John Thorne (1)Besprekingen

John Thorne prevails yet again and remains my favorite author to this day! I've read all of his books after my aunt bought them for me, and I can't believe how amazing they are! They really gave me an insight on cooking and whatnot. Thanks auntie!!

This book made me cranky more often than not. The authorial voice is one I found annoying due in no small part to the use of 'myself' when 'me' would have done. The recipes were interesting, to be sure. However, I found them presented in a supercilious and smarmy fashion. Thorne rabbits on about how he never follows a recipe in a book, then condescends to share his tweaked and polished recipes with you. Surely you, dear reader, will not need to take any liberties! He hastens to assure you that if you do, he won't mind a bit, and he probably wouldn't. But still, he rubbed me the wrong way. I remember liking his earlier _Serious Pig_ but after this book, I won't go back to check. Just in case.

Pot on the Fire is a collection of essays about food and cooking, each one exploring a particular dish or ingredient or meal, with recipes. It is all fascinating and eminently readable, and reading it I learned quite a lot about such diverse subjects as the history of the potato in Ireland, the Vietnamese sandwich and pizza-making in Naples. All this from a writer who, it appears, never leaves his home states of Maine and Massachusetts. I even discovered, finally, how to cook perfect rice. I don’t know if I’ll try any of the recipes, but the essays inspired me to be more thoughtful and self-aware of my own cooking, to consider the history of the foods I eat and to always strive for a better recipe.

John Thorne has written five books, Simple Cooking, Outlaw Cook, Serious Pig, Pot on the Fire, & Mouth Wide Open, each of which is a compilation of essays about food, cooking, and cookbooks. In one sense, these five books are among the best written, best tested, and best tasting cookbooks available today. He approaches a wide variety of classic recipes or food item (Chowder, Pasta with Anchovies, French Toast) like a proverbial blood hound. Initially, he circles around the recipe, describing its origins, historical variations, and analyzing its tastes and flavors. Then he zeroes in for the kill; first deconstructing and then reconstructing it until he has perfected the recipe to his tastes.

However, these five books are far more than just recipes. Food and cooking are just Thorne's gateways to writings and reflections about the human condition. He takes simple, home-based, everyday events and items and unearths surprisingly savory qualities. By exploring a specific food's or recipe's history and context, Thorne reveals larger truths about the relationship between the food we eat and the values we share. All of his books are worth reading, cook or no cook.

See my full review of John Thorne's books.

John Thorne has written five books, Simple Cooking, Outlaw Cook, Serious Pig, Pot on the Fire, & Mouth Wide Open, each of which is a compilation of essays about food, cooking, and cookbooks. In one sense, these five books are among the best written, best tested, and best tasting cookbooks available today. He approaches a wide variety of classic recipes or food item (Chowder, Pasta with Anchovies, French Toast) like a proverbial blood hound. Initially, he circles around the recipe, describing its origins, historical variations, and analyzing its tastes and flavors. Then he zeroes in for the kill; first deconstructing and then reconstructing it until he has perfected the recipe to his tastes.

However, these five books are far more than just recipes. Food and cooking are just Thorne's gateways to writings and reflections about the human condition. He takes simple, home-based, everyday events and items and unearths surprisingly savory qualities. By exploring a specific food's or recipe's history and context, Thorne reveals larger truths about the relationship between the food we eat and the values we share. All of his books are worth reading, cook or no cook.

See my full review of John Thorne's books.

John Thorne has written five books, Simple Cooking, Outlaw Cook, Serious Pig, Pot on the Fire, & Mouth Wide Open, each of which is a compilation of essays about food, cooking, and cookbooks. In one sense, these five books are among the best written, best tested, and best tasting cookbooks available today. He approaches a wide variety of classic recipes or food item (Chowder, Pasta with Anchovies, French Toast) like a proverbial blood hound. Initially, he circles around the recipe, describing its origins, historical variations, and analyzing its tastes and flavors. Then he zeroes in for the kill; first deconstructing and then reconstructing it until he has perfected the recipe to his tastes.

