I couldn't help but notice titles like:
- A16 : food + wine (SF restaurant)
- Matzoh ball gumbo (Jewish southern life & cooking)
- Beyond the Great Wall : recipes and travels in the other China
next to oblivious students slumped over chemistry lab reports, with books on infrared spectroscopy, non-communicative algebras, studies of cadmium lying about, probably more typically of what one would expect to find deep in a Science Library at UCSC.
Cookbooks in a science library? TX in the Library of Congress system, which fits into Science & Engineering Library along with nearby nutrition, health and medical books that environmentalists and sustainable advocates might want to read. (And this library also has a delightful reading room on the first floor, surrounded by redwoods. )
According to UCSC librarian Elisabeth Remak-Honnef the 300+ books were purchased with Bruce Aidells Cookery Endowment
Aidells is a UCSC grad and scientist who decided he was a better cook. He has now written 11 cookbooks.
Even if you are part of the raw foods movement, you still need to know nutrition and how to do things in the kitchen, which is the purpose of the endowment. Especially since so many commercially processed foods are in our diet and we don't hand receipes and skills as frequently as previous generations, Aidells wants us to remember how to cook real food and how we did through the ages and different cultures.
Librarian Remak-Honnef encourages the public to view the cookbook exhibit now on display on the ground floor of McHenry (free). The Aidells cook books will also be moved to the McHenry humanities library when space is available. (A beautiful new wing is being added to McHenry, home also to UCSC's wonderful. )
If you want to borrow books or use other UCSC services, there is a "Friends of the Library" program for the local community and a real bargin.
If you can't wait, here's more from this wonderful collection:
- We've always had Paris --- and Provence : a scrapbook of our life in France
- Arabesque : a taste of Morocco, Turkey, and Lebanon
- Luscious berry desserts
- The art of Mexican cooking : traditional Mexican cooking for aficionados
- Bottomfeeder : a seafood lover's journey to the end of the food chain
- Fat : an appreciation of a misunderstood ingredient, with recipes
- Grub : ideas for an urban organic kitchen
- New Orleans cuisine : fourteen signature dishes and their histories /
- Swindled : from poison sweets to counterfeit coffee : the dark history of the food cheats
- The hamburger : a history
- Chocolate : history, culture, and heritage
- The food snob's dictionary : an essential lexicon of gastronomical knowledge : food snob n: reference term for the sort of food obsessive for whom the actual joy of eating and cooking is but a side dish to the accumulation of arcane knowledge about these subjects
Unfortunately, I'll be reading one about making beans exciting.
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