Food Book Fair Authors Share Their Favorite Cookbooks
Warren Bobrow, Foodista Cocktail Columnist and cocktailwhisperer.com
Author of Apothecary Cocktails and the forthcoming Whiskey Cocktails
Tell us about your favorite classic cookbook or food-related book and how it transformed your relationship with food or informed your style of cooking.
My favorite classic cookbook would have to be the Clementine Paddleford’s 1949 masterpiece, How America Eats. Ms. Paddleford was writing about food decades before most of us were born! I was fortunate to have spent large blocks of time traveling with my family when I was a boy. We did what is known as total emersion traveling. A month (or more) would be spent eating, drinking and living like the “locals” in places like the Ivory Coast, Brazil, Europe and across America. Alcoholic beverages were never denied to me with either beer or wine on the dinner table every night. A firm basis of flavor.
Tell us about your favorite modern cookbook and like above, how it transformed your relationship with food or informed your style of cooking.
I’d be remiss if I didn’t talk about Speakeasy: The Employees Only Guide to Classic Cocktails Reimagined by Jason Kosmas. What this book did for me is indescribable. It had such a profound effect on my career, both as a mixologist/bartender and as a writer. AND I have the logo from Employees Only tattooed on my forearm. This in itself makes for an interesting conversation whenever I’m in a craft cocktail lounge. Someone always asks about it. Their use of freshly squeezed juices influenced my first book, Apothecary Cocktails, and forthcoming Whiskey Cocktails.
Favorite Brooklyn-based restaurant and why.
Saraghina, because their craft cocktail program is crisp and their pizza salubrious. No pretension. NO Manhattan crowd. Just good food that is authentic with regard to ingredients and the simplicity of flavor. No garbage pail cooking, no sous vide chicken mush. JUST GOOD FOOD served with a smile.
Warren will be at the Food Book Fair Panel: Food Book Slam on Saturday, April 26 at 10:30 a.m.