However, these five books are far more than just recipes. Food and cooking are just Thorne's gateways to writings and reflections about the human condition. He takes simple, home-based, everyday events and items and unearths surprisingly savory qualities. By exploring a specific food's or recipe's history and context, Thorne reveals larger truths about the relationship between the food we eat and the values we share. All of his books are worth reading, cook or no cook.

See my full review of John Thorne's books.

John Thorne has written five books, Simple Cooking, Outlaw Cook, Serious Pig, Pot on the Fire, & Mouth Wide Open, each of which is a compilation of essays about food, cooking, and cookbooks. In one sense, these five books are among the best written, best tested, and best tasting cookbooks available today. He approaches a wide variety of classic recipes or food item (Chowder, Pasta with Anchovies, French Toast) like a proverbial blood hound. Initially, he circles around the recipe, describing its origins, historical variations, and analyzing its tastes and flavors. Then he zeroes in for the kill; first deconstructing and then reconstructing it until he has perfected the recipe to his tastes.

However, these five books are far more than just recipes. Food and cooking are just Thorne's gateways to writings and reflections about the human condition. He takes simple, home-based, everyday events and items and unearths surprisingly savory qualities. By exploring a specific food's or recipe's history and context, Thorne reveals larger truths about the relationship between the food we eat and the values we share. All of his books are worth reading, cook or no cook.

See my full review of John Thorne's books.

John Thorne has written five books, Simple Cooking, Outlaw Cook, Serious Pig, Pot on the Fire, & Mouth Wide Open, each of which is a compilation of essays about food, cooking, and cookbooks. In one sense, these five books are among the best written, best tested, and best tasting cookbooks available today. He approaches a wide variety of classic recipes or food item (Chowder, Pasta with Anchovies, French Toast) like a proverbial blood hound. Initially, he circles around the recipe, describing its origins, historical variations, and analyzing its tastes and flavors. Then he zeroes in for the kill; first deconstructing and then reconstructing it until he has perfected the recipe to his tastes.

However, these five books are far more than just recipes. Food and cooking are just Thorne's gateways to writings and reflections about the human condition. He takes simple, home-based, everyday events and items and unearths surprisingly savory qualities. By exploring a specific food's or recipe's history and context, Thorne reveals larger truths about the relationship between the food we eat and the values we share. All of his books are worth reading, cook or no cook.

See my full review of John Thorne's books.

Seems better balanced than the other book I have read of his, Outlaw Cook. I suspect some of the essays seem to share a common base. I liked parts of Outlaw Cook, but a few essays seemed overly dramatic and struck me as Thorne was trying too hard to examine himself. This book has a more more warm and stable feeling.

His descriptions of food are superb, as are his hints and citations which make me want to hunt down more books about food. (I'd empathize books on food, not just cookbooks.)

I got this from the library and it's hard to return it. I've been taking pictures with my cel phone of interesting citations, but I'm tempted to simply xerox the bibliography at the end.

Like food? Like shows like Good Eats or shows with more historical perspectives on recipes and cooking? I'd recommend reading it.

John Thorne’s Home Body (Ecco, 1997) is a little book of twenty essays in 111 pages about things domestic (“The Keyhole,””The Chest of Drawers,””The Kitchen Sink”) with some surprisig inclusions (“The Electric Light,””The Mirror,””The Mouse,””Dust”) which seems to start from an epigraph by Rilke about a house whose parts are internalized in the body of the writer. Thorne usually begins with an anecdote: spending the night in the hallway outside the apartment of a friend who was unable to get home to let him in (this resonated with me, recalling sleeping in the hallway of my friend Pat Kent’s apartment building on La Motte Picquet in Paris in 1964), watching his dog watch a mouse steal kibbles from the dog’s dish—and then moves to a series of musings, some of them obvious (a keyhole is an orifice suggesting a human orifice; keys are emblems of power—some people carry enormous keyrings with more keys than they could ever use. Some are not: the mouse makes a house seem larger, with living spaces within living spaces; “the ability of the mouse to feed on crumbs can make the crust seem like a feast." I don’t think there’s a lot of discipline in Thorne’s writing: the mouse essay, for example, shifts from mice to rats without much transition, and ends with cats without much attempt at unity. But there are some novel insights here.

Early John Thorne work on single subject food pamphlets. See 7 other entries.

