The Culinary Plagiarist
(Mis)Adventures of a Lusty, Thieving, God-Fearing Gourmand
- Arts & Literature
- Publisher: Front Porch Republic Books (Wipf and Stock)
- Published: 2020
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Publisher's Description
More than a collection of vignettes and stories from garden, grill, and kitchen, The Culinary Plagiarist is a sustained adventure in gustatory delight, an intensely private but candid account of desire and all its objects. Opinionated on the full range of human experience, from fasting to inebriety, from sports to politics, from religion to raunch, it is at once serious, humorous, ironic, reflective, grateful, allusive, and appetitive. Along the way it offers a defense of small-scale, local life, of family, of place, and of "the bread we do not live alone by." And also the drinks. Don't forget the drinks. This is a book for people who enjoy being alive, whether in the kitchen, the pasture, the library, the barn, the trout stream, the henhouse (or the doghouse), or the bedroom.
Endorsements (7)
“Imagine a collection of essays with all the wit and polish found in The New Yorker. Subtract the nasally, condescending tone and the moral vacuum also found there. Add in an authentic Midwestern accent and a Christian sensibility (e.g., always slice asparagus stalks so as to honor the Holy Trinity). Let it marinate in a fanciful wine over several days of reading, and you have Jason Peters’ The Culinary Plagiarist: (Mis)Adventures of a Lusty, Thieving, God-Fearing Gourmand.”
“The funniest writer in America is a broken-down hoops star of irrepressible high spirits, an astringent Christian wit, a cussedly independent rhapsodist of olive burgers and local beers, and a whipper of creams and puller of pork and minter of apothegms. Jason Peters is the (gaunt) Chesterton of Dumb Ass Acres, Michigan. Read him while it’s still legal to do so.”
“Imagine Falstaff finds God, gets lucky in marriage, and retreats to a farm, where his epic appetites, redeemed at last by person and place, inspire him to share his wit and wisdom (much of it stolen from his well-stocked bookshelf) on the joys of food and drink. In The Culinary Plagiarist, Peters puts the gusto back into gustatory, serving spicy verbs and gutting sacred cows. Consumer warning: don’t swallow while laughing.”
“In the kind of whimsical and lyrical prose that is all too rare these days, Jason Peters artfully combines the best of what has been thought and written with the best of what has been cooked and fermented to produce a thoroughly entertaining and rewarding book. I could not wait to turn the page and see what was next from Peters’ delightful and slightly devious brain.”
“This book is delicious—every chapter a little amuse-gueule. If Roger Scruton was a beer connoisseur, he would have written this book. If Robert Farrar Capon weren’t high church, he would have written this book. Put this on your shelf between Supper of the Lamb and I Drink Therefore I Am. Wonderful!”
“Jason Peters’ writing on food, drink, and other earthy pleasures is like the most candid essayist—Montaigne, say—on truth serum. He may be the raunchiest gourmand ever to publish kitchen (and bedroom) musings, and also the funniest. Beneath the libidinous arias on martinis and mushrooms, however, there is a reverent man at work, as devoted to topsoil as to pasta, as versed in the Bible as in bourbon. The book is a wise romp. Read it with your favorite dish or darling.”
“I’ve never met anyone who takes more pleasure than Jason Peters in working out the implications of the Incarnation, and his delicious prose spreads the pleasure around. If you enjoy outlandish similes, learning subversively deployed, and great throwaway opinions voiced as if any sensible person will agree, this book is for you.”
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