Edible Boston Winter 2011 Number 19 : Page 27
Let’s start with two tasty treats that make us ridiculously happy: beer and cheese. In Great American Craft Beer , Cambridge-based Andy Crouch plays tour guide through our American craft-brewing renaissance. Don’t know your Hefeweizen from your India Pale Ale, a Porter from an Im-perial Stout? Crouch introduces you to American masters of malt in what feels a lot like a travel guidebook. Here Crouch guides you by style and flavor, while accompanying you with generous pours of beer history and meaty (yet interesting) explanations of beer styles. Sections devoted to “Mellow and Malty,” “Robust and Rich” and “Heavenly Hoppy” include plenty of photos and labels to identify craft beers, in-formation on the brewers, recommended glassware and valuable notes on whether the brew is available year-round or seasonally. Crouch por-tends that there’s a beer out there for everyone, and we agree. List price: $22.95 (or approximately two Pretty Things Jack D’Ors) Part of what makes Immortal Milk so charming is that this ode to cheese is not written by an industry insider. (Not that we didn’t enjoy Gordon Edgar’s Cheesemonger: A Life on the Wedge , because we did.) Rather, what we savored most was Eric LeMay’s personal journey through fermented, stinky, creamy, aged, washed, crumbled and even sometimes illegal versions of milky goodness. The majority of the book was written while LeMay lived in Cambridge. Words of affection for Formaggio Kitchen (which was the source of inspiration for the book to begin with) or for cheeses like Cypress Grove’s Humboldt Fog are spread generously. LeMay brings us along on his quest to find out if “terroir taste different when you’re in that terroir” as he heads up Mont d’Or with his girlfriend to sample the best Morbier he’s ever had, fol-lowed by a gooey, delicious Vacherin Mont d’Or. The narrative here is personal, insightful and passionate, and we think it will be treasured by any cheese lover on your list. List price $22 (or less than one pound of Comtè Marcel Petite) While Crouch and LeMay express passion for beer and cheese, noted journalist Paul Greenberg takes us on a more serious journey in his important book Four Fish . Here Greenberg whittles our voracious ap-petite for seafood down to four fish that have lengthy and consequen-tial ties to humans: salmon, sea bass, cod and tuna. Chapter by chapter, Greenberg keeps us on the line as he examines the complicated his-tory and possible fate of our last wild food. He explains the progres-sion of fish farming, highlights the decimation of magnificent bluefin tuna and guides us through the sea change of once-abundant wild salmon through today’s mammoth-sized hatcheries and industrial hatching facilities. Plenty of facts laid out in the book are grim, but overall, Greenberg’s message is not one of despair. “Never write off the wild ocean. It can always surprise you,” Greenberg says in the epilogue. If you’re interested in wild fish, this is a captivating story, and we give it a nod as one of the best books we read this year. List price: $25.95 (or about 2½ pounds of wild Coho salmon) edible boston Winter 2011 27
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