But while Bowles may fancy himself a professional eater with a penchant for risky man-food, he wins over his audience as a writer, describing dishes andsensations with the zeal of the recently famished, and his own hedonistic acts in delightful passages of unabashed bravado and self-deprecating humor. In the spirit of Anthony Bourdain but without the sensationalistic glitz. Agent: Grainne Fox/Ed Victor Ltd.