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Rafael Steinberg

Författare till Island Fighting

18 verk 1,373 medlemmar 7 recensioner

Om författaren

Inkluderar namnet: Rafael Steinberg

Foto taget av: Rafael Steinberg

Verk av Rafael Steinberg

Taggad

Allmänna fakta

Födelsedag
1927
Kön
male
Utbildning
Harvard University
Yrken
journalist

Medlemmar

Recensioner

 
Flaggad
AnkaraLibrary | Feb 29, 2024 |
I collected all the hardcover Time Life Foods of the World books and while I have occasionally cooked from various volumes, I'm now actually reading them all cover to cover.

The author of this volume of this series (and unfortunately several others) has no real connection to the cuisine. The same author who wrote the Japanese volume did this one as well and was a white American man. He seems to have had a real love of the foods of Asia and an adventurous spirit for trying things that perhaps most Americans didn't have at the time (especially with spicy foods). However, he is not a great spokesman for the cuisines that he was sampling for the first time on a trip he took specifically to write the book. Unsurprisingly, this is the book that I cringed the most at in terms of insensitive and even racist writing of all the volumes I've read so far. This guy also felt the need to regularly note how hot the women serving him food were in various countries which was irritating. I'm sure he was a product of his time but it did diminish my enjoyment of the book.

There weren't as many recipes that I am excited to cook in this volume either but I suspect that if I sought out modern books on Thai, Vietnamese, Hawaiian, and the other cuisines covered I would find more things I'm willing to try. When this book was written in 1970 most Americans probably wouldn't have had access to a lot of what they would need for the recipes or a basic understanding of the foods being described and I think the recipes are written in an overly complicated way to account for that.

As always, of course, the photos in the book are really cool. It's worth having for the pictures alone. My favorites in this volume are of parties. They seem to have made a point of photographing the food at celebrations and gatherings in each nation covered and they're great.
… (mer)
½
 
Flaggad
k8_not_kate | Apr 21, 2021 |
I collected all the hardcover Time Life Foods of the World books and while I have occasionally cooked from various volumes, I'm now actually reading them all cover to cover. This is the first one I read.

Like all of the FOTW books, this book has glorious photos of food and people cooking and eating in Japan around 1969. The author makes a special point to talk about the importance of how food looks in Japan and harmonizing with nature through cuisine. The photos do a good job illustrating that. There is a kaleidoscope of soups on one page, photos of people dining out in inexpensive restaurants and high end inns on others. I especially love the map of Japan in the beginning of this volume, made with a few strokes of ink like a sumi-e painting.

I would love to cook more Japanese food, although I feel daunted by it. Reading through the recipes in this book, I think I would definitely attempt a few. The descriptions and instructions for tempura are enough to have me pricing air fryers. (Apparently it's possible to make tempura that way? I guess I'll find out!) There is a great chapter on Japanese home cooking with some ideas that I would like to try. I wouldn't call this the most cook-able volume and I did google many of the recipes I'm interested in to see modern cooks' interpretations of the same dishes, but I do think many of the recipes look fairly approachable.

I'm reading all of these books with the assumption that, given that they were written fifty years ago, many of them will be insensitive if not outright racist. I didn't come across anything I really cringed at in this one, although the fact that a white guy wrote the whole book is strange. Certainly, if you want to explore Japanese cooking, this book isn't anything like a definitive book on the topic. It is a nice time capsule and a very sincere love note to Japanese cuisine and culture.
… (mer)
 
Flaggad
k8_not_kate | Jun 15, 2020 |
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_War_II_series World War II is a series of books published by Time-Life that chronicles the Second World War. Each book focused on a different topic, such as the resistance, spies, the home front but mainly the battles and campaigns of the conflict.
Typical Time-Life large format coffee table book. It contains many illustrations, especially photographs that appear to have been chosen for their iconic status more than for their representativeness.

An example of this is several photographs of fake factories and airfields the Germans constructed to divert Allied bomber crews from the real targets. These photographs are memorable, but no account I have read has mentioned that these deception/camoflage efforts had any significant effect on the bombing campaign. Bomber crews had plenty of trouble finding their targets even without these diversions, epitomized by the several times American bombers (with the advantage of daylight to help them navigate and find targets on the ground) bombed towns inside Switzerland.
… (mer)
 
Flaggad
MasseyLibrary | 2 andra recensioner | Dec 10, 2018 |

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Associerade författare

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Larry Burrows Photographer
Anthony Blake Photographer
Co Rentmeester Photographer
Fred Lyon Photographer

Statistik

Verk
18
Medlemmar
1,373
Popularitet
#18,736
Betyg
½ 3.5
Recensioner
7
ISBN
36
Språk
5

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