Outlaw cook

In this very autobiographical cookbook, John Thorne, author of Simple Cooking (1987), shows how learning to cook can become a voyage of self-discovery. The opening pages of Outlaw Cook evoke the slow time of childhood summers in Maine, where he first learned to taste, the secret midnight snacks in bed, where he began to compose meals, and the years as a college dropout on New York's Lower East Side, where hunger and solitude transformed an indifferent meal maker into an. Outlaw cook. The rest of the book shares his struggle to keep his kitchen a private place, and his consequent culinary rebellion - against food writers who keep filling his head with the chatter of instruction, against parental voices telling him not to play with his food, and especially against a culture that has denatured, compromised, and finally denied the polymorphous sensuality of his appetite. Along the way, he crosses swords with culinary perfectionists, argues. Against making stock, learns to throw pasta into the cooking pot by the handful instead of the carefully measured ounce, relishes Claude Monet's kitchen, wrestles with a recalcitrant wood-fired bread oven to make a genuinely artisanal loaf of bread,