This week it's a look at life and death in haute cuisine. Guest Rudolph Chelminski takes us into the world of French restaurant culture, where one star can literally change lives. His book, The Perfectionist: Life and Death in Haute Cuisine, tracks the life and suicide of master chef Bernard Loiseau, who committed suicide in 2003 when he heard rumors that his restaurant would lose its ranking in a leading dining guide.
We're talking Korean food this week with Cecilia Hae-Jin Lee, author of Eating Korean, From Barbecue to Kimchi, Recipes from My Home. Korean cuisine is bold and spicy, and served in a way that lets you play with all kinds of flavor combinations. Cecilia gives us the essentials. Her recipe for Spicy Pork Ribs gets us grilling.
Award-winning chef Frank Stitt put Alabama on the gastronomic map with his mecca of great eating, Highlands Bar and Grill in Birmingham. He joins us this week to talk the return of the South's culinary glory days, a renaissance in which he plays a major role. The recipe for Miss Verba's Pimiento Cheese is from his new book, Frank Stitt's Southern Table: Recipes and Gracious Traditions from Highlands Bar and Grill.
This week Lizzie Collingham, author of Curry: A Tale of Cook's and Conquerors, joins us for a look at the history of India through its curries. She says the most popular ones each tell a different story of a significant outside influence. It's a fascinating take on how a world-class cuisine came into being. The recipe for Vindaloo is from Lizzie's book.
John T. Edge, Southern food and culture historian and director of the Southern Foodways Alliance, joins us this week and he's talking fried chicken. His recipe for Sweet Tea Fried Chicken is from his book Fried Chicken, An American Story.
This week it's all things Italian but not in Italy. Instead of heading east to Rome, we're going south to Buenos Aires where the descendants of two million Italians have settled. Food writer Rich Lang is our guide.
We'll go inside the dairy with Soyoung Scanlon, California's new star cheese maker who has celebrity chefs kissing the hem of her apron. She follows the milk and her mood, not the market, at her Andante Dairy in Santa Rosa and it shows in her cheeses.
This week it's Cuban Miami with Glenn, Raul, and Jorge. The "Three Guys from Miami" love to eat, they love their town, and they give us advice on where and what to eat, including airport food worth the trip. The recipe for Roast Pork is from their book Three Guys from Miami Cook Cuban: 100 Great Cuban Recipes with a Touch of Miami Spice.
If you've always suspected that taste goes beyond science's big four of sweet, sour, salt and bitter your instincts are right. This week we're looking at umami. It's what food types call the "fifth taste." Our guest, David Kasabian, tells us how to use this wunderkind to make everything we eat taste better. Coq au Vin Nouveau, from The Fifth Taste: Cooking with Umami by David and Anna Kasabian, demonstrates the principle.
Joe Queenan, that quirky observer of the human comedy, takes us his England this week. It's a place of people driven by good-natured insanity, where home cooking thrives, and the steak and kidney pie requires a pneumatic drill. His book is Queenan Country: A Reluctant Anglophile's Pilgrimage to the Mother Country.