The Art of Mead Tasting and Food Pairing

Description

The world's first mead tasting and appreciation book, all the history of mead drink, not a mead making book, but finally a mead drinking book! With pairing suggestions for all types of mead and food, including Paleo, gluten-free, dairy-free and vegetarian. 44 food recipes and 10 dessert recipes with appropriate mead pairings, as well as 14 mead cocktail recipes. The 60 sidebars feature individual meads, meaderies and meadmakers; mead and cheese pairing; how to pair mead and snacks; mead vinegars; honeywine and honey spirits. Fully indexed. 345 gorgeous color photographs. The Art of Mead Tasting and Food Pairing demystifies all the varieties of mead from honey-only traditional meads to melomels (fruit meads) and from session meads to metheglins (spiced meads), how to pour and drink them, and the flavor dynamics that help you understand how to pair each type with food. Author Chrissie Manion Zaerpoor provides mead legends, lore and history from many parts of the world in the context of that region's food traditions, with detailed suggestions for pairing ethnic foods and ethnic styles of mead, along with delicious international recipes. Includes Viking lore and modern Scandinavian recipes; Irish and Celtic lore with modern Irish recipes; Roman and Greek lore with modern Mediterraneam recipes; as well as from Africa, India, and Asia. Where to Buy Mead includes bottle shops with selections worthy of road trips - across states and in your largest vehicle - and bars specializing in meads and mead cocktails. You'll meet many of the movers and shakers in the mead industry, see their meaderies, and feel more confident about going to meaderies to taste and buy mead for your home mead cellar and about serving mead at home with spectacular food pairings. Hard cover, full color, ribbon bookmark, 432 pages, 345 photos. Foreword by Ken Schramm. Review: Makes you even happier about drinking - Since the beginning of time, man has asked, "How can I turn THAT into booze?" With grain or grapes, you know the answers, but most Americans know little about mead, beer and wine's honey-based cousin. Why I enjoyed this gorgeous book: - Chrissie Manion Zaerpoor is passionate about every aspect of mead. This isn't like a cookbook by, say, the Notorious B.I.G., where the supposed author probably had little to do with writing it. It's aimed at an intelligent audience, so if you DID enjoy the Notorious B.I.G. Cookbook, this might not be for you. - The photographs are excellent and have a consistent style. In principle, photographing food is easy: it doesn't move, and you can arrange the lighting however you want. In practice, there are a lot of bad pictures of food out there. You won't find them here. - The recipes aren't more complex than is absolutely necessary. I read the Wall Street Journal, which features simplified recipes by famous chefs. The SIMPLE versions seem to average 15 ingredients, invariably things I've never heard of, or wouldn't know where to buy (e.g., spicy Argentine beef tongue sausage). This book emphasizes excellence in ingredients and preparation, not unneeded complexity. - The book is extremely well-constructed physically. Think of a 400+ page full-color textbook with excellent binding, precisely cut pages, picture bleed to the edge of pages, etc. - It makes you recognize that humans are omnivores, and that quality meats and moderate alcohol can be part of a healthy lifestyle. Americans seem to rush from one eating fad to another, thinking that the latest one will make up for their sedentary lifestyles and poor lifestyle choices. Most recipes here -- including the meads -- are similar to things people have eaten for thousands of years. Having McDonalds and a 6-pack every night is bad for you, but that doesn't mean that you can't enjoy some mead with your Japanese Braised Pork Belly. Review: This book is awesome - One of my FAVORITE cookbooks EVER