October 16, 2011

Lobsters Scream When You Boil Them, by Bruce Weinstein and Mark Scarbrough


I read about this book on Serious Eats, and thought it sounded fun and informative. When it arrived and I saw that this pair had written like 20 other books, I thought, "Ugh, how good is this going to be?" I was pleasantly surprised. It's a very quick read, but it's kind of funny and it really is informative and even scientific. Thanks to them, I'm going to replace my plastic cutting boards with wooden ones.

I also read another book about a month ago, called Ice Cream, by Laura B. Weiss. It was a slim, attractive little volume about the history of ice cream. At first it was pretty dry, but then I got interested. Did you know that Philadelphia-style ice cream, which is eggless, got its name because of the proliferation of dairy farms around Philadelphia? I also got briefly obsessed with the idea of opening a retro soda fountain thanks to this book. Soda fountains didn't have their heyday in the 1950s, despite what movies may show you- it was more like the early 20th century. When someone invented the bottle cap, as this fascinating article says, that's when the era of the soda fountain effectively ended.

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