Taste of Honey: The Definitive Guide to Tasting and Cooking with 40 Varietals

358 Pages·2013·11.85 MB·English

by  Marie Simmons

OTHER BOOKS BY MARIE SIMMONS
Fresh & Fast Vegetarian Things Cooks Love (Sur La Table) Soups and
Stews (Williams-Sonoma) Fig Heaven
Essentials of Healthful Cooking (Williams-Sonoma) The Amazing World
of Rice Cookies (Williams-Sonoma) The Good Egg
Puddings A to Z
Pancakes A to Z
Muffins A to Z
Bar Cookies A to Z
Holiday Celebrations (Williams-Sonoma) Fresh & Fast
Lighter, Quicker, Better (with Richard Sax) The Light Touch Cookbook
Rice: the Amazing Grain
365 Ways to Cook Pasta
Italian Light Cooking
Better by Microwave (with Lori Longbotham) Good Spirits (with Barbara
J. Lagowski)

Contents
Acknowledgments
introduction
What Is Honey?
The Life of Bees
Bee Society
The Anatomy of a Bee
The Role of the Beekeeper
Honey and Terroir
The Colors of Honey
Types of Honey
Honey and Healing
What Is Propolis?
chapter 1: tasting and cooking with honey
The Taste of Honey: A Guide to Honey Varieties
Guidelines for a Honey Tasting
Honey and Cheese Tasting
Cooking with Honey
chapter 2: breakfast and snacks
chapter 3: main dishes
chapter 4: salads and vegetable side dishes
chapter 5: sweets
Baking with Honey
Bibliography
Sources
Metric Conversions and Equivalents
Index
acknowledgments
It takes many minds and multiple palates to make a cookbook. The
primary instigators of this book are at the top of my thank-you list:
Jean Lucas, my editor and the brain behind the idea of writing a
cookbook to sort out the different honeys she encountered at her
local farmers’ market; Kirsty Melville, executive vice president and
publisher at Andrews McMeel Publishing; and Carole Bidnick, my
terrific agent, who suggested that I be the writer for this project.
Heartfelt thanks to the team at Andrews McMeel for the exquisitely
designed pages of this book. Thank you to photographer Meg Smith,
food stylist Nani Steele, and props from Christine Wolheim for
stunningly beautiful work. You, along with your assistants, are all
artists. A special thank-you to Rob Keller of Napa Valley Bee
Company, beekeeper par excellence, for supplying honey, hives, and
the beautiful honey bees for the photographs. Thank you also to my
copy editor, Tammie Barker, for giving my work the polish it needed.
A special thank-you to Emily Farris in advance of working with her on
publicity. I am grateful to all of you.
Without the hard work of others, who spent hours and possibly years
documenting the activities in the hive, keeping the bees healthy,
working in labs and compiling historical records and references, and
writing excellent books about bees and honey, the information in this
book would be a bit puny. Several of you are mentioned in the text,
and the rest can be found in the bibliography. I am grateful for your
hard work, for it not only gave me knowledge and understanding but
also fired my enthusiasm for honey, bees, and beekeepers to the
point where I am now a bit of a bee—and honey—maniac.
May Berenbaum, a professor of entomology at the University of
Illinois at Urbana Champaign, deserves special mention because it
was in one of her many books, Honey, I’m Homemade, that I found
the precise answer to a nagging question, “What is honey?”
Professor Berenbaum’s excellent explanation—gratefully
acknowledged here—helped me write a clear answer to this
question. Thank you, Professor Berenbaum, for generously agreeing
to vet portions of A Taste of Honey for me.
This book, because it is primarily a guide to honey varieties and a
cookbook, translated into many happy—and somewhat sticky—hours
spent in the kitchen tasting, testing, and tasting some more. Just
days into the project I began calling my work space “the sticky
kitchen” and was tempted to change the title to The Sticky Kitchen
Cookbook. Stickiness did little to deter from my ever-increasing
excitement for the subject, however. I started out liking honey a lot
and ended up loving it. I also fell in love with the bees.
In addition to the bees, I am grateful for the generous support and
assistance with honey and bee sleuthing I received from colleagues,
friends, and family. They are too numerous to mention here, so I will
name just a few: Helene and Spencer Marshall, longtime Napa Valley
beekeepers, for your kind hospitality; Matt Bennett, for bringing a
frame with wax honeycomb, dripping with raw honey, from his wife
Ashley’s beehive to a honey tasting I hosted for the San Francisco
Professional Food Society; the National Honey Board, for its
excellent, fact-filled website and support for this project; David Guas,
honey aficionado and chef proprietor of Bayou Bakery in Arlington,
Virginia, for introducing me to Appalachian sourwood at a tasting
hosted by the honey board; Linda Sikorski and Juliana Uruburu of
Market Hall Foods in Oakland, California, and The Pasta Shop in
Berkeley, for more honey tasting and an insightful honey and cheese
pairing experience; Brooke Jackson and Nancy Kux, for retesting a
few recipes; Laura Brainin-Rodriguez, for nutritional wisdom,
research, and friendship; Paula Hamilton and Pam Elder, dear friends
and tireless researchers, for sending media alerts and honey factoids
my way; Jenny and Hari Krishnan, neighbors and enthusiastic tasters;
and Kathleen de Wilbur, Kathleen O’Neil, Debbie Rugh, and friends in
my book club for keeping me sane.
And then there is my sweet and concerned family, who watched over
me as I worked my way through this cookbook: John, my best friend
and husband; Stephanie, our amazing daughter; Shawn, our
thoughtful son-in-law; Seraphina, our beautiful and smart
granddaughter; and Joseph, our adorable grandson, who at the age of
three insisted that my honey chocolate cake needed chocolate icing,
inspiring yet another honey recipe.