Famous Dave's Backroads and Sidestreets: Recipes Inspired by America's Down-Home Eateries
Author: Dave Anderson
More than 100 recipes for comfort foods and authentic regional dishes. They come from neighborhood storefront restaurants and blues joints (Voodoo Chicken & Mojo Salsa and Beale Street Shrimp and Corn Fritters); small town roadhouses and cafes (Route 66 Truck Stop Chili, Creamy Sweet & Sour Cole Slaw, and Caraway Cheese Soup); country kitchens (Front Porch Cheesy Grits, Real Honest Southern Fried CHicken, and County Fair Blue Ribbon Peach Pie); and rustic cabins and lodges (Log Cabin Chicken Pot Pie, Ketchickan Lodge Salmon Pate, and Drunken Peach Cobler).
About the Author:
A native American, Dave Anderson is as remarkably unique as his food and his award-winning restaurants. A man recognized for his extraordinary palate, devotion to detail, and dedication to perfection, he is also a silversmith, antiques expert, homespun philosopher, and philanthropist. (All profits from his book will be donated to The Mino-Giizhig Fund.) In 1997, Nation's Restaurant News honored Famous Dave's Inc. with its coveted "Hot Concept Award" for being the most innovative and exciting new restaurant in the marketplace, and that same year, Famous Dave himself won the "Minnesota and the Dakota Entrepreneur of the Year Award" from Ernst & Young, NASDAQ and USA Today. Famous Dave lives in Edina, Minnesota with his wife and two sons.
What People Are Saying
Carolyn Wells
This is the ultimate comfort food cookbook. It's food that people love to eat. Dave's outdone himself this time.
— (Carolyn Wells, Kansas City Barbecue Society)
The Best Cookbook Ever! Passion on Every Page! 25 Years of Living, Loving, Laughing and Eating.
— (Steven Schussler, Creator, Rainforest Cafe)
Rich Melman
Dave Anderson is a guy whose heart is even bigger than his appetite. These recipes reflect his love for his Chicago roots and his zest for life with a little kick.
— (Rich Melman, Chairman: Lettuce Entertain You Enterprises, Inc.)
Spice: The History of a Temptation
Author: Jack Turner
A brilliant, original history of the spice trade—and the appetites that fueled it.
It was in search of the fabled Spice Islands and their cloves that Magellan charted the first circumnavigation of the globe. Vasco da Gama sailed the dangerous waters around Africa to India on a quest for Christians—and spices. Columbus sought gold and pepper but found the New World. By the time these fifteenth- and sixteenth-century explorers set sail, the aromas of these savory, seductive seeds and powders had tempted the palates and imaginations of Europe for centuries.
Spice: The History of a Temptation is a history of the spice trade told not in the conventional narrative of politics and economics, nor of conquest and colonization, but through the intimate human impulses that inspired and drove it. Here is an exploration of the centuries-old desire for spice in food, in medicine, in magic, in religion, and in sex—and of the allure of forbidden fruit lingering in the scents of cinnamon, pepper, ginger, nutmeg, mace, and clove.
We follow spices back through time, through history, myth, archaeology, and literature. We see spices in all their diversity, lauded as love potions and aphrodisiacs, as panaceas and defenses against the plague. We journey from religious rituals in which spices were employed to dispel demons and summon gods to prodigies of gluttony both fantastical and real. We see spices as a luxury for a medieval king’s ostentation, as a mummy’s deodorant, as the last word in haute cuisine.
Through examining the temptations of spice we follow in the trails of the spice seekers leading from the deserts of ancient Syria tothrill-seekers on the Internet. We discover how spice became one of the first and most enduring links between Asia and Europe. We see in the pepper we use so casually the relic of a tradition linking us to the appetites of Rome, Elizabethan England, and the pharaohs. And we capture the pleasure of spice not only at the table but in every part of life.
Spice is a delight to be savored.
From the Hardcover edition.
The New York Times - Michiko Kakutani
In this, his first book, Mr. Turner not only gives the reader a wonderfully vivid history of the quest for spices and the lucrative spice trade, but he also provides some intriguing insights into why spices once exerted such a hold over the human imagination -- and how they catalyzed the Age of Discovery. He shows how the early spice trade forged an enduring, often exploitative relationship between the West and the East, traces the ambivalent attitude of the Church toward spices, and chronicles the gradual de-mythologizing of spices with the advent of the modern era. In doing so, he has succeeded in writing a book that is at once a social and cultural history, a culinary history and a delightful read.
The New York Times Sunday Book Review - Tobin Harshaw
Turner's genius lies in his organization. Rather than trying to deal with his Asian delights individually or track their stories through a tidy timeline, he has divided his book into sections devoted to the effects these spices have had on the human body and psyche. This allows him not just to trace the biological evolution of Piper nigrum and the changing manifests of royal pantries but to jump from continent to continent, century to century, and explore the bigger picture: how a West that once saw spices as the product of a literal and geographic Eden matured into a society in which ''Paradise survives not as a place but as a symbol.''
The New Yorker
Turner arranges his history of spices thematically, in a series of lively essays on their role in different aspects of human endeavor, such as exploration (Columbus was looking for cinnamon when he discovered America) and love (a fifteenth-century tract prescribes an ointment of honey and ginger for “Increasing the Dimension of Small Members and Making Them Splendid”). Turner’s sedulous research is manifest on every page, as he follows spices across cultures and eras, with allusions that range from St. Augustine to the Spice Girls. The book’s unlikely hero is the peppercorn, which has linked East and West since the time of the Romans and which typifies the way that spices, although no longer the luxury items they once were, have become quietly ubiquitous. Cinnamon and nutmeg are rumored to be the key to “capitalism’s most closely guarded secret,” the formula for Coca-Cola.
