National Dish

January 1, 2023

Award-winning Vanderbilt historian Blackbourn rethinks Germany in the World, arguing that it was a persuasive force even before unification in the 19th century. Joint Chief Curator of Historic Royal Palaces and a prolific historian, Borman (Crown & Sceptre) limns the historic significance ofAnne Boleyn & Elizabeth I. In Revolutionary Spring, Wolfson Prize--winning Clark refreshes our view of the revolutions that rocked Europe in 1848. In Homelands, Oxford historian Garton Ash draws on both scholarship and personal experience to portray Europe post-World War II. In Soldiers Don't Go Mad, distinguished journalist Glass uses the friendship and literary output of outstanding war poets Siegfried Sassoon and Wilfred Owen--both gay and both ultimately opposed to fighting--to show how an understanding of post-traumatic stress disorder and its treatment first emerged during the industrialized slaughter of World War I. Journalist Hartman's Battle of Ink and Ice shows that the contention between explorers Robert Peary and Frederick Cook, both claiming to have discovered the North Pole, also sparked a newspaper war with all the earmarks of fake news. The long-anticipated My Friend Anne Frank recounts Holocaust survivor Pick-Goslar's friendship with Frank (she's called Lies Goosens in The Diary of a Young Girl), having been together with her at the Westerbork transit camp and eventually Bergen-Belsen. Also known as the Graveyard of the Pacific, the Columbia River Bar forms where the river pours into the ocean off Oregon's coast and creates fearsome currents that have claimed numerous lives; like his abusive father, Sullivan risked crossing it, and he makes his book at once history, memoir, and meditation on male behavior at its extreme. Former undersecretary of defense for intelligence in the Obama administration, Vickers recalls a life in intelligence and special operations that arcs from his Green Beret days to his involvement in the CIA's secret war against the Soviets in Afghanistan to the war on terror. In Road to Surrender, the New York Times best-selling Thomas (First: Sandra Day O'Connor) relies on fresh material to convey the decision to drop the atomic bomb from the perspectives of Secretary of War Henry Stimson, Japanese Foreign Minister Shigenori Togo, and Gen. Carl "Tooey" Spaatz, head of strategic bombing in the Pacific. In National Dish, three-time James Beard award-winning food journalist von Bremzen investigates the relationship between food and place by examining the history of six major food cultures--France, Italy, Japan, Spain, Mexico, and Turkey. In Beyond the Shores, the Harriet Tubman Prize--winning Walker (Exquisite Slaves) considers why Black Americans leave the United States and what they encounter when they do, moving from early 1900s performer Florence Mills to 1930s scientists to the author's own grandfather. An historian at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government, Walton assays the century-long intelligence war between the West and the Soviet Union/Russia, considering lessons that can be gleaned today in Spies.

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April 1, 2023
An award-winning food journalist searches for the connection between a nation's people and what they eat. Is it food that defines the culture or the culture that defines the food? Von Bremzen--a three-time James Beard Award winner and author of the memoir, Mastering the Art of Soviet Cooking, as well as multiple cookbooks--wonders if there can still be national dishes in the age of globalization and convenience foods. In her travels around the world, she has found plenty of evidence of distinctiveness, and she demonstrates how the idea of the national dish is often opposed by aggressive regionalism. She strolls through the back streets of Naples looking for the origins of pizza and pasta, and she discusses the connection between religion and tapas in Seville. Her vivid narrative is packed with intriguing characters, and in some countries, conversations about the food can be as important as the dish itself. The author finds much to admire about Oaxacan cuisine, and although Mexican dishes are often seen as bold and spicy, she is particularly impressed by the subtlety of atole ("a pre-Hispanic maize drink") and the mysterious rituals attached to it. She finds street food more authentic than Michelin-star fanciness, a point that is made clear with her explorations of rice and ramen in Japan. Paris proves to be a disappointment, apparently stuck in a cul-de-sac of nostalgia and factionalism. There is still plenty of good food in the City of Lights, but it seems to have lost its luster. Von Bremzen obviously enjoys these cross-cultural discussions and disputes, although she does not really find answers to the questions she initially asked. Eventually, her travels bring her back to the U.S. and, ironically, to the Slavic dishes she grew up with. In this piquant platter of a book, von Bremzen tackles questions of culture, history, and the meaning of a good meal.

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Starred review from May 1, 2023
“Never have we been more cosmopolitan about what we eat—and yet never more essentialist,” declares James Beard Award–winning food writer von Bremzen (Mastering the Art of Soviet Cooking) in this revealing and richly detailed exploration of six national cuisines. The culinary tour begins in France, which became the site of the “first explicitly national discourse about food” as its cuisine was deemed a “uniquely French cultural product.” However, von Bremzen points out, “Gallic culinary exceptionalism has taken a terrific beating” over the last few decades, thanks to a “cascade of crises” including the “global fast-food invasion.” In Naples, she uncovers pizza’s 18th-century roots as a “dirt-cheap, palatable street food,” and discovers that the origin story of the city’s popularly touted pizza Margherita, which involves a charismatic queen of the same name who favored the “patriotic tricolore pie,” may be a nationalist fiction. Von Bremzen, who emigrated from the U.S.S.R. in the 1970s, concludes with a moving epilogue about borscht—a dish with Ukrainian roots that Russia has claimed as its own—that, in light of the war in Ukraine, vividly illustrates how food “carries the emotional charge of a flag and an anthem” and often belies a more complicated story than meets the eye. Fans of food and travel writing will want to sink their teeth into this.

May 15, 2023
Pizza is to Italy what ramen is to Japan, tapas is to Spain, and �ilingir sofrası (small plates) is to Turkey. Prolific cookbook author Von Bremzen (Paladares, 2017) attempts to uncover the stories and identity derived from the "national dishes" that imbue the countries that claim them with meaning. The exploration of a dish is the exploration of place, as Von Bremzen weaves her conversations into vivid descriptions from her immersive stays in Paris, Naples, Tokyo, Oaxaca, Seville, and Istanbul. A Neapolitan chase for the origins of pizza margherita and pasta al pomodoro plants Von Bremzen--and the reader--in the maze of the Spanish Quarter, head spinning while scooters fly by. In Oaxaca, readers can almost smell the smoke rising from the comal, the pan where mole preparation begins. Von Bremzen's prose meanders through each city, introducing a whirlwind of people, new vocabulary, and frequent, flowery prose that can make it hard to follow the original story thread. However, for readers who appreciate a sensorial journey and eschew arriving at easy conclusions, this will hit the spot.

COPYRIGHT(2023) Booklist, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.