The Culinary Plagiarist: (Mis)Adventures of a Lusty, Thieving, God-Fearing Gourmand

by Jason Peters

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.

Genres: Biography

294 pages, Hardcover

Published May 28, 2020

Reviews

[Richard Nelson · Rating 5 out of 5]

A disclaimer: I studied under the author’s tutelage a few decades back, and the Mike to whom the book is dedicated was my mentor. So when the author describes making a martini with a twist, I picture it differently than most; he made me one, once, and I was honored to drink it with him and the aforementioned Mike.

All that said, this book is a riot. Peters and I share no theology (like my mentor, I’m what he calls an unbelieving Catholic and I call an atheist) but I appreciate how he honors food and drink and the life of the mind all at once. There’s plenty to enjoy here even if you and the author are not acquainted.

[Dave Crowe · Rating 5 out of 5]

The chapters in this book of ironic, humorous, and learned meditations first appeared as columns addressed to denizens of the Front Porch Republic, a community of like-minded writers, academics, and conservationists moved to promote localism. This point of origin makes the essays both fun to read and remarkably edifying. More than a farm-to-fork movement, localism, for the FPR, hopes to reinvigorate political consciousness and proper worship and personal conscience around the miracle of our having been created and left the stewards of a beautiful but fragile planet. These essays celebrate people who want to take care of that planet by living joyously and modestly in a particular local place, communing with God and neighbors and tilling the disappearing local topsoil. Peters, who is an important scholar of Wendell Berry (not to mention Flannery O’Connor, St. Augustine, the English Romantics, and the writers of the Gospels), edits books and a journal the Front Porch writers produce, and he has become something like their spokesperson. This book is about the fun they have. In these very funny and allusive essays, filled with quotations from poems and books we might have read and certainly ought to, Peters carves out space for the kind of man he likes to hang out with: a martini-drinking, meat-grilling, poetry-reading, wife-teasing, land-loving, church-going, garden-growing neighbor—the kind of neighbor you call on when you need an old snowblower fixed or a new essay edited or another grief consoled. Don’t miss the final essay of this book, in which Jason grieves the loss of his friend and sounding board, Mike, who epitomized the friendship, faith, and healthily doubting skepticism that apparently inspire Peters to write so thoughtfully.

[Andrew Figueiredo · Rating 4 out of 5]

I met Jason Peters at a convention some time ago and found him hilarious, so I picked up his book. A sometimes irreverent foodie myself, I really liked reading this. His ruminations on food, politics, and friendship are sometimes insightful and always entertaining. That said, Peters is a little *too* lusty at times and it feels a little awkward...