Food Origin Stories: 100 Percent Toxic Waste and Radioactive Spider Free!
Did you know Benedict Arnold has nothing to do with Eggs Benedict? Or that Australian opera singer Nellie Melba has no less than four famous dishes named after her? Well get ready to have your mind blown and your mouth start to water. Who Put the Beef in Wellington? by James Winter is a great book that explores fifty famous dishes and their origins, a thankfully unlike superheroes none of these origin stories involve radioactive spiders or toxic waste.
In Who Put the Beef, there’s a little something for everyone, appetizers, main dishes, desserts, and even beverages. While many of the dishes tend to lean towards the higher end of dining (Veal Prince Orloff, Steak Diane, and Oysters Rockefeller to name a few), there are some that are everyday dining as well (Caesar Salad, Beef Stroganoff, etc.). Each of these stories is accompanied by a recipe so you can make it yourself. Even the entry on Melba Toast (remember Nellie Melba? This is one of hers) has a recipe, which I will happily breakdown for you here:
Step 1. Make really thin toast.
Step 2. There is no step 2.
Okay, the book actually does a much more eloquent job of making it sound like more than simply making toast (even talking about how great it is with duck pate, and you know a recipe is getting all hoity-toity when it mentions no only any kind of pate, but a kind that involves water fowl). Overall, even as just a casual read for those who have no interest in cooking I’d heartily recommend this book. Stuffed with beautiful pictures and great stories like a Woolton Pie is full of vegetables (see pages 104- 107), you almost can’t go wrong with this book. Unless of course you suffer from Celiac, are vegetarian or vegan, or are a robot. Then you will wish you could eat grains, be abhorred by the sheer amount of meats-stuffed-into-other-meats, and curse your metal diodes for a lack of taste buds respectively. But even then, you still might enjoy this book - available from your local Milwaukee Public Library!