John Thorne

Matt Lewis Thorne

An American Cook in Search of His Roots

Serious Pig

Further Confessions of a Renegade Cook

Pot on the Fire

Outlaw Cook

Pot on the Fire is the latest collection from "the most enticingly serendipitous voice on the culinary front since Elizabeth David and M.F.K. Fisher" (Connoisseur). As the title suggests, it celebrates-and, in classic Thorne style, ponders, probes, and scrutinizes-a lifelong engagement with the elements of cooking, and elemental cooking from cioppino to kedgeree. John Thorne's curiosity ranges far and wide, from nineteenth-century famine-struck Ireland to the India of the British Raj, from the Italian cucina to the venerable American griddle. Whether on the trail of a mysterious Vietnamese sandwich ("Banh Mi and Me") or "The Best Cookies in the World," whether "Desperately Resisting Risotto" or discovering the perfect breakfast, Thorne is an erudite and intrepid guide who, in unveiling the gastronomic wonders of the world, also reveals us to ourselves.

A dimension and resonance of experience almost never found in American food writing.

In essays ranging from his earliest cooking lessons in a cold-water walk-up apartment on New York's Lower East Side to opinions both admiring and acerbic on the food writers of the past ten years, John Thorne argues that to eat exactly what you want, you have to make it yourself. Thorne tells us how he learned to cook for himself the foods that he likes best to eat, and following along with him can make you so hungry that his simple, suggestive recipes will inspire you to go into the kitchen and translate your own appetite into your own supper.

Matt Lewis Thorne

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