About this item
Every day, noodle shops around the globe ladle out quick meals that fuel our go-go lives. But Ken Albala has a mission: to get YOU in the kitchen making noodle soup. This primer offers the recipes and techniques for mastering quick-slurper staples and luxurious from-scratch feasts. Albala made a different noodle soup every day for two years. His obsession yielded all you need to know about making stock bases, using dried or fresh noodles, and choosing from a huge variety of garnishes, flavorings, and accompaniments. He lays out innovative techniques for mixing and matching bases and noodles with grains, vegetables, and other ingredients drawn from an international array of cuisines. In addition to recipes both cutting edge and classic, Alabala describes new soup discoveries he created along the way. There's advice on utensils, cooking tools, and the oft-overlooked necessity of matching a soup to the proper bowl. Finally, he sprinkles in charming historical details that cover everything from ancient Chinese millet noodles to that off-brand Malaysian ramen at the back of the ethnic grocery store. Filled with more than seventy color photos and one hundred recipes, A World of Noodle Soup is an indispensable guide for cooking, eating, and loving a universal favorite.
About the Author
Ken Albala is Professor of History at the University of the Pacific. He is the author or editor of 25 books on food including Eating Right in the Renaissance, Food in Early Modern Europe, Cooking in Europe 1250-1650, The Banquet: Dining in the Great Courts of Late Renaissance Europe, Beans: A History (winner of the 2008 IACP Jane Grigson Award) , and Pancake. He has also co-edited The Business of Food, Human Cuisine, Food and Faith and edited A Cultural History of Food: The Renaissance and The Routledge International Handbook to Food Studies. Albala was also editor of the Food Cultures Around the World series with 30 volumes in print, the 4-volume Food Cultures of the World Encyclopedia and is now series editor of Rowman Littlefield Studies in Food and Gastronomy for which he has written a textbook entitled Three World Cuisines: Italian, Chinese, Mexican (Winner of the Gourmand Best Foreign Food Book in the World 2012) . Albala was also co-editor of the journal Food Culture and Society and edited a 3 volume encyclopedia on Food Issues for Sage. He has also co-authored cookbooks: The Lost Art of Real Cooking and The Lost Arts of Hearth and Home. His recent works are a translation of the 16th century Livre fort excellent de cuysine, A Food History Reader and Nuts: A Global History. Most recently there is At the Table: Food and Family around the World. Noodle Soup: Recipes, Techniques, Obsession is his latest book.
