Giant Cookbooks Descend on New York at Phaidon Pop-Up Store

Phaidon, the publisher of such door-stoppingly huge cooking tomes as The Silver Spoon and 1080 Recipes, and -- more recently -- I Know How to Cook and Coco: 10 of the World's Greatest Chefs, 100 Emerging Culinary Stars, will open a pop-up store in New York City for the holiday season.

The temporary shop, called PHAIDON|STORE, will occupy a 2,500-square-foot retail space at 100 Wooster Street (between Prince and Spring) from November 2, 2009, through January 2010.

According to a press release, the shop will hold special events and offer concierge services and same-day delivery in Manhattan. Here's hoping they won't charge by the pound.

Gourmet Cookbook Sales Rise as Magazine Tumbles

The Book on Bacon Dashi

Jonathan Safran Foer on Not Eating Meat

The Piglet: A Cookbook Smackdown

The new cooking website food52 has announced "The Piglet," which founders Amanda Hesser and Merrill Stubbs are calling a "tournament of cookbooks."

Think March Madness, only in October and with cookbooks instead of basketball teams.

Sixteen cookbooks published in 2009 (see list below) will be reviewed head-to-head in a bracketed competition modeled on The Mornings News' annual "Tournament of Books" to pick the best novel of the year.

Recipe Bookmarking for Cookbooks

You may have collected hundreds of great recipes that are bookmarked in your browser for easy future reference, but how do you find cherished (and permalink-less) recipes in an old-fashioned cookbook?

This could be a serious technological challenge for future generations of cooks educated only in the ways of epicurious.

The Chef Set page flags give you a way to bookmark -- in an analog way --  your favorite cookbook recipes, tagged by category (appetizers, meats, seafood, and so on). $5.95 at The Spoon Sisters.

Seinfeld Prevails Over Sneaky Chef

A federal judge threw out cookbook author Missy Chase Lapine's copyright claim against Jessica Seinfeld.

Real Chefs Catch Fish With Their Bare Hands

Perusing Eat Me Daily's post about the new cookbook from "Top Chef" alum Fabio Viviani, I was struck by the similarity of one of the book's images to a photo from another chef cookbook.

The above image of Ludovic Lefebvre (left) from his cookbook Crave is nearly the same as that of Viviani (right) in his new book: badass chef dude wades into the sea in his jeans and seemingly pulls two giant fish out of the water with nothing but his hands. We don't need no stinking fishing poles!

Back in 2005, Leslie Brenner swooned over the photo of Lefebvre in the pages of the Los Angeles Times: "Look at him, emerging from the surf like a chef-Adonis, kelp fairly dangling from his biceps. He caught those big fish with his bare hands!"

So, will this mean that the barehanded fishing shot will become de rigeur for the up-and-coming celebrity chef, or have Viviani and Lefebvre simply upped the ante to something even more absurdly over-the-top?

Gourmet Rhapsody: A Fictional Foodoir

Just released in an English translation, Muriel Barbery's first novel Gourmet Rhapsody (published in France in 2000) tells the story of Pierre Arthens, the greatest food critic in the world, who, facing death, searches his memory for "that singular flavor, that sublime something once sampled, never forgotten, the Flavor par excellence." "While 'Gourmet Rhapsody' is unlikely to appeal to as wide a reading swath as [Barbery's] 'The Elegance of the Hedgehog,'" says the Christian Science Monitor, "Barbery’s descriptions should have foodies salivating." $9 at amazon.com. 

No-Knead: The Book

Coming soon: My Bread: The Revolutionary No-Knead, No-Work Method, a baking book by Sullivan Street Bakery's Jim Lahey. The book detail's Lahey's now legendary technique for making "no-knead" bread and pizza, along with recipes for Sullivan Street standards like pizza bianca, desserts, and sandwiches. Due out on October 5, the book is available now for pre-order for $19.77 at amazon.com (dutch oven sold separately).