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Culinary Delights: Books about Food
Discover amazing dishes and recipes from chefs across Canada, or delve into delicious food writing with this book list.
All Books in this Collection
Showing 1–16 of 33 results
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A Taste of Acadie
$22.95For A Taste of Acadie, Melvin Gallant and Marielle Cormier-Boudreau travelled all over Acadia, from the Gaspé Peninsula to Cape Breton, from the tip of Prince Edward Island to the Magdalen Islands, and around northern New Brunswick and southern Nova Scotia. They gathered the culinary secrets of traditional Acadian cooks while there was still time, and then they adapted more than 150 recipes for today’s kitchens.
First published in 1991, A Taste of Acadie, the popular English translation of the best-selling Cuisine traditionalle en Acadie, is available once again. The indigenous cuisine of Acadia is a distant relative of French home cooking, born of necessity and created from what was naturally available. Roast porcupine or seal-fat cookies may not be to every modern diner’s taste, but the few recipes of this nature in A Taste of Acadie hint at the ingenuity of women who fed their families with what the land provided. Most of the recipes, however, use ingredients beloved of today’s cooks. Here you’ll find fricot, a wonder of the Acadian imagination, pot en pot, a traditional Sunday dinner sometimes called grosse soupe, and dozens of meat pies.
For those with a sweet tooth, Gallant and Cormier-Boudreau include recipes that use maple syrup and fresh wild berries. A Taste of Acadie is traditional cooking at its best, suffusing contemporary kitchens with country aromas and down-home flavours. Decorated with evocative woodcuts by Michiel Oudemans, it is a pleasure to look at and a charming addition in its own right to contemporary country-style kitchens.
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An Anglophone is Coming to Dinner
$16.95The play, Un Anglophone Vient Souper, written by a little-known Quebec playwright, has been translated into English by Jim Bob himself, except for “the swearin’” which he decided sounded better in the original French. Colliding worlds of culture and language are served up Texas style in this social satire of a Québécois family playing host to a bewildered, Ontario-born English professor.
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Apron Strings
$24.95Shortlisted, 2018 Taste Canada Awards and 2018 Writers’ Federation of New Brunswick Book Award for Non-Fiction
Longlisted, 2018 RBC Taylor PrizeJan Wong knows food is better when shared, so when she set out to write a book about home cooking in France, Italy, and China, she asked her 22-year-old son, Sam, to join her. While he wasn’t keen on spending excessive time with his mom, he dreamed of becoming a chef. Ultimately, it was an opportunity he couldn’t pass up.
On their journey, Jan and Sam live and cook with locals, seeing first-hand how globalization is changing food, families, and cultures. In southeast France, they move in with a family sheltering undocumented migrants. From Bernadette, the housekeeper, they learn classic French family fare such as blanquette de veau. In a hamlet in the heart of Italy’s Slow Food country, the villagers teach them without fuss or fanfare how to make authentic spaghetti alle vongole and a proper risotto with leeks. In Shanghai, they home-cook firecracker chicken and scallion pancakes with the nouveaux riches and their migrant maids, who comprise one of the biggest demographic shift in world history. Along the way, mother and son explore their sometimes-fraught relationship, uniting — and occasionally clashing — over their mutual love of cooking.
A memoir about family, an exploration of the globalization of food cultures, and a meditation on the complicated relationships between mothers and sons, Apron Strings is complex, unpredictable, and unexpectedly hilarious.
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Buon Appetito Toronto! The Influence of Italian Food in our City
$30.00Buon Appetito Toronto! is the story of how Italian-Canadian food culture has evolved in the city and how its influence has helped define our perceptions of what constitutes a good meal. From the convivial social dynamics of the Italian table, to the quest for the perfect coffee, to the introduction of food products and artisanal wine from Europe, Italian-Canadians have led the way in educating Torontonians about the pleasures of the table. Through interviews with 28 of the city’s most important chefs, restaurateurs importers and manufacturers, Buon Appetito Toronto! gathers together the people that set the standard for culinary creativity and changed the culture of a great city.
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Congratulations on Everything
$18.95Ambition, failure, sex, and the service industry
A dark and comic novel, Congratulations On Everything tracks the struggles, frailties, and cruelly pyrrhic victories of the middle-aged owner of a bar-restaurant and a 30ish lunch-shift waitress.
