Overview

The author of the massively popular blog Chez Pim attempts to guide us to appreciating food, dining, and cooking (again) with her unique brand of sass and humor. While the dining tips are useful and the recipes look delicious, some of the material appears simply a supplement to (or derivative of) the blog. Her guide is a mixed bag of earnest, well-thought-out advice and odd name- and place-dropping that somehow makes being a foodie synonymous with being well-traveled and well-connected (or synonymous with Pim’s life), contrary to her stated objectives.

Full review

Structure of the book

The book is divided into four sections:

• How to eat like a foodie – Pim gives tips on how to appreciate flavors, search out good street food, conduct yourself in a restaurant, and spot a mediocre restaurant.
• How to cook like a foodie – She gives a few tips on how to shop and presents recipes for more than 35 dishes that range from simple to exotic.
• How to drink like a foodie – She gives tips on how to select a wine that’s right for you and how to pair it appropriately with food.
• How to be a fabulous foodie – Finally, Pim lists 50 things that she believes every foodie should “at least try to do once in her (his) life.”

The epilogue consists of several more sections, “How to be an ethical foodie”, “Cook your story”, and “How to bake (no-knead) bread.”

About the author

Pim Techamuanvivit is the author of the popular food blog Chez Pim, where she chronicles her adventures in food wherever she may find it. She was born in Bangkok and moved to the US, where she currently resides in San Francisco.

Review

Pim begins the book with a foreword on “how to love food (again).” She laments the current attitudes of the media (? or society?) towards food and recipes, as if we were “apologizing for some sort of offence, real or imagined” and how you have forgotten your exhilaration as a child, eating good food with abandon. I believe since the advent of food blogging and the spread of food-related media (the bloggers and readers probably being the main demographic purchasing this book), this has been overturned. I hardly think there is a great majority out there that considers the term “comfort food” derogatory or dismissive, and barely remembers a time when food was savored — it might even be as they are reading the book. I began to wonder if there was a disconnect between who the text was written for and who will most probably buy the book: those who recognize Pim through her blog, or people who have at least a good working relationship with food.

However, as the book progresses this discrepancy begins to matter less because Pim has a unique voice that is able to explain familiar topics in an enjoyable way, and new topics in an encouraging manner. You can almost imagine her telling you, “Ah, there’s nothing to it,” and you feel like you actually can. She exhibits these qualities best in her collection of recipes. Without much effort, you can produce impressive results in your kitchen, as long as you use the best ingredients you can manage. She starts out the first section, “How to taste like a foodie” with two illustrative recipes: Alain Passard’s Strawberries in hibiscus and vanilla soup and Ferran Adrià’s Warm apricots with honey and saffron, both with only four ingredients each. She writes the recipes in what is my opinion the best method for really learning how to cook from the gut: describing what to expect of the food in detail, nearly abandoning the pedagogically inferior listing of cryptic steps, temperatures, and times.

After this, however, the selection of recipes sometimes seems arbitrary. The perfect roast chicken (done la méthode Robuchon, which is worth trying) and easy (pan-)roast potatoes are suddenly followed by pad thai for beginners to further illustrate her point about anti-recipes, and with a preface on how popular the recipe is on her blog and how frequently it’s linked to and shared. While it is a fantastic recipe, it is a rephrasing of the recipe on her blog, adding to the feeling that the book is at times just a supplement to the Chez Pim website (perhaps a link would have sufficed?). She goes straight to salads, with a brief primer on how to become more instinctive in your approach to making them, which is absolutely the right direction for this book. However, there is no gentle transition into the section on soups– only two straightforward recipes, for David Kinch’s Strawberry “gazpacho” and Roasted squash soup with brown butter, without how they apply to being a foodie, generally or specifically regarding soup (especially a soup like strawberry gazpacho). There are four recipes on fish, three recipes on meat, and three recipes on rice and noodles. At this part it begins to read like a regular cookbook with no real rhyme or reason to the selection of recipes and how it relates to your growth as a foodie (perhaps they are just more illustrative points, but it’s unclear). The photographs are beautifully captured by Pim herself.

Pim then goes on to discuss pastry, and her approach is much more logical here — we start with two basic tart doughs, and it opens up a whole world of experimentation and innovation for the budding foodie. There’s even an example of a savory (tomato) tart to more effectively break down those self-imposed pastry barriers in one’s head. It’s followed by a few more specific recipes, including Gooey chocolate cake baked in a jar and Alfajores.

The third chapter, “How to drink like a foodie,” is of interest because Pim attempts to cover briefly subjects for which whole books have been written. Defying convention, she gives plenty of practical tips on how not to be a slave to wine scores and critics, and instead form your own notes and opinions. It is, however, not wholly practical, as it still requires you to form your wine lexicon, of course, by tasting a lot of different wines, but it’s disingenuous to think you can really “drink like a foodie” otherwise. There is a curiously lengthy section about how to marry wine and Thai food, and its specificity again can lead one to think that it’s supplementary to the blog, but still not essential in most people’s growths as foodies.

The last section is perhaps the most controversial of all, “How to be a fabulous foodie.” Leave alone the fact that lists reduce everything to David-Letterman-like randomness: why fifty? The items themselves are a mixed bag. Several of them have me nodding vigorously in agreement: go native, try a durian, pick your own berries, go on a quest for the best, learn to cook your mum’s or dad’s best dish. These are all sensible, simple truths that really strike at the heart as to what it means to be a foodie and how to have a good relationship with food. The others just serve to confound and contradict her complaint in the introduction– that there are those who admonish us into doing things the most expensive way possible. Sip a perfect espresso at Caffè Mulassano in Turin! Take your lover on a trip to Olivier Roelliner in Cancale, Brittany! Eat a plate of truffe bel humeur at the restaurant l’Ambroisie in Paris! Why? Because it’s her story on how she became the fabulous foodie that she is, and somehow it feels like you have to live it in order to be worthy of calling yourself one. It’s suddenly not enough that you abandon Starbuck’s for the best quaint neighborhood espresso place, eat in your country’s most revered French restaurant, or forage your own mushrooms– you have to fly your way to become a fabulous foodie. Of course, there is a chance that all these border on self-parody, but when they are admixed with more earnest and doable ways of being a foodie and there are no indicators that they are jokes, I’m more skeptical. Besides, why buy a Foodie Handbook if you can’t accomplish it?

One of the last sections is “Cook your story,” and it is an honest, unpretentious account of her journey towards being a foodie, which of course, starts with her family. With earlier sections on how she managed to discover the fledgling cheese company that soon blossomed into a San Francisco phenomenon and lessons on how to truly cook and not to follow recipes and behave in restaurants: these are the parts that I wished could have been more of the book. She may be that encouraging voice that tells you that you can do it, but it seems like there are a lot of things you don’t need to do to become a foodie. That is the burden of anyone who claims they can write how you can become a foodie — you can only provide a framework, but once you flesh out the details, it’s difficult not to sound pretentious.

Who might enjoy/use this book most?

Anyone who needs direction on how to break out of a food rut and learn how to appreciate food again would probably benefit from this book the most, but fans of Pim’s sassy, fabulous voice will no doubt enjoy The Foodie Handbook.