Recipe for learning about haute cuisine (Excerpted from email to Heather, 6 June 2007)

I got into the chef books after picking up a biography called The Perfectionist about a French chef who shot himself in the head in 2003.

If you're at all interested in the weird world of French cuisine, the intro to that book was a pretty good primer for me -- and if you read any farther than that, I recommend doing what I did: get the book out of the library, read about 40 pages initially and then put it down, reading a few pages at a time up to about 80.

Then let it sit there quietly while your maximum number of renewals run out.

On the day that it is due, go to the library and sit in an uncomfortable wooden chair for several hours, racing to finish it before the library closes.

THIS is when you'll start to really enjoy what may have started out as an academic exercise in willpower; this is when you'll get to know the man, Bernard Loiseau, and wish that he was still alive. It's tough breaking into the world of three-star french cuisine for you, but it's even tougher for HIM, and right around that point in the book where you had stopped before is where the anecdotes begin.

It was after that that I started looking up and putting holds on chef books. Of course, I've read the requisite Anthony Bourdain phenomenon, Kitchen Confidential, which I would recommend for its colorful descriptions of kitchen manners and its advice on garlic (in short, that people who don't have time to mince fresh garlic don't deserve to have any garlic at all). I've also listened to A Cook's Tour, which was less good, unless you'd like your food descriptions to take place in exotic locales, in which case, it's your best bet.

I'm somewhat disappointed; I was going to recommend Ruth Reichl to you and now you've revealed that you've already read two of her books. I read those books in semi-reverse order: Garlic and Sapphires, Tender at the Bone, Comfort Me With Apples (instead of the chronological TatB-CMWA-GaS order).

If you've already read Garlic, then I recommend the other one that you haven't read. If, like a more normal person, you've read them in order and are left only with Garlic, I say go ahead and read it while understanding this: that it's not the same as the first two, the tone is somewhat different and the timeline is shorter, but also that it's her time at NYT that made her famous enough to write those other ones and find an audience. Sometimes I found her discussing her disguises to be annoying, but I did always enjoy her about-the-food writing, and some of the recipes -- though I have yet to try them -- looked promising. [Ed. note: I still have yet to try them.]

One set of chef books that I thought was really excellent (and which I would recommend above the others I've listed so far) was Michael Ruhlman's The Making of a Chef, The Soul of a Chef, and The Reach of a Chef. The second and third don't come up to the standard of the first, but they do continue what I think is Ruhlman's true theme: the pursuit of perfection in all areas. I liked his writing enough -- the clarity and subtlety of his anecdotes reflects his subject matter very nicely (form! content!) -- to purchase a book he wrote on neonatal heart surgery called Walk on Water. I think he's the only nonfiction writer I've been faithful to as though he were writing novels -- typically I would follow the subject matter rather than the actual author, with nonfiction.

If you're interested in Italian cookery (as opposed to the French), Heat by Bill Buford was also pretty good, affording some decent and memorable story-telling. The movie "Mostly Martha" is also cute and definitely worth watching. ("Bella Martha" in its Italian title, I believe.)

I have Toast, but I haven't read it yet.