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• THIS FROST PAPERBACK is a USED book which a member of the Frost family has checked for condition, cleanliness, completeness and readability. When the buyer collects their book from Frost’s shop, the delivery charge of £3.00 is deducted

For conditions, please view our photographs. An original  book from the library gathered by the famous Cambridge Don, computer scientist, food and wine connoisseur, Jack Arnold LANG.

Jack founded the Michelin Guide ‘Midsummer House’- Cambridge’s paramount restaurant. This dining experience is hidden amongst the grassy pastures and grazing cattle of Midsummer Common and perched on the banks of the River Cam. The Midsummer House experience is imaginatively curated to delight and amaze.

Mark Kurlansky, bestselling author of Salt and Cod, serves up a smorgasbord of food writing through the ages, from Plato to Louis Prima

Choice Cuts offers more than two hundred mouth-watering selections, including Brillat-Savarin on chocolate; Waverley Root on truffles; M. F. K. Fish on gingerbread; Pablo Neruda on French fries; Alexandre Dumas on coffee; and a vast variety by Escoffier, Elizabeth David, A. J. Liebling, Ernest Hemingway, Virginia Woolf, Dickens, Balzac, Chekhov, Orwell, and Alice B. Toklas, among others. Filled throughout with recipes, menus, classic photographs, and Kurlansky’s own original drawings, this food anthology is a must-have for any serious lover of food.

“The most outrageously broad, gregarious food writing anthology.” -Saveur

Review: This book, a collection of writing about food, drags somewhat from the burden of including too much arcane material, for example Pliny the Elder’s note on onions from the first century. Elsewhere, another chapter devotes too many words to the difference between a gourmet and a gourmand, which is perhaps not as critical to the reader as to the editor.

There are some excellent pieces in this book however. Among the best are the articles by M. F. K. Fisher, who was a food writer, but felt that food, security, and love are entwined. She also wrote very well. Her story about a last meal at a favorite restaurant before leaving France in 1932 is warm and witty. Fisher almost did not get the last meal because a waiter failed to recognize her and her husband. He spotted her precious accordion she was carrying on to the ship, assumed that they were street musicians, and showed them the door. In another article, Fisher writes about bachelors’ cooking, “few of them under seventy-nine will bother to produce a good meal unless it is for a pretty woman.”

Another fine piece by Jeremy Wechsberg about a restaurant in Vienna before the war, where the boiled beef specialties required a customer to have a thorough knowledge of the anatomy of a steer, is one of my favorites. The restaurant kept herds of cattle, fed with molasses and sugar beet mash to supply its pampered customers. The story, written in 1948, reflects a past lifestyle to which few of us could relate. It was said that Austrian poets lavished rhymed praise upon the delicacies they consumed at “Meissl & Schadn”.

The George Orwell article about cooks and waiters in Paris is the writer at his best. The waiters made more than the cooks, and the waiters had the mentality of snobs. A shorter piece about English food is equally good. In it, Orwell offers, “England is a very good country when you are not poor.” I also admired John Steinbeck’s article about hunger in California during the depression. Steinbeck wrote that, when children starved, the coroners wrote “malnutrition” on the death certificate because is sounded better “when a thin child is dead in a tent”.

This book offers a number of satisfying entrees, even for those whose main interests are other than food. However, one has to get through too many bland side dishes between them.

Mark Kurlansky is the New York Times bestselling author of many books, including Cheesecake, The Food of a Younger Land, Cod: A Biography of the Fish That Changed the World; Salt: A World History; 1968: The Year That Rocked the World; and The Big Oyster: History on the Half Shell. He has received the Dayton Literary Peace Prize, Bon Appetit’s Food Writer of the Year Award, the James Beard Award, and the Glenfiddich Award. He lives in New York City.