The fine folks at the Royal Society for the encouragement of Arts, known for their brilliant sketchnote animations of talks by prominent authors and scientists, recently launched a competition, inviting emerging filmmakers to bring RSA talks to life in fresh ways. This fantastic stop-motion entry by Marija Jacimovic and Benoit Detalle, which took more than three weeks to create, is based on Michael Pollan’s iconic Food Rules and is the most refreshing take on the classic since Maira Kalman’s illustrated edition.
You can give this gem your vote here and help the talented duo win £2,000.
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Phylogeny of the pantry, or what architecture has to do with anellini.
In 2010, London chef extraordinaire Jacob Kenedy with award-winning British graphic designer Caz Hildebrand explored the geometry of pasta — a journey into the science, history, and philosophy of Italy’s most iconic pasta dishes through a minimalist, design-driven cookbook. Now comes Pasta by Design, an even more ambitious design dissection on the beloved carb staple, exploring the intricate, beautiful, almost whimsical geometrical shapes of more than 90 different types of pasta.
(After all, if geometry is good enough a lens for love, it’s certainly good enough for pasta.)
Pasta, it turns out, is a surprisingly apt vehicle for the elements of great design. MoMA’s Paola Antonelli (♥) writes in the introduction:
Pasta, that simple and yet surprisingly versatile mixture of durum wheat-flour and water, shaped by hand or machine, is a delicious example of great design. Just like any other indispensable invention, pasta matches the available resources (wheat — one of the most widely produced cereals in the world) with goals (the human need not only to eat, but also to have a somewhat diversified diet). As well as being a design born out of necessity, it is also such a simple and strong concept that it has generated an almost endless variety of derivative pasta types — and an even greater number of dishes made from them. Moreover, it has proven to be a timeless design; although pasta’s production tools may have been updated across the centuries, its basic forms have remained the same. It is also a global design, easy to appropriate and adapt to local culture — as can be seen from the many regional varieties of pasta dishes across the world. Finally, pasta is a universal success with both critics and the public, thus also passing the market-driven design test.”
Given the astounding variety of pasta types and the often confusing nomenclature of their classification, the book takes an approach inspired by the science of phylogeny — the study of relatedness between groups of forms in nature — to pare down 92 different types based on their morphological features, then charts them in a family tree.
Each shape is described in a meticulous mathematical formula, and expressive minimalist photographs and drawings zoom in on the hidden genius of the classic pantry mainstay.
Quirky in spirit yet rigorously researched and beautifully produced, Pasta by Design at once humanizes mathematics and exposes the captivating complexity of one of the world’s most beloved foods, revealing the dimensionality of design as a cross-disciplinary cultural lens.
Images courtesy of Thames & Hudson; photographs via IJP
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It’s not every day that one of the greatest food books of our time gets a makeover by one of the greatest illustrators of our time. Such is the case of this new edition of Michael Pollan’s classic compendium, Food Rules: An Eater’s Manual, illustrated by the great Maira Kalman (♥) — the timelessly sensible blueprint to a healthy relationship with food redone in Kalman’s characteristically colorful and child-like yet irreverent aesthetic. This new edition also features 19 additional food rules, including Place a bouquet of flowers on the table and everything will taste twice as good and the meta When you eat real food, you don’t need rules.
From the very first page, starting with Kalman’s introduction, the book is an absolute — and guilt-free — treat:
Everyone eats food. That is the universal connector. Life is fragile. Fleeting. What do we want? To be healthy. To celebrate and to Love and to live Life to the Fullest. So here comes Michael Pollan with this little (monumental) book. A humanistic and smart book that describes a Sane and Happy world of Eating. It asks us, gently, to hit the Reset button on manufactured food and go back in Time.” ~ Maira Kalman
Treat Meats as a Flavoring or Special Occasion Food
Cook
Don't Overlook the Oily Little Fishes
Shop the Peripheries of the Supermarket and Stay Out of the Middle
Eat When You Are Hungry, Not When You Are Bored
Kalman’s illustrations emanate the kind of thoughtful simplicity that underpins the message of Pollan’s classic, which is based on the premise that the wisdom of our grandparents might teach us more about eating well than the overly complicated nutritional scheming purveyed by the popular media.
From Adam Gopnik, one of my favorite nonfiction writers working today, comes The Table Comes First: Family, France, and the Meaning of Food — a fascinating journey into the roots of today’s obsession with food and culinary culture. From the dawn of our modern tastes in 18th-century France, where the first restaurant was born, to the kitchens of the White House to the Slow Food movement to Barcelona’s bleeding-edge molecular gastronomy scene, Gopnik tours the wild and wonderful world of cuisine, with all its concomitant sociocultural phenomena, to explore the delicate relationship between what goes on the table and what goes on around it as we come together over our food. It’s history, nutrition, philosophy, anthropology, and sociology all rolled up into one delectable streusel of insight and illumination, in Gopnik’s unapologetically intelligent yet charmingly witty style.