Early John Thorne work on single subject food pamphlets. See 7 other entries.

Early John Thorne work on single subject food pamphlets. See 7 other entries.

Early John Thorne work on single subject food pamphlets. See 7 other entries.

Early John Thorne work on single subject food pamphlets. See 7 other entries.

Early John Thorne work on single subject food pamphlets. See 7 other entries.

Early John Thorne treatises on various culinary topics. See seven other entries.

Vol. 1 1980 through Current Vol. 95 2015. Simple Cooking, the newsletter will cease publication with Vol 100.

In an age when “cooking” seems to be the sole domain of dieticians or celebrity chefs, when food is all about either the calorie counts or the rarefied tastes of expensive and obscure dishes, John Thorne is an oddity—a man who rejects food fads but revels in unusual tastes, who finds Martha Stewart too bland, Paula Wolfert too snobby and Rachel Ray rather silly. He produces a hard-to-find newsletter called “Simple Cooking” and every five years or so Farrar Straus Giroux collects his essays into a book. My first exposure to Thorne’s idea of food writing was in his book, The Outlaw Cook, which opens with a rather lengthy quote from The Tin Drum about making spaghetti sauce in a frying pan:

Klepp rolled over on one side and silently, with the assured movements of a somnambulist, attended to his cookery. When the spaghetti was done, he drained off the water into a large empty can, then, without noticeably altering the position of his body, reached under the bed and produced a plate encrusted with grease and tomato paste. After what seemed like a moment’s hesitation, he reached again under the bed, fished out a wad of newspaper, wiped the plate with it, and tossed the paper back under the bed . . . After providing me with a fork and spoon so greasy they stuck to my fingers, he piled an immense portion of spaghetti on my plate; upon it, with another of his noble gestures, he squeezed a long worm of tomato paste to which, by deft movements of the tube, he succeeded in lending an ornamental line; finally, he poured on a plentiful portion of oil from the can. He himself ate out of the pot. He served himself oil and tomato paste, sprinkled pepper on both helpings, mixed up his share, and motioned to me to do likewise . . . Strange to say, I enjoyed that spaghetti. In fact, Klepp's spaghetti became for me a culinary ideal, by which from that day on I have measured every menu that is set before me.

I was instantly both captivated and horrified by the passage, but “captivated” won out when later on in the essay that Thorne calls “The Outlaw Cook” he says how Gunter Grass made him “aware, against the force of all my upbringing, of a denied appetite, of a repressed and forbidden hunger.” Thorne, in turn, brought home to me in the most vivid way that you can’t write about food without writing about EATING—and next to sex, eating is one of the moments when we are at our most primal, most basic, operating on sheer instinct. I am suspicious of food served as if these instincts do not exist, and tend to revel in the kinds of foods that tempt us to indulge in them.. . read more

The best intelligent, thoughtful, down to earth food writing out there.

I keep meaning to get all of John Thorne's books. The essay on rice in this one is worth the price of admission.

Note from a few hours after I wrote the above: I seriously don't understand why everybody isn't reading John Thorne all the time.

A food book, somewhat scholarly, but still very personal and engaging. I read about a third of this a while back and then got distracted, then enough time had passed that I just started at the beginning and found it was just as interesting the second time. He's quite a good writer.

I am loving this book.

I had made it partway through another Thorne book, "Outloow Cook" I think, so I picked this one up at the book store. I ended up reading it in the aisle for about twenty minutes and promptly brought it home.

It's a mix of talk about food in the author's youthful age & place, Maine. He writes about family recipes and local recipes and the summer house where they lived and the house he rented later and where he & Matt live now and potatos and berries and beans and crab -- and always about the food. Each chapter is a single subject, and ends with a recipe or two, but they're very much subordinate to the text that wends and winds around the topic.

The gingerbread chapter, for instance, is only a few pages long but it includes the tale of a great gingerbread recipe, an account of tracking down the orignial author of a recipe quoted third-hand in an old cookbook, and details of Thoreau's travels and dining among Maine logging camps. (Wha..?)

Weird and wonderful, warm and homey and inspiring.

2nd ed. revised & expanded. Early John Thorne work on single subject food pamphlets. See 7 other entries.

Signed. 1st ed.