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To call "Modernist Cuisine: The Art & Science of Cooking" a "cookbook" is "akin to calling James Joyce's 'Ulysses' 'a story'," wrote Katy Mclaughlin in the Wall Street Journal. Nathan Myhrvold, a polymath's polymath, has written perhaps the most intimidating cookbook around. For a mere $625 it can be yours. Here he discusses his epic cookbook, patent-licensing and the law, and why he's getting into nuclear power.

"Blood, Bones and Butter", a new memoir from Gabrielle Hamilton, an acclaimed New York chef, is a delectable feast. It begins with a lamb roast party on her family farm on the East Coast, and ends with a drink on a porch in Italy with an inherited family. From here to there is a colourful ride, a somewhat indirect route from hapless dish-washer to successful restaurateur. This is a dishy book, vividly written, with plenty of blue language and one maggot-filled rat.

Ms Hamilton is executive chef and owner of Prune, a restaurant in the East Village. It is a cosy, homely place, where Ms Hamilton cooks what she knows and what she would want to be served. (As she puts it: the "salty, sweet, starchy, brothy, crispy things that one craves when one is actually hungry".) When she opened Prune in 1999, she admits she didn't know a thing about running a restaurant. Now the wait for brunch is two hours on a normal Sunday.

Like the restaurant, the book is a labour of love, uncompromisingly individual in its own right. She writes well about her life, offering up the salty, sweet and starchy bits. Like Prune, it is a breakout hit, now in its third week on the New York Times best-seller list. Here she talks to More Intelligent Life about her approach to memoir, and the role of female chefs.

When did you first get the idea to write this book?

For the longest time it didn't seem like I had anything to offer. At some point the right agent helped put together a proposal, though I ended up not writing the book I pitched. I ended up writing a memoir.  read more »

When it comes to describing wine, few people take issue with "fruity", "acidic" or "ruby". Most can handle "blackcurrant", "chocolate", "tobacco", "truffle" or even "toast" (this Johnson swears to having caught a whiff of all five). But then self-styled connoisseurs begin spouting attributes like "graphite" (which does not smell or—if nibbling pencil ends is any guide—taste of anything), "zesty mineral" (how it differs from plain mineral is anyone's guess), "angular" (huh?), or "dumb" (indeed). Little wonder oenological jargon gets a bad rap. And oenophiles (your correspondent among them) stand accused of bamboozling the uninitiated, probably out of some underhanded motive.

In an essay published a few years ago in Journal of Wine Economics under the title  "On Wine Bullshit" (and cited by Ms Krumme), Richard Quandt, an economist at Princeton University, puts it thus:

In some instances, there is an unhappy marriage between a subject that especially lends itself to bullshit and bullshit artists who are impelled to comment on it. I fear that wine is one of those instances where this unholy union is in effect.

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Food is everywhere in "Edible Stories", a new work of fiction by Mark Kurlansky. Characters have names like "Minty Maris"; an Indian man is "walnut-skinned"; a mountain range is "berry-stain purple". In this "novel in sixteen stories" from the author of non-fiction bestsellers such as "Salt" and "Cod", food even flavours the story titles, with names such as "Red Sea Salt" and "Menudo". Each tale, in one way or another, hinges upon food. And the novel as a whole—though in truth, it's less a novel than a collection of linked stories—is a tidy paean to the act of eating.

This theme is innocent enough on its surface, particularly given the book's diminutive size and cute illustrations (of, say, a cupcake or a group of oysters). Kurlansky’s offerings, too, are not exactly conflict-rich pieces. One, for instance, centres around a small girl eating a cupcake ("There it was, white icing piled high and a rainbow of sprinkles.") But the author, luckily for his readers, laces the sweet plainness of his stories with a sense of the absurd and the frightening. It's not for nothing that Kurlansky quotes Turgenev in the book's epigraph.  read more »

1961 was a big year. John F. Kennedy was elected president, the Vietnam War began, and construction on the Berlin Wall started. It also saw the first chimp rocketed into space and the first issue of Marvel Comic's "Fantastic Four" series. It was also the year that an essential part of childhood was finally committed to paper: the act of making mud pies and other delights from backyard materials.

Marjorie Winslow's "Mud Pies and Other Recipes", illustrated by Erik Blegvad, is a cookbook for dolls originally published in 1961. This charming and fastidiously complete resource thankfully has been reissued by the New York Review Children's Collection. Now anyone in need of a menu for entertaining in a kitchen full of dirt and branches need look no further. This cookbook provides recipes for each course (Wood Chip Dip, Gravel en Casserole, Leaves en Brochette, Honeysuckle Wine) as well as suggested menus for a wedding banquet, summer luncheon and other occasions.