Jeremy has bought into the teachings of an empowerment and success guru, hook, line, and sinker. A Toronto service industry lifer, he’s risen through the ranks until he finally takes the keys to his destiny and opens his own place, The Ice Shack.
Everyone assumes Ice Shack daytime waitress Charlene is innocent and empathetic, but in reality she’s desperately unhappy and looking for a way out of her marriage to her high-school sweetheart. A drunken encounter sends Charlene and her boss careening. The Ice Shack stops being an oasis of sanity and, as Jeremy struggles to keep his business afloat, he’ll stop at nothing to maintain his successful, good guy self-image.
In an era when the gourmand rules and chefs become superstars, Congratulations On Everything is a hilarious and occasionally uncomfortable dose of anti-foodie reality that reveals what goes on when the customers and Instagrammers aren’t around — and even sometimes when they are.
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County Heirlooms
$27.95Equal parts memoir, cookbook, and love letter, County Heirlooms collects stories and recipes from chefs, farmers, and other food producers who are making their mark in Prince Edward County. Each contributor offers a glimpse into what fuels their love for food, and what keeps them doing what they do―from cultivating honeybees and growing heirloom tomatoes to cooking for two or for crowds. Featuring 42 interviews, recipes, and photos, County Heirlooms is a celebration of food in all its forms.
Royalties from sales of the book will support Food to Share, a PEC-based initiative working to address food insecurity.
“County Heirloomsoffers both tantalizing, approachable recipes and candid conversations with food producers, brewers, entrepreneurs and food stylists… Wollenberg and Leigh Nash succeeded in throwing a really fab dinner party.”―Harrowsmith
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East Coast Keto
$34.95With over 120 amazing keto recipes, Bobbi Pike and her husband, Geoff, serve up the flavours and ingredients of the East Coast, with both original creations and traditional meals re-imagined as low-carb and ketogenic staples. Here you’ll find the Best Ever Breaded Chicken, Game Day Chili, Lasagna, Savoury Cheesy Biscuits, John Cabot Salmon, and Newfoundland Snowballs. With appetizers and fat bombs, main meals and decadent desserts, East Coast Keto also delivers tips, lessons, and nutritional values to help simplify your ketogenic lifestyle. Now you can join the millions of people practicing a ketogenic approach to life, and do it the East Coast Keto way.
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Eyes in Front When Running
$22.95This defiant and unapologetically sardonic debut novel explores the collision between fear and longing.
Eyes in Front When Running is a quick-witted family drama that uses humour to tackle heavy topics, such as the crumbling of a relationship, miscarriage, abortion, infertility, and postpartum depression.
When Cleo Best moves back in with her parents after the collapse of her relationship, a series of bad decisions turn her life upside down, but somehow set it right at the same time.
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Farm to Table
$29.95When we say farm to table, we mean it. Farm to Table pairs 25 alumnus chefs from the Stratford Chefs School with 25 of their favourite food producers and farmers for a culinary adventure through Perth-Huron County. The Stratford Chefs School has a long history of training impeccable chefs – 35 years of history, in fact. Inside, you’ll find recipes from head chefs at all of your favourite Stratford restaurants, designed specifically for this cookbook. This book is complete with photos by famed food photographer Terry Manzo, and alumni profiles from Andrew Coppolino, Publisher of Waterloo Region Eats and CBC Food Columnist. This compilation of recipes from some of the most celebrated graduates of the Stratford Chefs School takes you inside the lessons they learned at Stratford Chefs School and makes this book a staple of every Canadian kitchen.
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Freshly Picked
$26.00Take a delightful journey through BC’s extraordinary bounty and explore the secrets of locally grown fruits and vegetables. In Jane Reid’s new book, Freshly Picked, foodies, locavores and gardeners will discover fascinating information about the plentiful harvests that BC farmers produce every year. In this beautiful colour edition, Reid shares valuable tips on where and when to find the freshest fruits and veggies, plus storage hints and simple recipes that bring out the full flavour of BC’s offerings one fruit and vegetable at a time. With her vast collection of historical tidbits Reid shares the surprising facts about the sex life of corn, the checkered reputation of garlic, how beans saved mankind, and more. A committed locavore, Reid passes on stories of local farming, the traditions of preserving foods, and the benefits of eating locally grown fruits and vegetables. Freshly Picked: A Locavore’s Love Affair with BC’s Bounty is an essential read for any local food lover. Season by season, Reid offers stories, memories, and tales of love and affection for the best of what BC has to offer.
