Colman Andrews

Colman Andrews reads from The Taste of America

In the first of a new phaidon.com series the celebrated food writer reads an extract from his new book

Our American readers will need no introduction to Colman Andrews though for others around the world his name may be a new one to conjure with. Whatever the case, it's worth reminding ourselves of the suprisingly varied career of this great food and wine writer. He's perhaps best known as the founder of nineties foodie mag Saveur. After that he was restaurant columnist for Gourmet and three years ago launched thedailymeal.com

He started his career in music however, in the early seventies working as a PR at Atlantic Records in LA, working on campaigns for Jackson Browne and Bette Midler before going on to edit the west coast lifestyle magazine Coast while reviewing records for Creem magazine where the legendary music critic Lester Bangs was his commissioning editor. He also wrote liner notes for albums, one of them, for a Miles Davis record, received a Grammy nomination. 

Pursuing his successful writing career, in 1998 he published a groundbreaking book, Catalan Cuisine. It was partly his work on this that led him to pen the remarkable Reinventing Food: Ferran Adrià: The Man Who Changed the Way We Eat.

 

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The winner of 8 James Beard journalism and book awards, Colman is a wonderful author, wearing his considerable knowledge lightly and injecting really joyful flourishes into his writing. He really brings his subjects alive. So when phaidon.com read that as an English major at  university he'd actually neglected his studies in favour of the campus radio station we thought he might like to revive those early DJing efforts by making us some readings from his new book. 

We'll be bringing you one a week at around this time. We kick off the series with him reading an extract concerning the humble Graham Cracker. We hope you enjoy the readings and, if you do, please let your friends know about them. Listen to Colman read below and then head to the store to check out the print version of his wonderful book or head here for the iBook version.