"Pancakes are a luxury, like smoking marijuana or having sex. That's why I came up with the names Ho Cakes and Slutty Cakes. These are extra decadent, but in a way, every pancake is a Ho Cake." Thus speaks Kenny Shopsin, legendary (and legendarily eccentric, ill-tempered, and lovable) chef and owner of the Greenwich Village restaurant (and institution), Shopsin's, which has been in existence since 1971.
Kenny has finally put together his 900-plus-item menu and his unique philosophy--imagine Elizabeth David crossed with Richard Pryor--to create "Eat Me," the most profound and profane cookbook you'll ever read. His rants--on everything from how the customer is not always right to the art of griddling; from how to run a small, ethical, and humane business to how we all should learn to cook in a "Goodnight Moon "world where everything you need is already in your own home and head--will leave you stunned or laughing or hungry. Or all of the above.
With more than 120 recipes including such perfect comfort foods as High School Hot Turkey Sandwiches, Cuban Bean Polenta Melt, and Cornmeal-Fried Green Tomatoes with Comeback Sauce, plus the best soups, egg dishes, and hamburgers you've ever eaten, "Eat Me "is "White Trash Cooking "for the twenty-first century, as unforgettable and mind-boggling as its author.

200 recipes--from appetizers to desserts--for this nutritious and increasingly popular vegetable.

Potatoes are the world's best food. You can boil them, bake them, fry them, sauté them, grill, braise, roast, and microwave them. Potatoes are irresistible, and Lydie Marshall's recipes for them are sublime. The book is an international compendium of tempting and varied dishes by one of America's most talented cooks.

"Too Soon To Tell" reveals Trillin at his barbed and irrepressible best. His short takes send us back to contemporary life refreshed and delighted.

This delightful book collects Calvin Trillin's accounts of his trips to Europe with his wife, Alice, and their two daughters. In Taormina, Sicily, they cheerfully disagree with Mrs. Tweedie's 1904 assertion that the beautiful town "is being spoilt," and skip the Grand Tour in favor of swimming holes, table soccer, and taureaux piscine. In Paris, they sp a day on the Champs- lysées comparing Freetime's "le Hitburger" to McDonald's Big Mac. In Spain, Trillin wonders whether he will run out of Spanish "the way someone might run out of flour or eggs." Filled with Trillin's characteristic humor, Travels with Alice is the perfect book for summer travelers.

Murray Tepper would say that he is an ordinary New Yorker who is simply trying to read the newspaper in peace. But he reads while sitting behind the wheel of his parked car, and his car always seems to be in a particularly desirable parking spot. Not surprisingly, he is regularly interrupted by drivers who want to know if he is going out.

Tepper isn’t going out. Why not? His explanations tend to be rather literal—the indisputable fact, for instance, that he has twenty minutes left on the meter.

But once New Yorkers become aware of Tepper, some of them begin to suspect that he knows something they don’t. And an ever-increasing number of them are willing to line up for the opportunity to sit in his car with him and find out what it is.

Tepper Isn’t Going Out is a wise and witty story of an ordinary man who, perhaps innocently, changes the world around him.

A reissue of Calvin Trillin's memoir of his relationship with a brilliant but tragic Yale classmate that is also a rumination on social change in the 1950s and 1960s"Remembering Denny" is perhaps Calvin Trillin's most inspired and powerful book: a memoir of a friendship, a work of investigative reporting, and an exploration of a country and a time that captures something essential about how America has changed since Trillin--and Denny Hansen--were graduated from Yale in 1957. Roger "Denny" Hansen had seemed then a college hero for the ages: a charmer with a dazzling smile, the subject of a feature in "Life "magazine, a member of Phi Beta Kappa, a varsity swimmer, a Rhodes scholar...perhaps a future president, as his friends only half-joked. But after early jobs in government and journalism, Hansen's life increasingly took a downward turn and he gradually lost touch with family and old friends before eventually committing suicide--an obscure, embittered, pain-racked professor--in 1991. In contemplating his friend's life, Calvin Trillin considers questions both large and small--what part does the pressure of high expectations place on even the most gifted, how difficult might it have been to be a closeted homosexual in the unyielding world of the 1960s Foreign Service, how much responsibility does the individual bear for all that happens in his life--in a book that is also a meditation on our country's evolving sense of itself.

Calvin Trillin has never been a champion of the "continental cuisine" palaces he used to refer to as La Maison de la Casa House. What he treasures is the superb local specialty. And he will go anywhere to find one. As it happens, some of his favorite dishes can be found only in their place of origin. Join Trillin on his charming, funny culinary adventures as he samples fried marlin in Barbados and the barbecue of his boyhood in Kansas City. Travel alongside as he hunts for the authentic fish taco, and participates in a "boudin blitzkrieg" in the part of Louisiana where people are accustomed to buying these spicy sausages and polishing them off in the parking lot. ("Cajun boudin not only doesn't get outside the state, it usually doesn't even get home.") In New York, Trillin even tries to use a glorious local specialty, the bagel, to lure his daughters back from California. Feeding a Yen is a delightful reminder of why "New York" magazine called Calvin Trillin "our funniest food writer."

