The Plagiarist in the Kitchen: A Lifetime's Culinary Thefts - Hardcover

Meades, Jonathan

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1783522402 ISBN 13: 9781783522408

Publisher: Unbound, 2018

Synopsis

Best known as a provocative novelist, journalist, and filmmaker, Jonathan Meades has also been called "the best amateur chef in the world" by Marco Pierre White. His contention here is that anyone who claims to have invented a dish is delusional, dishonestly contributing to the myth of culinary originality. Meades delivers a polemical but highly usable collection of 125 of his favorite recipes, each one an example of the fine art of culinary plagiarism. These are dishes and methods he has hijacked, adapted, improved upon, and made his own. He tells us why the British never got the hang of garlic. That a purist would never dream of putting cheese in a Gratin Dauphinois. That cooking brains in brown butter cannot be improved upon. And why—despite the advice of Martin Scorsese’s mother—he insists on frying his meatballs. Adorned with his own abstract monochrome images (none of which "illustrate" the stolen recipes they accompany), The Plagiarist in the Kitchen is a stylish object, both useful and instructive. Includes metric measues. 

About this title

About the Author

Jonathan Meades is a writer, journalist, essayist, and film-maker. He is the author of Incest and Morris Dancing. He was the Times' restaurant critic for 15 years, and won the Best Food Journalist in the Glenfiddich Awards. 

Review

"A wonderful cookbook . . . defiantly and hilariously unprecious, even as it demonstrates on every page the author’s discernment as a gourmet. Periodically Meades erupts in wittily splenetic denunciations of holier-than-thou food ist rhetoric. [The Plagiarist in the Kitchen] instantiates a philosophy of food that is wiser and cleverer than anything you will read under the burgeoning academic rubric of “philosophy of food”." —Guardian
"A defiant cookbook...delicious to read and even better to cook from." --The New York Times Online

"Meades returns now as defiant, playful, and possibly punch drunk as ever . . . The Plagiarist in the Kitchen is a cookbook in the mode of, say, The Futurist Cookbook, The Alice B. Toklas Cookbook, or a good old-fashioned M. F. K. Fisher." —Times Literary Supplement

"The Plagiarist in the Kitchen is hilariously grumpy, muttering at us 'Don’t you bastards know anything?' You can read it purely for literary pleasure, but Jonathan Meades makes everything sound so delicious that the non-cook will be moved to cook and the bad cook will cook better." —Guardian

"Meades reasonably observes that 'no one reads a cookbook cover to cover', but for obvious reasons I did this one, and I don't regret it. It is quite the funniest I've read." —Sunday Telegraph

"Meades was for 15 years from 1986 the restaurant critic of the Times, a calling he approached with polymathic wit, much copied, rarely bettered . . . The Plagiarist in the Kitchen is a personal food odyssey, a book of recipes, each with a story of how he came by it, and why exactly he is passing it off as his own." —Observer

"Witty, forthright and full of excellent recipes. A welcome companion for self-catering holidays." —Spectator Summer Reads

"Meades is a hugely entertaining writer and the book is peppered with anecdotes and contrarian statements: 'So far as I can recall I have not eaten guacamole,' is just one example." —Restaurant Magazine

"A human Enigma machine . . . Jonathan Meades is the Jonathan Meades of our generation." —Vanity Fair

"The scope of his ideas, the force of his arguments, the sheer vitality of his sentences: these things come at you like negative ions after a storm, with the result that you soon start to feel an awful lot better—envious but revitalised, too." —New Statesman

About this edition

• Publisher: Unbound
• Publication date: 2018
• ISBN 10: 1783522402
• ISBN 13: 9781783522408
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 176