Product Description

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #164085 in Books
• Published on: 2007-11-27
• Released on: 2007-11-27
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 448 pages

From Publishers Weekly
This cornucopia of previously published pieces by James Beard Award–winning food writer Thorne, from his newsletter, Simple Cooking, along with a few from other publications, showcases his relaxed, unfussy attitude, refreshing in this age of cookbook and food-personality overabundance. That casualness comes through on subjects from bagna cauda to pepper pot. It's all foodstuff to him, and his affection for foods of all kinds is boundless. Some of the most intriguing suggestions, reprinted from a regular feature of the newsletter, reflect an awareness that the avocado-green electric range is as legitimate as the Viking. Thorne likes to delve into the source and cultural history of individual dishes, and many spur-of-the-moment concoctions, whose recipes are given, were prepared out of a sense of what-the-heck invention and appetite. He fervently promotes his belief that in every foodie lurks a cook capable of doing wonders with prepared foods, that the opposite also holds, and that the ultimate authority on food is the person eating. (Dec.)
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Review
Praise for Pot on the Fire: “Those new to [Thorne's work] will experience the joy of prose that welcomes you to the hearth and invites you to stay . . . Each nuance and thought provides a doorway into the contemplation of a life well-savored.” —Kyla Wazana, San Francisco Chronicle "The Thornes will bring out the culinary adventurer in you, whether or not you ever leave home . . . Everthing John Thorne writes, in prose rubbed shiny like river stones, is . . . rich in substance and texture." --Sylvia Carter, Newsday "With every collection, [Thorne's] accounts . . . make richer reading." --Corby Kummer, The New York Times Book Review

About the Author
John Thorne and Matt Lewis Thorne live in Northampton, Massachusetts, where they publish the food letter Simple Cooking. Their most recent book, Pot on the Fire, won a James Beard Foundation Book Award.

Customer Reviews

A Thorne in my side; or, good cooking for the less than elite
I always appreciate the careful reviews of Mr. Marold. I see he has fallen into Mr. Thorne's trap. I myself did until I figured out that Mr. Thorne is a bona fide crank. He is a cranky writer and a bitter observer of the food scene. Hence his appreciation of bitter marmalade. And then he turns right around and gives you new direction on good jams and preserves that he now prefers.

Now that am poor again, "Mouth Wide Open" is the perfect book for me in these miraculous times of ours. I have not yet bought this latest book of his, I but keep renewing from my library as I slowly work through it. He makes hash of our cult chefs and turns on the kitchen sink disposal for our kitchen celebrities. He is looking to pick a fight. He does not like to spend money. He wants to play with his food. Bravo!

There is nothing much more fun than a food fight. So long as you hang in with his extended diatribes, Mr. Thorne eventually gets around to his points. He got me so excited with something he got from a box of De Cecco fusilli pasta that I went out and bought a box. I had been buying boutique pasta at three times the price, but there it was with the same dang "Fusilli with Tomato and Green Olive Sauce" on the back. Thorne turns the makings inside out and upside down (NO TOMATOES!!), but he works into a variation that rhymes pretty well.

His chapter on Cod and Potato is for the ages. This is a book for reading, argument (even if only alone) and only then cooking. He likes powerful cooking concepts that can play out in different ways without quite loosing touch.

Try his fooling around with making mayo on a plate with a fork. You could learn sumpin'.

What finally sold me on him and this book is how often he sent me scurrying for more information before making anything. Two dozen searches on the internet and nearly as many in the local low brow market. He gives credit to all who have helped him on his way and lets fly against all those who presume and posture.

Spend much pre-cooking time with him and argue along the way, but never fail to give a fair hearing. I notice tag suggestions include Alice Waters and California Cuisine. Guess again...

At the end of each workout has transformed an inspiring recipe into a new incarnation. His hope is that you can develop the same knack. Worth every star.