Calvin Trillin begins his wise and charming ruminations on family by stating the sum total of his child-rearing advice: "Try to get one that doesn't spit up. Otherwise, you're on your own." Suspicious of any child-rearing theories beyond "Your children are either the center of your life or they're not," Trillin has clearly reveled in the role of family man. Acknowledging the special perils to the privacy of people living with a writer who occasionally remarks, "I hope you're not under the impression that what you just said was off the record," Trillin deals with the subject of family in a way that is loving, honest, and wildly funny.

In the 1970s, Calvin Trillin informed America that its most glorious food was not to be found at the pretentious restaurants he referred to generically as La Maison de la Casa House, Continental Cuisine. With three hilarious books over the next two decades—American Fried; Alice, Let’s Eat; and Third Helpings—he established himself as, in Craig Claiborne’s phrase, “the Walt Whitman of American eats.” Trillin’s three comic masterpieces are now available in what Trillin calls The Tummy Trilogy.

In January 1961, following eighteen months of litigation that culminated in a federal court order, Hamilton Holmes and Charlayne Hunter became the first black students to enter the University of Georgia. Calvin Trillin, then a reporter for "Time Magazine," attended the court fight that led to the admission of Holmes and Hunter and covered their first week at the university--a week that began in relative calm, moved on to a riot and the suspension of the two students "for their own safety," and ended with both returning to the campus under a new court order.

Shortly before their graduation in 1963, Trillin came back to Georgia to determine what their college lives had been like. He interviewed not only Holmes and Hunter but also their families, friends, and fellow students, professors, and university administrators. The result was this book--a sharply detailed portrait of how these two young people faced coldness, hostility, and occasional understanding on a southern campus in the midst of a great social change.

"Brilliant . . . The dean of American comic writers showcases his varied talents mocking the public and private lives of politicians, average citizens and himself."--"The Star-Ledger"
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Calvin Trillin has committed blatant acts of funniness all over the place--in "The New Yorker, " in one-man off-Broadway shows, in his "deadline poetry" for "The Nation, " in comic novels, and in what "USA Today" called "simply the funniest regular column in journalism." Now Trillin selects the best of his funny stuff and organizes it into topics like high finance ("My long-term investment strategy has been criticized as being entirely too dependent on Publishers Clearing House sweepstakes") and the literary life ("The average shelf life of a book is somewhere between milk and yogurt"). He addresses the horrors of witnessing a voodoo economics ceremony and the mystery of how his mother managed for thirty years to feed her family nothing but leftovers ("We have a team of anthropologists in there now looking for the original meal"). He even skewers deserving political figures in poetry. In this, the definitive collection of his humor, Calvin Trillin is prescient, insightful, and invariably hilarious.
"A literary treasure . . . There is only one Calvin Trillin, and if he didn't exist we would have to invent him."--"The Washington Times"
"Funny is to Trillin what drinking is to Uncle Jed in "Annie Get Your Gun"--it's what he does 'natur'lly.' He's also a lot more than funny. "Quite Enough of Calvin Trillin" is the twenty-eighth book he's published over not far short of a half-century, and their range of subjects is remarkable."--Jonathan Yardley, "The""Washington Post"
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"Trillin made his reputation over four decades as the author of 'U.S. Journal' in the "New Yorker" but he] is incapable of resisting the temptation of comedy. The jokes kept on welling up and Mr. Trillin made a parallel reputation as a writer of funny stuff."--"The Economist"
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"Wry, whip-smart, understated, and entertaining."--"The Miami Herald"

"Trillin is our funniest food writer. He writes with charm, freedom, and a rare respect for language."
-"New York" magazine
In this delightful and delicious book, Calvin Trillin, guided by an insatiable appetite, embarks on a hilarious odyssey in search of "something decent to eat." Across time zones and cultures, and often with his wife, Alice, at his side, Trillin shares his triumphs in the art of culinary discovery, including Dungeness crabs in California, barbecued mutton in Kentucky, potato latkes in London, blaff d'oursins in Martinique, and a $33 picnic on a no-frills flight to Miami. His eating companions include Fats Goldberg, the New York pizza baron and reformed blimp; William Edgett Smith, the man with the Naughahyde palate; and his six-year-old daughter, Sarah, who refuses to enter a Chinese restaurant unless she is carrying a bagel ("just in case"). And though Alice "has a weird predilection for limiting our family to three meals a day," on the road she proves to be a serious eater-despite "seemingly uncontrollable attacks of moderation." "Alice, Let Eat "amply demonstrates why "The New Republic" called Calvin Trillin "a classic American humorist."
"One of the most brilliant humorists of our times . . . Trillin is guaranteed good reading."
-"Charleston Post and Courier"
"Read Trillin and laugh out loud."
-"Time"

"The man was stubborn", writes Calvin Trillin - the second most stubborn member of the Trillin family - to begin his fond, wry, and affecting memoir of his father. Abe Trillin had the western Missouri accent of someone who had grown up in St. Joseph and the dreams of America of someone who had been born is Russia. In Kansas City, he was a grocer, at least until he swore off the grocery business. He was given to swearing off things - coffee, tobacco, alcohol, all neckties that were not yellow in color. Presumably he had also sworn off swearing, although he was a collector of curses like "May you have an injury that is not covered by workman's compensation". Although he had a strong vision of the sort of person he wanted his son to be, his explicit advice about how to behave didn't go beyond an almost lackadaisical "You might as well be a mensch". Somehow, though, Abe Trillin's messages got through clearly. Fathers, sons, and admirers of Trillin's unerring sense of the American character will be entertained and touched by this quietly powerful memoir.