Chris Kimball's Book Reviews
Get a taste of what Christopher Kimball is reading at Milk Street.
Rumbles: A Curious History of the Gut
By Elsa Richardson
The question that Elsa Richardson tries to answer is this: Does the gut play a key role in not only our physical health but also our mental health, and does it perhaps also offer a repository of intelligence? The field of gastromancy, founded in medieval Europe, believed that listening to the patient’s digestion could help diagnose health issues but was also used to predict upcoming world events. (The term ventriloquist refers to someone speaking from the stomach.) My favorite bit regards Erasmus Darwin (grandfather of that Darwin!), who had a teenage girl patient with a particularly noisy gut. The prescription? Eat 10 peppercorns after dinner, ingest a dose of crude mercury and insert a small pipe into the rectum to facilitate the escape of air. Moving to the present day, the list of items that may be gut-affected include obesity, metabolic health, the immune system, cognitive function, mental illness and neurodegenerative diseases. There are 100 million neurons lodged in our alimentary canal (these neurons are similar to those found in the brain), and the emerging field of neurogastroenterology suggests that the stomach might have a role to play in cognition. This can be summed up in the term “gut feeling,” suggesting that the digestive system has a mind of its own. Beyond humans, there are many examples in the animal kingdom—first and foremost, the octopus, which has neurons in each of its tentacles that can make decisions independent from the brain itself. It may just turn out that we have more sense in our stomachs than in our heads.
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Danube
By Irina Georgescu
A quick caveat: I traveled through Transylvania recently with Irina Georgescu, so I am predisposed to the cooking of Romania, as well as that of Serbia and Bulgaria, the other regions that “Danube” covers. Let’s start with a few of my favorite recipes: plăcintă (a deconstructed pie with two flat layers filled in between with almost anything and baked in a rectangular pan), mămăligă la cuptor (a baked polenta dish with sour cream, cheese and eggs), lacşa (noodle soup) and the fascinating dish pepene cu brânză dulce (curd cheese with watermelon and sesame seeds). I love these cuisines because they are somewhat familiar, yet totally foreign. Yes, there is plenty of fish and vegetables here, as well as breads, cheese, stews, potato pancakes and the like. Georgescu’s great gift (she grew up in Bucharest) is that she loves the history as much as the cooking, which provides fascinating context. It’s not just the food—“Danube” also celebrates the people who make it.
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Richard Hart Bread: Intuitive Sourdough Baking
By Richard Hart and Laurie Woolever
Richard Hart has one of those charmed lives—working at Selfridges in London, then on to a small bakery that provided bread for the French Laundry, then head baker at Tartine, and then he teamed up with René Redzepi in Copenhagen to start Hart Bageri, which now has 10 locations. What this book provides is sprezzatura, an Italian term for a casual nonchalance based on a massive amount of practice and craft behind the scenes. Hart talks about how to adjust for kitchen temperatures by using hotter or cooler water and how flours from different places require different hydration. He explains how a biga and a poolish are different, how to make pumpernickel bread without flour, why it takes years to learn how to make real panettone and why he finds the “100-year-old starter” myth annoying. And he doesn’t think much of the baguettes in Paris these days, either. Few cookbooks offer a mastery of the topic like this one, plus you get Hart’s inimitable energy and style, which makes the journey a useful and entertaining guided tour you will never forget.
