Book Note: The Food Snob's Dictionary.

The Food Snob's Dictionary: An Essential Lexicon of Gastronomical Knowledge by David Kamp (Author), Marion Rosenfeld (Author), Ross Macdonald (Illustrator).

Last year, David Kamp wrote a wonderful food book, THE UNITED STATES OF ARUGULA. This year David Kamp and Marion Rosenfeld have produced a little volume that is a very funny dictionary of foodie words and phrases, some of them X-rated, and altogether a very useful reference.

Food prep definitions: affinage, emulsion, and concasse. Foods: fennel pollen, pulses, peekytoe crab, PEI mussels, crepinette, poulet de Bresse, and porchetta. Terms like farmstead, farm to table, biodynamics, and molecular gastronomy.

How about the differences among “free-ranged,” “grass-fed,” and “organic” meat?

Quark (a curdlike cheese) and a subatomic particle?

Chino Farm (organic produce) and Niman Ranch (natural meat)?

Romanesco (a broccoli-cauliflower hybrid) and Romesco (a Catalonian sauce of nuts, garlic and tomatoes)?

The authors are often quite funny: biodynamics, for example, is defined as an "intense, holier-than-thou organic farming movement".

"Foam," a "sputum-like nuisance".

Puget Sound Geoduck, an "alarmingly phallic siphon that hangs, John Holmes-like, out of its shell."

Reminds me a bit of some of Samuel Johnson's offbeat definitions: "Oats. A grain, which in England is generally given to horses, but in Scotland supports the people".

The book is organized alphabetically, from “Affinage” to “Zest,” with stand-alone essays on films, guilty pleasures and the pronunciation of names, little biographies of famous foodies like James Beard, Lucius Beebe, and Dione Lucas. You'll be able “to correctly identify esteemed food personages in conversation with other food snobs." Example: Don’t refer to James Beard as James. He was "Jim". The New York Times restaurant critic William Grimes is known as "Biff". Others: "Ruth RYE-shul, Ghee Sav-WAH and Tim and Nina Zuh-GATT."

There are 60 interesting, sometimes funny, black and white illustrations that spice up the text.

It's not easy to keep up with the language of food snobs -- or even your every day foodie. Hopefully Mr. Kamp [David?, Dave? _____?] will find a way to keep us all up to date. [He's done a nice job on his website http://www.davidkamp.com with United States of Arugula, but so far there's no sign of Food Snob there. Hint: the site is a great resource for his fans.]

Very strongly recommended.

[Jenise]

Puget Sound Geoduck, an "alarmingly phallic siphon that hangs, John Holmes-like, out of its shell."

This has not gone un-noticed up here. Two years ago one of our best friends dressed up on Halloween as a flasher. He wore a trench coat and a live geoduck taped inside his pants.

Boy, ain't that the truth Jenise.

Some of the pictures on Google Images are hilarious.

One thing I learned was that perhaps raising them isn't so funny. Any views on the environmental impact?

http://nogeoduckfarm.com/

and

http://nogeoduckfarm.com/_wsn/page2.html

Puget Sound Geoduck, an "alarmingly phallic siphon that hangs, John Holmes-like, out of its shell."

This has not gone un-noticed up here. Two years ago one of our best friends dressed up on Halloween as a flasher. He wore a trench coat and a live geoduck taped inside his pants.

Ever see the episode of "Dirty Jobs" where Mike Rowe goes out to harvest (non-farmed) geoducks? The look on his face while he grabs those things and pulls them out of the mud is pretty funny.

[Jenise]

Never have. But I thought Jim was very brave for wearing that thing. Possibly braver is that after the party, Jim and Mary drove down to the Bay to get some salt water to refresh the poor thing as it was getting a bit, um, flacid, and in the morning they cooked it for breakfast.