The Splendid Table: Conversations & Recipes For Curious Cooks & Eaters · American Public Media

835: Fall Cookbooks with Aleksandra Crapanzano, Anna Ansari, and Cassie Yeung

·50 min·4 clips

Louis XIV used chocolate to control his courtiers, banning it later for love, sparking a black market.

Francis Lam opens by framing the fall season as cookbook season, with new books arriving every week for months. He singles out three books he is especially excited about, starting with Alexandra Crapanzano and Chocolat. Alexandra grew up in a literary family in Paris, wrote for film and television, spent 15 years as a cooking columnist for the Wall Street Journal, and has built the latest book in a trilogy of cookbooks about French home baking. The conversation settles into dessert, chocolate, and the pleasures of French home baking. Anna Ansari follows with Silk Roads. A remembered noodle dish from her teenage years opens into a wider history of flavor, and she explains how it tasted like home before she had language for why. Francis and Anna move through Uyghur food, Central Asia, trade routes, migration, Baku, Beijing, and the way ingredients have traveled across centuries. Cassie Young closes the episode with Bad Bitch in the Kitsch. Her cookbook brings the show closer to home with Chinese and other Asian recipes she remembers from growing up. Francis keeps the discussion anchored in what people actually cook, which leads to a quick egg and tomato idea and a 30 minute beef and broccoli recipe at the end. The episode stays close to the plate while showing how food carries family, place, culture, and memory.

As heard by us

Three cookbooks turn taste into memory, route, and home.

Fall cookbook season comes into focus through three picks Francis Lam seems especially taken with: Alexandra Crapanzano's Chocolat, Silk Roads by Anna Ansari, and Cassie Young's debut cookbook, Bad B**** in the Kitsch.

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You want a fall cookbook episode that starts with dessert and ends with a 30-minute supper.

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