"Doll cookery is not a very exacting art," Winslow explains in a preface. "The time it takes to cook a casserole depends upon how long your dolls are able to sit at the table without falling over." Furthermore, the author continues, "If a recipe calls for a cupful of something, you can use a measuring cup or a teacup or a buttercup. It doesn't much matter." A tree stump works well for a counter, Winslow advises, while a cake pan can be cut from the bottom of an old milk carton.  read more »

The sandwich is a simple, humble foodstuff, eaten daily by billions of people across the globe. Familiarity may breed contempt, but there is much to love and learn about the sandwich, acccording to Bee Wilson, author of a new history of the convenient meal. An historian and food journalist (and a contributor to Intelligent Life), Ms Wilson delves into the evolution and re-invention of the sandwich, and considers its cultural significance around the world. Along the way she delivers some charming anecdotes, amusing pictures and mouth-watering recipes.

From dainty, crustless cucumber squares to Yorkshire ‘mucky-fat’ doorstops (wedges of white bread and dripping), the sandwich has been enjoyed by both rich and poor. Its incarnations across the globe vary from the Chilean barros luco (hot steak and melted cheese in a roll) to the Vietnamese bánh mì (pate, pork and pickled vegetables in a baguette). It is indeed a wondrous and endlessly variable one-handed meal, which can “be applied to face and devoured in a trice”, and leave fingers clean to boot.

More Intelligent Life has plucked five juicy morsels about sandwiches from Ms Wilson’s book.

On the etymology of ‘sandwich’:  read more »

Chris Hegedus and D.A. Pennebaker, documentarians best-known for their edgy and often political work ("Don't Look Back", "Town Bloody Hall", "The War Room"), turn to lighter matters with their new film, "Kings of Pastry". Here they chronicle 16 international pastry chefs as they jockey for position to become Meilleurs Ouvriers de France (Best Craftsman in France, MOF). The fierce, three-day competition will yield only one winner, who will then go on to wear the blue, white and red striped collar that signifies culinary excellence. With their patient approach to character development and intuitive feel for conflict, Hegedus and Pennebaker expose the punishing training and personal sacrifices that go into becoming a pastry champion.

Made in 2009, "Kings of Pastry" has been making the rounds on the international festival circuit, and is currently screening for a limited run at New York's Film Forum. Over e-mail, the directors collaborated on answers to More Intelligent Life's questions about dessert aesthetics, gender biases in the pastry industry and the national pride of the Meilleurs Ouvriers de France competition.   read more »

Bookended by a nail salon and a pickle store, a tiki bar makes an unexpected appearance at the storefront of 49 Essex Street in the Lower East Side. A tiki bar, furthermore, is not where you'd expect to find painstakingly composed drinks of transcendent tastiness, not to mention potency and expense. Naturally this place is called Painkiller, which is all of these things at once: a free-form riff on the classic tiki bar, a rare opportunity to order ace versions of bygone cocktail classics (daiquiri, anyone?) and, frankly, a decent place to get sloshed.   read more »

New York City's Health Department has handed down its first letter grade to a restaurant, presenting Jose and Antonio Araujo of Long Island City with an A for Spark's, a "well-kept deli" that the Department heralds as "a model for the city's 24,000 other eating establishments." Having aced an unannounced inspection, Spark's has become the new face of a city initiative to raise public awareness of sanitary conditions. Restaurants are required to visibly post their letter grades, and a corresponding website allows users to sort eateries by name, borough, cuisine type and inspection score. If you're seeking, say, a lower Manhattan Sicilian joint free of mouse excreta, you'll find plenty of options on the Health Department's database.

More Intelligent Life spoke with Tony Araujo, a Spark's co-owner, who exclaimed that he was "very thrilled, very proud" to receive the honour. He also mentioned that Dr Thomas Farley, the city's Health Commissioner, had visited Spark's earlier in the day to congratulate the owners. What sort of fare is Spark's known for? "Breakfast, lunch, and dinner," Araujo replied. "And also hot sandwiches."

The restaurant grading system newly adapted by New York is modelled after one  read more »

This past week was full of the kind of New York summer weather in which everyone visibly gives up on trying to look or smell good, with the exception of a very few. Those few appeared to congregate on a recent Thursday at lunchtime at David Chang’s new midtown restaurant, Má Pêche, which opened last month as the fourth instalment in the Momofuku line of restaurants (it is preceded by Momofuku Noodle Bar, Momofuku Ko, and Momofuku Ssäm Bar).

With Brian Eno on the stereo and chef Tien Ho in the kitchen, Má Pêche is an attempt to transfer the flavour of Chang’s downtown joints to the staid, business-lunch environment of the Chambers Hotel. The menu is written in a mixture of English, French and Vietnamese, which translates into lots of foreign squiggles and dishes like xà lách frisée (frisee with tripe and poached egg) and coquille st. jacques sauté chanh (scallops with brown butter, lime and pea shoots). My companion and I sampled the oysters, which came prettily arranged with a thai basil mignonette, and an appetizer of pork ribs, which was easily generous enough to serve as an entree. A salad of asparagus was dressed delicately with egg yolk, shallots, and strands of crab. Steak frites came with crispy fried rice sticks in place of the frites—golden on the outside and melting within, like Asian-influenced Tater Tots.  read more »