Summer Must-Reads of 2011, Food-wise

Tomatoland
In what started as a James Beard Award-winning Gourmet article, food politics journalist Barry Estabrook traces the modern supermarket tomato from the deserts of Peru through paltry paid farmworkers in Florida hoping on at least a one cent per pound wholesale raise for the fruits of their labor. "What can you say when you find twelve farm workers, covered in pesticides living in a trailer and paying $2,000 a month," asked Estabrook at this year's Cooking For Solutions conference at Monterey Bay Aquarium, home of the much-adopted Seafood Watch guide. Now there's a look at just how unsustainable and unfair the trade is for tomatoes, and in Estabrook's always vivid words.

Tart & Sweet
Before this summer's crops bloom into unmanageable quantities, here's a plan of action: a whole cookbook devoted to canning and pickling, but one both pie-baking, chutney-packing moms and beer mustard-curious guys can use. Learn to make what all the cool picklers make—candied kumquats, citrus-ginger-pear butter, habañero hot sauce, daikon pickles, fermented kimchi, and recipes to go with, like nachos with pickled okra, braised short ribs with pickled onions, and a Martini with pickled ramps. Read more about the catering co. responsible for these renditions, Sweet Deliverance, at Edible Manhattan.

Beer Craft
Given all the small-scale breweries popping up all over the country, a pair of NYC apartment-bound recreational beermakers (a journalist for the WSJ, GQ, Fast Company; a web-savvy designer/editor) figured there should be simpler, more up-to-date literature on homebrewing for more would-be entrepreneurs. Complete with illustrations and one-gallon recipes, they've created such a guide. Check them in this Edible Manhattan news spot.

Goat: Meat, Milk, Cheese
Goat's cheese is well-eaten in the U.S. but not yet its meat (save for street-side rarities), despite the worldwide attention it gets for its lean, low-cholesterol cuts that cook like lamb. With recipes like saag paneer curry, goat empanadas with chimichurri, jerk-rubbed leg with blood orange and chops roasted with blackberries and sage, this cookbook might send you begging your butcher. There's also lessons in cheese-making, dairy-milking and goat-raising; cultural context; and new adaptations for milk and cheese, like chocolate-dipped goat cheese balls.

Edible
Those Edibles—you may have heard of them way too many times here but in case you wanted to check out the work of Edible magazines outside your region, the community has published a compilation of best-of articles and recipes. It's a good way to get to know all those small-scale American food businesses, farmers and lesser-known chefs that are doing right by food in an industry that became so confusing and far-removed from the days of family farms and neighborhood butchers.