Having made food a more fashionable object, we have ended by making eating a smaller subject. When ‘gastronomy’ was on the margins of attention it seemed big because it was an unexpected way to get at everything — the nature of hunger; the meaning of appetite; the patterns and traces of desire; tradition, in the way that recipes are passed mother to son; and history, in the way that spices mix and, in mixing, mix peoples. You could envision through the modest lens of pleasure, as through a keyhole, a whole world; and the compression and odd shape of the keyhole made the picture more dramatic. Now the door is wide open, but somehow we see less, or notice less, anyway. Betrayed by its enlargement, food becomes less intimate the more intensely it is made to matter.” ~ Adam Gopnik
The book opens with Charles Darwin’s famous haikuesque meditation:
We have happy days, remember good dinners.”
Gopnik goes on to explore the two pillars of modern eating — the restaurant and the recipe book — both of which are modern developments, mere blips in evolutionary time, and reflects on their cultural history with his characteristically brilliant blend of keen analysis and ever-so-subtle smirk.
The restaurant was once a place for men, a place where men ate, held court, cooked, boasted and swaggered, and wooed women. The recipe book was traditionally ‘feminine’: the kitchen was the place where women cooked, supervised, gave orders, made brownies, to steady and domesticate men. In the myth-world of the nineteenth century, the restaurant existed to coax women into having sex; the recipe book to coax men into staying home.” ~ Adam Gopnik
MODERNIST CUISINE
Nathan Myhrvold may be better-known as Microsoft’s former Chief Technology Officer, who studied quantum science alongside legendary physicist Stephen Hawking, but his true passion lies at the intersection of science and food. Myhrvold trained as a chef at LaVarenne in Burgundy, France, and has spent the past three years in a laboratory in Bellevue, Washington, perfecting — with his seven full-time chefs — the elaborate cooking techniques of gastronomy’s recent mega-obsession: molecular cuisine.
Modernist Cuisine: The Art and Science of Cooking, originally featured as one of these 5½ fantastic cross-disciplinary cookbooks, is the pinnacle of his experimentation, a 2,400-page, six-volume behemoth with over 1,000 recipes that transform the kitchen into a lab. Needless to say, expectations for the ambitious undertaking have been gargantuan, which made gastronomers all the more unsettled by the recent announcement that due to packaging concerns, the book — which weighs over 48 pounds — won’t be available until March, nearly four months past the publication date originally promised.
Modernist Cuisine isn’t for everyone — besides the hardcore foray into ingredients like methylcellulose and agar approached with cooking techniques that involve liquid nitrogen and rotary evaporators, the book comes with a hefty $625 price tag. (Amazon has it at 28% off, which clocks in at the non-negligible sum of $175 in savings — but still runs your a good $450.)
Images courtesy of Credit: Ryan Matthew Smith/The Cooking Lab LLC via The New York Times
FARM ANATOMY
From the ever-talented Julia Rothman — she of Drawn In and The Exquisite Book fame, and one of the most original illustrators working today — comes Farm Anatomy: The Curious Parts and Pieces of Country Life, a charming illustrated guide to the intricate microcosm that underpins your dinner plate. From how to properly milk a cow to a taxonomy of squash varieties and faming tools to a morphology of barn cupolas, Rothman’s warm drawings are bound to entertain, educate (did you know that a one-year-old goat is called a ‘yearling’ and you can use cornflower to dye wool blue?), and instill in you newfound awe and fascination with rural life.
And as if the striking illustrations weren’t enough of a feat, most of the type in the book was handwritten, with the exception of the introduction and metadata font, which Rothman created from her handwriting.
The book was inspired by Rothman’s first visit to the farm on which her husband, Matt, grew up, which left the born-and-bred New Yorker artist wide-eyed and wonderstruck.
Working on this book has given me a chance to learn more about what it’s like to live off the land and to better understand Matt’s roots. In small ways I hope to bring the ideals and traditions he grew up on back into our daily lives.” ~ Julia Rothman
Utterly charming and thoroughly researched, Farm Anatomy is one of those rare treats that speak to your eyes and your heart, and in the process manage to expand your mind.
Originally featured here, with more images, last month.
ART OF THE MENU
Menu Design in America: 1850-1985 by design writer extraordinaire Steven Heller (previously), Esquire food columnist John Mariani, cultural anthropologist and graphic design historian Jim Heimann, and high-end publisher Taschen (previously) is a delicious history of menu creativity, featuring nearly 800 vibrant illustrated examples of menu ephemera, alongside photographs of restaurants, that together tell the rich and fascinating story of eating out in America. Besides the fascinating design history, the book doubles as a curious tracker of American inflation, both economic (who’s in for a $1.50 fine-dining lunch?) and of culinary claims (how did we go from simple and to-the-point food descriptions to foofy foodie-speak?).
