The Devil's Picnic: Around the World In Pursuit of Forbidden Fruit
Presented by Pages Books & Magazines, HarperCollins Canada and NOW
"Grescoe is of the Anthony Bourdain school of food reportage, treating the reader as a sidekick on a rebellious gastronomical adventure with lots of boozing (absinthe in Switzerland), drugs (coca leaves in Bolivia) and foods that, tasty as they may be, are not for the faint of heart . . . behind this culinary risk-taker hides a true policy wonk, deeply interested in the regulations that make so many forbidden foods, drinks and drugs . . . forbidden." -Washington Post
In The Devil's Picnic (HarperCollins Canada), Montreal writer Taras Grescoe serves a social history of prohibition as a nine-course meal. Beginning with appetizers and aperitifs and closing with dessert and digestifs, Grescoe delights in challenging the nanny-state mentality. He takes readers on a provocative tour through the forbidden fruits of Europe, Asia, and the Americas, exploring the mystique and aura that surround some of the world's most highly sought after - and often illegal - delicacies.
Join us as Taras Grescoe and award-winning cookbook author Jeffrey Alford talk about the taboo foods Grescoe encountered in his travels. We'll have samples of some of these foods on hand, so come prepared to indulge in forbidden fruits! Taras Grescoe will be delighted to sign copies of The Devil's Picnic.
The Devil's Picnic (HarperCollins Canada) is Taras Grescoe's travelogue of crisscrossing the globe in search of illicit indulgences. Grescoe drinks moonshine in Norway and absinthe Swizerland. He eats malodorous raw milk cheese at a French farm and poppy seed crackers in Singapore. He hunts for criadillas - bull's testicles served in a garlicky stew - in Madrid and smuggles Cuban cigars into the United States. He chews coca leaves with indigenous people in La Paz and witnesses the same hardy leaf being transformed into cocaine in the backwoods of Bolivia. He draws the line at sipping pentobarbital sodium in Switzerland, where suicide tourists come to legally end their lives.
Taras Grescoe is the author of Sacre Blues: A Unsentimental Journey Through Quebec, which won both the Mavis Gallant Prize and the Edna Staebler Award for Non-Fiction and was a national bestseller. His second book, The End of Elsewhere, was shortlisted for the Writers' Trust Non-Fiction Prize. He is a frequent contributor to the New York Times, Salon, CondÈ Nast Traveller, the Independent, and has written features for Saveur, the New York Times Magazine, Wired, and the Chicago Tribune Magazine. He lives in Montreal, where is working on a new book that will take him around the world in search of a decent plate of seafood.
Jeffrey Alford is the co-author, with Naomi Duguid, of five cookbooks: Flatbreads and Flavors: A Baker's Atlas (William Morrow, 1995), Seductions of Rice (Artisan, 1998), Hot Sour Salty Sweet: A Culinary Journey through Southeast Asia (Artisan, 2000), HomeBaking: The Artful Mix of Flour and Tradition Around the World (Artisan 2003), and Mangoes & Curry Leaves: Culinary Travels Through the Great Subcontinent (Artisan 2005). Both Flatbreads and Hot Sour Salty Sweet won the James Beard Award for best Cookbook of the Year. Alford first travelled to Asia for eighteen months in 1977-78, eating his way across west Asia, India, and Thailand, and he's been travelling regularly back ever since. Jeffrey met partner Naomi Duguid while on a bicycle trip across the Himalaya, from Lhasa to Kathmandu, in 1985. The following year they bicycled together from western China to northern Pakistan, and a year later, from western Tibet into Xinjiang. Along the way they talked about food a lot.