Publishers Weekly
Spices helped draw Europeans into their age of expansion, but the Western world was far from ignorant of them before that time. Turner's lively and wide-ranging account begins with the voyages of discovery, but demonstrates that, even in ancient times, spices from distant India and Indonesia made their way west and fueled the European imagination. Romans and medieval Europeans alike used Asian pepper, cinnamon, cloves, nutmeg and mace to liven their palates, treat their maladies, enhance their sex lives and mediate between the human and the divine. While many of these applications were not particularly efficacious, spices retained their allure, with an overlay of exotic associations that remain today. Turner argues that the use of rare and costly spices by medieval and Renaissance elites amounted to conspicuous consumption. He has perhaps a little too much fun listing the ridiculous uses of spices in medieval medicine-since, as he notes in a few sparse asides, some spices do indeed have medicinal effects-and fails to get into the real experience of the people. His account of religious uses, on the other hand, paints a richer picture and gets closer to imagining the mystery that people found in these startlingly intense flavors and fragrances. It is this mystery and the idea that sensations themselves have a history that make the entire book fascinating. Agents, Giles Gordon and Russell Galen. (Aug. 17) Copyright 2004 Reed Business Information.
Daniel Levinson - KLIATT
The history of spices—the exotic faraway places they come from, how people fought over their trade, their variety of uses—is almost always fascinating. This version of the story is well written, thoroughly researched, and wide-ranging in scope. It covers spices in history, literature and legend. The book's subtitle suggests the author's focus on mind more than stomach in handling material. (He prefers the sensational to the prosaic, too). The book is organized into three sections: the spice race, palate, body and spirit. The book has a good index, copious notes and a few color images. For my money, Wolfgang Schivelbusch's Taste of Paradise (Pantheon, 1992) is a shorter, more pointed, and better illustrated history of the historical lure of stimulants in general (though, admittedly, that book focuses more on alcohol and tobacco than spices). KLIATT Codes: SA—Recommended for senior high school students, advanced students, and adults. 2004, Random House, Vintage, 352p. illus. maps. bibliog. index., Ages 15 to adult.
Library Journal
Rhodes Scholar and first-time author Turner (Ph.D., international relations, Oxford) leads readers along the fascinating trail of spice through time, from the pre-Common Era use of various spices as medicine, embalming aids, and food flavor enhancers to current, everyday applications. His interest in spices began in primary school and was further piqued by his mother's regular preparation of spicy kormas, chutneys, and curries. Instead of a chronological approach, Turner presents chapters organized around major themes, including the spice race in the Europeanization of the New World, the longtime use of spices as food enhancers and aromatics, the integration of spices in food preparation in medieval Europe, the use of spice in preserving cadavers in ancient Egypt, and the importance of spices in enhancing sensuality. Readers will be thoroughly entertained by the tasty tidbits that follow the trail of spice in medicine, magic, religion, sex, avarice, fantasy, and gluttony and will likely think again next time they shake pepper on their evening meals. Exhaustively researched and amply footnoted, Turner's title nicely updates J.W. Purseglove's Spices, fleshes out Elisabeth Lambert Ortiz's The Encyclopedia of Herbs, Spices, and Flavorings, and provides more details about the intriguing story of spice than Andrew Dalby's Dangerous Tastes. Highly recommended for all academic and larger public libraries. [Previewed in Prepub Alert, LJ 4/1/04.]-Dale Farris, Groves, TX Copyright 2004 Reed Business Information.
Kirkus Reviews
A convincing case that once upon a time spices were pretty influential in world history. Visiting olden lands like the Moluccas, Malabar, and Vindoland, the text is redolent of such exotic, long-forgotten substances as malabathron and costus, galangal and zedory. Extracted from bark, root, gums, resins, seeds, and fruits for the gratification of Caesars and potentates, they are the reason Columbus set sail and brought back little more than hot chili peppers. Magellan died for the craving for spices; da Gama did better on his trip to Calicut. In ancient Egypt, Ramses was laid to rest with peppercorns in his nostrils. The attraction of pepper, the most widely popular spice, had something to do with the decline of Rome. In the Middle Ages, pepperers and spicers flourished. And, debut author Turner maintains, their products were not really used to salvage rotten meat. That's a canard: medieval meat was probably local and therefore fresh. (Wine needed spicing, though.) Sundry spices were prescribed, like diet supplements today, to cure illnesses resulting from imbalances of the four humors. Some, presaging Viagra, were recommended to enhance amatory performance. (Thus ginger was in every pharmacopoeia.) Churchmen were often conflicted about the use of spices, which represented the sweetness of good or the stink of evil, but found a place for them in the sacristy. Eventually the consumer pepper index plunged, and flavorings became more available. Other than perfumery, the uses of such assets remain principally as condiments and flavorings. Frankincense and myrrh may be rare now, but the ancient favorites ginger, pepper, cardamom, cloves, and caraway still fill spice racks. A wide-ranging,learned treat for epicures and cultural historians from-let us say it first-a man for all seasonings. (8-page color insert, b&w illustrations in text)Author tour. Agent: Russell Galen/Scovil Chichak Galen Literary Agency
Table of Contents:
| Introduction : the idea of spice | ||
| Ch. 1 | The spice seekers | 3 |
| Ch. 2 | Ancient appetites | 57 |
| Ch. 3 | Medieval Europe | 98 |
| Ch. 4 | The spice of life | 145 |
| Ch. 5 | The spice of love | 183 |
| Ch. 6 | Food of the gods | 227 |
| Ch. 7 | Some like it bland | 265 |
| Epilogue : the end of the spice age | 289 |
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