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Happy Belly
$29.95A fun, non-traditional approach to baking cakes and treats from the creator of Man versus Cake.
Happy Belly: The Cake Book is a collection of recipes from internationally recognized blogger, nutritionist, and pastry chef Aaron McInnis. This book is filled with tips, tricks, and secrets to successful cake making from the owner of Happy Belly Cakery and the online learning space Man versus Cake. As a firm believer that a great base recipe is all you need to be successful, Chef Aaron guides you on a journey through cakes and cupcakes, from popular candy bars and classic flavour pairings to holiday treats, unconventional flavours, and more.
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If We Caught Fire
$22.95If We Caught Fire brings two families together for a wedding in St. John’s, an event that sets off a summer of fireworks in the lives of the people around them.
Edie’s calm and contained life is knocked awry when her mother decides to marry a man she met online after just a few months of dating. The groom’s son, Harlow, is a joyful adventurer who shows up for the wedding and quickly recruits Edie as his sidekick.
Harlow runs toward risk and adventure with arms wide open, unconcerned about what other people expect from him. Edie plans every step carefully and keeps her dreams small and attainable, even when others encourage her to want more. Over a few months, they develop a connection that defies definition, a situation that leaves Edie queasy with fear and tingly with possibility.
Edie and Harlow (and the rest of their new unwieldy family) do an elaborate dance, trying to discover just what they are to one another. When Edie thinks she’s figured him out, Harlow reveals a depth and darkness she didn’t see coming. By Labour Day, they’ve created connections, tested boundaries, and found they’ve come together and apart in unexpected ways.
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In Grace’s Kitchen
$20.00Pour yourself a glass of red wine and settle in for this collection of stories and recipes from author Vince Agro. Centred around his mother’s kitchen table, “from where she steered the family as if the captain of a ship,” we learn of his father’s butcher shop, collecting dandelions, drinking red wine, hunting ducks, butchering chickens and escaped snails. But it always comes back to the kitchen table, and the recipes for the delicious meals his mother, Grace, placed before her family every day. Whether you want to know how to cook cardoons or what they did with those ducks, In Grace’s Kitchen is a wonderful immersion in a way of life that is quickly passing.
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Island Vegan
$29.95**WINNER: 2020 GOURMAND WORLD COOKBOOK AWARD, LOCAL REGION – CANADA**In Island Vegan, Newfoundland’s original trailblazing vegan chef, Marian Frances White, returns with over 100 beautiful and utterly mouth-watering, plant-based recipes. Using readily available ingredients with a blend of local and international flavours, Marian provides everything you need, whether you’re a committed vegan or just starting out. Here you’ll find soups, salads, sauces, smoothies, pastries, pancakes, main dishes, delectable desserts, and much more. And there are full-colour photographs to help you create the perfect setting.
The culmination of over forty years of exquisite, tried-and-tested vegan cooking, every recipe in Island Vegan is health conscious, environmentally sound, and absolutely delicious! -
IsThisAnOlogy?
$19.95IsThisAnOlogy? is a journey of discovery! Andie interviews different “ologists” and learns all about different types of science.
IsThisAnOlogy? explores big jobs, big science, and the biggest questions. Learn about fossils, bird migration, beekeeping, the science behind making food delicious, and the chemistry involved in cheese making. IsThisAnOlogy? features illustrations, interviews, comics, photographs, charts, recipes, and experiments you can try at home. Science can be a fun hands-on activity!
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Let It All Fall
$26.95Incorporating elements of creative nonfiction and oral history, Let It All Fall: Underground Music and the Culture of Rebellion in Newfoundland, 1977–95 is a collection of interview-based first-person monologues that describe the experiences of a generation of independent musicians, artists, and activists.
Beginning in the late 1970s, a new raw sound began to emerge from the basements and garages of St. John’s which, by the mid-’90s, had grown into a vibrant community. With few resources, dozens of bands produced a staggering amount of music.
Let It All Fall traces how underground youth culture challenged social and economic inequity, as well as cultural norms, during one of the most turbulent times in Newfoundland history.