Immerse In Lives Of Notorious Cooks Picturized By Brendan Connell Offered As Printed Matter

is an utterly entrancing assemblage of biographies historical and fabulous from the antipodes of cuisine,
In the tradition of Ihara Saikaku, this book presents a wide range of obsessions as they manifest through the lens of singleminded devotion to manipulating food.

This wonderful and strangely disturbing book casts a continuing spell, read someof the biographies so far and they are invariably entertaining and strange Mr, Connell is one of my favorite authors these days, His wit and creativity and wide ranging topics make him a joy to read, Originally posted at the Small Press Book
sitelink blogsp

Abstinence and indulgence, pleasure and pain, Each meal holds a microcosm of the world of desires, Brendan Connell has compiled a group of the most exquisite, the most transcendent, the most tortured masters of the culinary world for our reading pleasure.
Lives of Notorious Cooks brings togetherof the worlds greatest masters of cookery and in doing so also provides us a unique view of the antique world through its skillets, cleavers and stomachs.
He prefaces the book with a mysterious caveat: This book may be fiction or may be fact, It is probably best not to cite this work in any essays intended as part of an academic history qualification, Enough said.

The eras of the cooks range from one hundred years to four thousand or more years ago and they come from ancient Roman, Egyptian, Chinese, Japanese and English cultures among others.
The portraits vary in length from one page tapas to full multi course eleven page feasts, The cooks themselves may come as grandiose divas who live theatrical lives and consume just as much as they cook, mountain dwelling ascetics who hesitate to cut vegetables too vigorously in honor of the plants Buddha nature, and some who are only mentioned briefly in their own stories.
Regardless, Connell captures the tone of the times and places perfectly,

Connell is a master of emulating the style of antiquated manuscripts perfectly with their particular language, oblique references and cultural idiosyncrasies, Each portrait is produced from what appear to be varying amounts of fact, speculation and extrapolation, If the admittedly limited fact checking I performed is any indication then Connell has done a noteworthy amount of research and has filled in the gaps with his warped and powerful imagination.
His humor is bone dry, slipped in almost like an afterthoughtthough without losing any potency, Some jokes are reminiscent of the famous Spam sketch from Monthy Pythons Flying Circus and I found myself laughing out loud at more than a few of the stories.
He wields repetition to great effect and often whips around and drops novelty right as you are settling into a common groove, The paranormal plays a role in many of the stories, with demons and goddesses popping up to little fanfare to help or hinder the cooks and in at least one case to become enchanted cookware.
This combination of brevity and the supernatural had me at times feeling traces of Borges though the writing here is totally unique,

One of the great pillars of the work is the dishes and recipes Connell describes, Playing with obscure delicacies and very probable but probably impossible dishes he serves us eight pound swallow tongue pies by the truckload, wormwood cakes and the moon or so it seems.
The lists of ornate, luxurious and sometimes revolting dishes goes on and on and provides just as much entertainment as the stories themselves, Not only the foods but how much and how the dishes are prepared provide ample entertainment: feasts of absurd size and acts of grotesque overindulgence abound, living foods and dishes of mimicry are common.


The stories did sometimes seem repetitive and Connell uses similar tricks from time to time, I initially took this as a fault in the work but came to feel after reading further that this is usually just a small humorous act on Connells part.
The writing throughout is fantastic and as mentioned above Connell is an excellent mimic of the styles of the time, Of course if these styles do not resonate with you than appreciation the Lives of Notorious Cooks may be slightly limited,

Connell has compiled an excellent and entertaining resource for those interested in the seamy side of the culinary world, Thoroughly enjoyable and often bizarre, it is a rousing and lively look into history and the people who cooked for it, At first I thought this would be a great companion piece to Lunar Follies, Gilbert Sorrentino's sendup of pretentious art galleries, This collection of short essays lives up to its title, relating sometimes hilarious bios of famous cooks from antiquity forward, Some are historically true, others, more mythic, but the food porn references tend to cloy after a while, It's the situations and life experiences of these people whose passion was for their food as opposed to station in life or those they cooked for.
This is not my normal read, but I won it as a GR giveaway and was excited to give it a shot, I really enjoyed having something to read in between other long, epic novels, This is probably the most random book I've read this year, and I would recommend it to anyone who wants to break up the monotony of reading serials.
Ω! Τι μπορώ να πω γι' αυτό το βιβλιαράκι Είναι γοητευτικό, μυστηριώδες, σκαμπρόζικο, ευφυές, συγκινητικό, και πάνω απ' όλα γεμάτο γεύσεις, γεύσεις, γεύσεις! A feast of the senses, Lives of Notorious Cooks being, in many ways, the culinary cousin to his astounding novel/collection Metrophilias, which does for the art of cooking what that book did for the world's poleis and their disparate denizens.
With some luck, Connell will find an interesting theme in this same delicious vein and round out thesetreasuries of minifictional biographies, with a third volume.

Cooks is like a miniArabian nights, where the kitchen can be anywhere rather than successive "nights", time shifts back and forth to different points in history and the nationalities and ethnicity of the various cooks run the gamut of possibilities, Arab being only one of many.


With this book
Connell, proving himself, a cook,
has concocted a repast of
countless courses of figments
all pulsating with life amp
spirit, oozing
fabulous juices
of freshest figs.


This is the hook, now read the book!