The beautifully illustrated recipes come from a roster of famous chefs — including Mario Batali, John Besh, David Chang, Tom Colicchio, and Andrea Reusing — contextualized amidst chef interviews and essays by acclaimed food writers like Melissa Clark and J. Dixon, pondering such complexities as the culinary connotations of The Beatles’ White Album and what moussaka has to do with Metallica.
Masterminding the project is Brooklyn-based band One Ring Zero, who for the past couple of years have been working their favorite rock-star chefs to each choose the musical genre for his or her song, all included on the CD that comes with the book. One Ring Zero’s Michael Hearst got the kernel of this genre-bender in college, when he composed a choral piece around a recitation of grocery store names.
The book also comes with a delightful free iPhone app that lets you enter up to 5 ingredients you have on hand and dishes out a delicious, speedy singable recipe to make with them.
Gabrielle Hamilton has spent the past decade as the chef-owner of the beloved Prune restaurant in New York City’s East Village, but hear path to the kitchen was neither straight nor smooth. In Blood, Bones & Butter: The Inadvertent Education of a Reluctant Chef, Hamilton — whose formidable talent as a writer is on par with her culinary mastery — recounts twenty years of seeking purpose in her life, from the idyllic kitchen of her childhood on a farm in rural Pennsylvania, raised by a French mother and an artist-set-designer father, to the difficult and protracted dissolution of her family, to the grit of her grueling and uncompromising work that took her to the peak of New York’s food scene. Anthony Bourdain calls it “absolutely the best food-related memoir, ever.” And, as Bourdain tends to, he might be absolutely right. But Hamilton’s powerful blend of culinary conviction and raw honesty make the book as much a “food-related memoir” as it is a lyrical meditation on being human.
I had no clue that my parents were unhappy with each other until I was sweeping up cornichons and hard salami and radishes off the kitchen floor.”
COOK’S ILLUSTRATED COOKBOOK
Since 1992, America’s Test Kitchen, a 2,500 square foot kitchen outside of Boston, has been publishing its meticulously tested and instructionally detailed recipes in Cook’s Illustrated Magazine. This year, they culled the 2,000 most timeless, essential, delicious recipes from the magazine’s two-decade archive and presented them in The Cook’s Illustrated Cookbook: 2,000 Recipes from 20 Years of America’s Most Trusted Cooking Magazine — an epic nearly thousand-page tome full of “test kitchen wisdom,” strategies, and tricks from the culinary trenches.
Founder and editor Christopher Kimball writes in the introduction:
This reminds me…of a story about the old-timer from Vermont’s Northeast Kingdom, who sat down one night to fill out his taxes. Now, like any thrifty farmer, he hardly found this a pleasant task, and staring him in the face at the head of a box in the top right-hand corner of the printed form where these words in bold type: DO NOT WRITE HERE.
Before going any further, the old gentleman took a firm grip on his pen and wrote in the box, in equally bold letters: I WRITE WHERE I GODDAMN PLEASE.
I guess that pretty much sums up how we go about recipe testing.”
THEY DRAW & COOK
For nearly two years, brother-and-sister duo Nate Padavick and Salli Swindell have been delighting us with their beautifully illustrated visual recipes from around the world. They Draw and Cook: 107 Recipes Illustrated by Artists from Around the World collects the best 107 of these lovely and delicious treats, joining the ranks of our favorite quirky cookbooks with an absolute gem of visual and culinary allure. From the playful and facetious to the elegant and sleek, these illustrated treasures offer everything from Chocolate Haystacks to Starving Artist Goo-lash and, of course, Cooooooookies for good measure.
We hope this book inspires you to cook up something new or maybe even pick up a pencil and doodle out your own favorite recipe and play along by visiting our website.” ~ Nate Padavick & Salli Swindell
Marmalade Flapjacks by Matt Dawson
Beetrooty-Yogurty-Thingummyjig by Corrina Rothwell
Chicken in Love by Irena Inumaru
Toad-in-the-Hole by Admira Pustika
Turn That Frown Upside Down Cake by Claire Murray
COOOOOOOOKIES! by Pietro Duchi
A feast for eyes and mouth, They Draw and Cook is bound to make you smile and drool — quite likely at the same time. And if the muse strikes, you can even submit your own illustrated recipe to the online project, adding your pin to this impressive world map of contributions.
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Brain Pickings has a free weekly newsletter and people say it’s cool. It comes out on Sundays and offers the week’s best articles. Here’s what to expect. Like? Sign up.
FOOD RULES / MAIRA KALMAN
THE TABLE COMES FIRST
MODERNIST CUISINE
FARM ANATOMY
ART OF THE MENU
THE RECIPE PROJECT
BLOOD, BONES & BUTTER
COOK’S ILLUSTRATED COOKBOOK
THEY DRAW & COOK