Superb Meditations on Classic Recipes. Buy it NOW!
`Mouth Wide Open' is John Thorne's fourth book, each volume being a collection of articles from his self-published journal `Simple Cooking'. I cannot be more delighted in seeing this book, as I was just recently wondering whether we would ever see any more from the good Mr. Thorne and his distaff collaborator and wife, Matt Lewis Thorne.
Even more than in all his previous books, Mr. Thorne validates exactly my approach to reading and reporting on cookbooks. At one point, he states that the most interesting kind of writing a professional chef can do is to describe how they cook at home. This fits exactly my feelings about books such as Jacques Pepin's `Chez Jacque' and `Fast Food My Way', Alice Waters' `The Art of Simple Food', and Eric Rippert's `A Return to Cooking'.
Thorne's own food writing embraces an approach to recipes which matches my own reading and writing, and which probably drives some of my readers to distraction, when I don't get around to actually cooking the recipes. This approach may be compared to Biblical textual criticism, where scholars adjudicate the authenticity of many different versions and fragments of versions for the canonical works in scripture. My favorite Thorne exercise of this sort is his essay on New England clam chowder in an earlier book, `Serious Pig'. If there is any lesson to be learned from his many exercises in this form, it is that one may never find the `genuine' version of any traditional recipe, but it is certainly fun to make the journey. You come out the other end with an enormously improved understanding of a cuisine and the needs of the people who created it. Thorne's essays in this genre in this book start with that rather unfamiliar sauce native to the Piedmont in Italy, bagna cauda. Among his researches are `depositions' from twelve different modern recipes for the sauce, including such notables as Elizabeth David, Faith Willinger, and Jeffrey Steingarten. And, lo and behold, each one is different from one another, and different from Thorne's eyewitness of a preparation in Piedmont.
It is no surprise that Thorne cites David and Steingarten, as his work owes much to David's style of writing, as is also allied to the writings of Patience Gray and Richard Olney. As the title of his newsletter attests, Thorne is a great proponent of `simple cooking', which, however, is different from either fast or easy cooking. Thorne presents an excellent exercise in `simple cooking' when he describes his first exposure to making homemade mayonnaise. Like an omelet, it is utterly simple, involving nothing more than an egg, oil, some lemon juice, and some dexterity.
Another evidence of Thorne's great orthodoxy is that his conception of good cooking is to make the best with what you have. This is virtually identical to Tom Colicchio's elegant description of cooking creativity in his `How to Think Like a Chef'.
In the course of my rambling, I have not taken the time to point out that Thorne's books are definitely meant to be read from cover to cover and enjoyed in their own right, and not from the incidental recipe one may glean from it, as you might do from a celebrity chef cookbook. In doing so, we may discover that Thorne may actually have some opinions with which we may rightfully disagree. Thorne takes issue with the replacing of books (and TV cooking shows) by cooks with books (and TV shows) by `entertainers' such as Rachael Ray. I am sympathetic with his primary point that the TV Network approach to food has tended to drive out the kind of writing done by Thorne and Steingarten and (formerly) by Gray and Grigson and David. I disagree on two counts. First, Thorne and Steingarten and Nigel Slater and Amanda Hesser are still going strong in this kind of writing. Second, people like Rachael Ray address a particular audience who has no time for a contemplative approach to cooking, and Miss Rachael does have some reasonably serious credentials as a food professional. She is NOT just an engaging talker who fronts culinary staff who do the real work.
In spite of those little quibbles, I am enthusiastically in Thorne's camp when he talks about a meditative approach, as profound in its own way as Alton Brown's metaphor of culinary teaching which replaces the directions of the recipe with the explanations comparable to a map of the whole city. While Brown gives us a map, Thorne gives us a history, seen from a very personal point of view.
Thorne includes in this book some reviews of notable books on culinary subjects. Most notable are reviews of Eric Schlosser's `Fast Food Nation', `Amanda Hesser's `The Cook and the Gardener', and Raymond Sokolow's `The Cook's Canon: 100 Classic Recipes Everyone Should Know'. I'm delighted less by Mr. Thorne's opinions of the books, all of which I reviewed, than by the fact that approaches each review in a manner very similar to `The New Yorker' style, which I often consciously emulate.
The book does contain many recipes, and Mr. Thorne does us the great service of listing them all at the beginning of the book. And, unlike recipes in other culinary memoirs, these are integral to the story and need to be read; however, they are `examples', almost footnotes to the main line of narrative. One reads the book for how John Thorne got there, not for a description of the destination.
A really, really great read for foodies.

An ongoing conversation
What a truly pleasurable book. John Thorne continues his ongoing conversation about cooking, food, and life, and the rest of us are privileged to listen in. His intellectual rigor is notable, but there is no element of pretention in it. Rather, he tuns his attention to good things and gives a great deal of careful thought to their history and how best to do them justice. It is also a very funny book, and the best antidote I've found to the current depressing parade of egomaniacal chefs'compendiums and "smile big and get your cooking over with in a hurry" non-cookbooks. Highly recommended for any serious cook and for anyone who likes to think about food. Lovers of good essays will like it too.