Home  Home About Gastronomer
|
Gastronomer is meant to be amusing and informative. Although recipes on how to cook animals are given, no animals were actually harmed during the writing of Gastronomer.
Recipes are not the central focus of the Gastronomer site, as there is a lot more to cooking than can be found in your average recipe. Embedded in recipes is the assumption that the readers have a basic core knowledge of how to execute the instructions given in the
recipe, and this is not always the case. Of course, without that assumption, recipes would be ridiculously repetitive and lengthy, with every recipe starting with "Make sure that your stove is plugged in." The Gastronomer site therefore sets out to equip the aspiring cook with some of the core knowledge needed to get going. This is the primary goal of the Setting up your Kitchen and Spices (and Herbs) sections.
Another obstacle to good cooking is having to wade through all of the crap that has flooded the food market. By crap I am not (at the moment) referring to food products themselves, but to the various cookbooks and kitchenware items without which we would all be a lot
better off. While I will at times touch upon those things that are bad enough to be amusing or popular enough to be evil, I'd much rather highlight those things which are good. To this end I've compiled a list of links to food sites which I like, as well as a list of cookbooks and cookbook authors which I think are excellent. A good tip on buying cookbooks is to look on the back of the jacket to see who is recommending it. If Craig Clairborne, or James Beard, or Julia Child liked the book, odds are that you will too.
Why aren't there more recipes here? Personally, I'm not a big fan of recipes. Recipes are the rules of grammar of the culinary world. They allow us to communicate intelligently, but unless we can see beyond them, we have no poetry. That being said, bear in mind that well constructed prose can be awfully tasty. Eventually I'll put up some more recipes on the Gastronomer site. But even then, I'll have nowhere near the over 50,000 recipes which you can access through the websites listed in the Recipe Links section.
The Essay section is an attempt to deal with the idea that food is about more than just
eating. If it weren't, a dinner invitation would mean going to someone else's house to to eat cereal while watching t.v.
As for Barbecuing and Beverages , if you need an explanation of
these, it's time to go back to college.
|
|
