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What to Drink with What You Eat: The Definitive Guide to Pairing Food with Wine, Beer, Spirits, Coffee, Tea - Even Water - Based on Expert Advice from America's Best Sommeliers

(Also see the Interviews with the authors:
Andrew Dornenburg and Karen Page)
Book Description
The most comprehensive guide to matching food and drink ever compiled, by the James Beard Award winning author team of Karen Page and Andrew Dornenburg, with practical advice from more than seventy of America’s leading pairing experts.
     In a great meal, what you drink is just as important as what you eat. This groundbreaking food and beverage pairing reference allows food lovers to learn to think like a sommelier, and to transform every meal - breakfast, lunch, and dinner - from ordinary to extraordinary.
     Exceptional in its depth and scope - with over fifteen hundred entries - What to Drink with What You Eat is based on the collective wisdom of experts at dozens of America’s best restaurants, including Alinea, Babbo, Bern’s, Blue Hill, Chanterelle, Daniel, Emeril’s, French Laundry, Frontera Grill, Inn at Little Washington, Jean Georges, Masa’s, The Modern, Per Se, Rubicon, Tru, and Valentino.
     You’ll find authoritative recommendations for stocking your cellar and kitchen with must-have beverages, from wines to waters. You’ll also learn what to drink with everything from French toast to Chinese food, and what to eat with everything from Pinot Noir to green tea, to create mouthwatering matches. Follow the authors three simple Rules to Remember when making a match - or just dive into the wide-ranging listings in chapters 5 and 6.
     This incisive, hip writing team (Publisher’s Weekly) distills history, geography, science, expert technique, and original insight to create a remarkably user-friendly and engaging reference. Lavishly illustrated with gorgeous four-color photographs, What to Drink with What You Eat is an instant classic essential to every connoisseur’s bookshelf.

REVIEW
This is truly spectacular aid to matching food with drink. We all are creatures of the tried and liked comfort zone of doing this. Found something, stay with it. Don't change a winning game.

Tough to venture out when don't know the lay of the land. But here in this rich, well done, nearly 350 page compendium are the helps to move us into new food/drink heavenly combos. In the similar style as their classics: Becoming Chef and Culinary Artistry, authors talk with famous chefs and drink experts and then combine all this into workable format for such expansion to happen among us. There are many sections to this, but one that takes off on same tangent as Culinary Artistry is alphabetically by various subjects listing of what goes well with what, e.g. Crayfish = especial winners as New World Chardonnarys, chablis, and white burgundy, with some other suggestions as well. Or one can go the other route of what goes with Chardonnay and we find crayfish, but super special combos recommended include: Crab and cream sauces, chicken in cream sauce, lobster and veal. There are minute details here, which is superb value of this. Reminds me of my first exposure to wine/food pairings. I would go to this wine store where this expert would make recommendations. He would ask what's the food to match: I would say lasagna. He would ask, what are the herbs and how much garlic, tomato sauce, etc. Never forget when he recommeded a French rose for a steak with complex butter. Hated rose till made that combo. This book gives that kind of advice and detail.

The writing is superb, e.g. this overall desription of its objective which it easily meets: "Sampling new beverages is typically a low-risk proposition--with a high potential payoff."

The richness of the paperstock, photos and printing are perfect stylistic choices to this wonderful, useful resource. Not only for wine and food pairings, but also waters, beers, teas, etc. Their are tips on how to taste, how to start with something you like and move on to others one probably will enjoy discovering, etc.

Renown chefs and sommeliers provide their pairing favorites along with some recipes. Haven't found it yet, but what I have found so valuable is my dossier that I keep on food/drink pairings, when possible removing label off drinks to put in this diary. Would have been nice to find sample of this. Maybe I'll discover it already included, or maybe for second printing?

You can't go wrong on securing this for yourself or as gift.
rodboomboom (Amazon.com)