28 cookbooks from 2013

From Japanese soul cooking to desserts to cooking with kids, a sampling of cookbooks from 2013.

2. A History of Food in 100 Recipes

A History of Food in 100 Recipes by William Sitwell

By William Sitwell (Little, Brown & Company, 360 pp.)

For the cook who has everything, "A History of Food in 100 Recipes" from British food writer William Sitwell will be a wonderful addition to the bookshelf. Sitwell traces recipes back to the beginning of recorded time with instructions for breadmaking from off an Egyptian wall. He continues through the centuries stopping to examine those recipes which have had the greatest impact, exploring when culinary tools such as the fork came on the scene, and finally comes to rest with foie gras. Find out when sandwiches were invented (1787) when strawberry shortcake galloped onto the scene (1896), and the mystique behind creamed mushrooms.

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Dear Reader,

About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.

The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”

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