An interesting idea, to write fictional biographies of historical cooks, Best taken in small bites can be a bit pungent, The book is mosaic in nature, telling the unconnected stories of several notorious cooks, It has a large geographic reach, spanning from England to China and all points in between, In addition, it covers a great chunk of time, The stories include both mundane and fantastic elements, Therefor, this book could have been written for me,

The idea is a good one, Many of the stories are simultaneously funny,touching and eccentric, However, after several of them, they begin to merge and the readers attention begins to wander,

This would be a good bedside/handbag book, You could read a random story when time allows, However, I wouldnt recommend reading them one after the other, Take time to savor, and digest, each meal before moving on to the next, This would make a good Christmas present for a foodie, Fair to middlin', I liked the premise more than the execution, . . some stories were great others shouldnt have made the collection, the organization was just confusing to offputting, . . needed more massaging Great capsule biographies of masters of cookery throughout history, Connell's varied tones evoke a variety of moods and feelings, like the flavors of the dishes in a perfectly tuned meal, These pages made me hungry at times, but sometimes did the opposite, as though I'd eaten by myself a feast intended for one hundred, There is a loose connective tissue through the biographies, in the form of the cooks' imperturbable natures, certain shared ingredients, and possibly in a recurring demon/cooking implement.


Connell is a master of the anticlimactic appended paragraph, It takes a second to get into the groove of this little book, but it's absolutely a worthwhile read, The pieces are pretty short some only a page or two so after a while it starts to seem more like poetry, I read this on the beach in Jamaica, and it was perfect for alternating between reading and snoozing,

My favorite story was about a cook named Lala Sukh Lal Jain, set in India, His sweets were so delicious that a Brahmin bought some and took them to the BhadraKālī temple as an offering to the deity, The goddess loved them so much she scooped up a different confection in each of her sixteen hands, p.

"Carême opened a shop on the Rue de la Paix but it might as well be said that heaven opened its gates, such were the beauties to be seen therein ornaments of almond paste forests of parsley and chives rivers of béchamel mountains of Bavarian cheeses bedecked in violets.
" p.

"'You will never turn back once you have eaten my cooking, for to do so would be like tumbling from the highest clouds into the deepest abyss.
'" p.

"A woman came to him saying she felt very tired,
'What should I eat to gain more energy' she asked,
'Eat whatever tastes good to you,' he said, 'but dance as often as possible, '" p.

"'My son,' he said, 'hospitality, in this day and age when the triumphs of cookery have been all but forgot and even God is scarcely honoured, is looked on as a mere chance occurrence, but it is in fact the highest art, for in it all arts are combined one must be a poet, a painter, a sculptor, and a philosopher one must master the sciences botany and anatomy if one is to both conserve and candy, if one is to sauce as well as dress and bring meat to a faultless coction.
But even if you were a veritable Aristotle in the kitchen, still you would need the mystical element to reach

the highest planes, '" p.Originally published at sitelinkRisingshadow,

Brendan Connell definitely can't be blamed for lack of imagination and wittiness, because who else could've come up with the idea of writing a historical book about cooks.
This fully fictional account of the lives of historical people is a damn good book it's historical fantasy at its best,

As you may have already guessed by the previous sentence, I categorize this book as historical fantasy it's also possible to categorize this book as historical speculative fiction, because certain stories contain fantastical elements.


Lives of Notorious Cooks is one of the best and most entertaining books I've read this year I never would've thought that it would be possible to write a book like this about cooks and cooking.
I think it's great that Brendan Connell can surprise his readers with books that defy categorization and are totally different from all other books on the market.
He's one of those rare authors who aren't afraid to use imagination while writing new books and stories,

Lives of Notorious Cooks contains several short stories, It's almost like a different kind of Metrophilias Metrophilias is an excellent flash fiction collection by Brendan Connell, but in this case some of the stories aren't exactly flash fiction, because they're too long to be flash fiction.


These decadent and fantastical biographies ofcharacters are fascinating stories, because Brendan Connell has a way with words and he uses witty expressions.
It's interesting to read what happens to the cooks, The stories are humorous and also a bit disturbing in a playful way, You'll find yourself smiling and smirking when you read these stories,

It's fascinating to read about different kind of cooks and their foods in vivid details, The author writes about the cooks and their lives enchantingly and lets his readers see glimpses of their lives, Their lives are filled with all kinds of happenings, cooking and delicacies, which will cast an enchantment over the reader so that he/she has to keep on reading the stories.


Brendan Connell's literary prose is wonderful and sparkles with creativity and originality, His writing is so beautiful that it's difficult to find another author who is capable of writing similar kind of nuanced and witty prose, To be honest, this book is a small gem of sparkling imagination to readers of historical fiction and speculative fiction,

If you're looking for something different to read and want to read quality, you must read this book, because Brendan Connell writes beautiful prose and interesting stories.
This collection can be especially recommended to readers who are interested in cooking and delicacies, but other readers will also enjoy it,

Highly recommended!
When he reached the age of, Peng Zu was sought after by the benevolent Emperor Yao, who wished to receive advice on ruling the nation.
Peng Zu made a thick soup for the emperor out of pheasant, Jobs tear seeds and plums, well salted, Eating the dish, the emperor felt as if he were sitting on air, He was filled with a deep cosmic joy in which he saw everything clearly,

“You see,” Peng Zu said, “the gravest problems of state can be resolved over a bowl of soup, The people, seeing you live frugally will not resent you, When the ruler is calm, the nation is calm, ”

Learn of the outrageous and sometimes dubious lives of Peng Zu and fifty other notorious cooks from the pages of history and legend, in a picaresque dictionary of delicious and playful storytelling.
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