Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
Cookbooks & Kitchenware
54
Books for Cooks
Turning the Pages
Melbourne, Australia
While Sydney and Melbourne run neck-
and-neck when it comes to the liveliness of
their food scenes, Melbourne's got one
thing Sydney hasn't: Books for Cooks.
Tucked away in the suburb of Fitzroy, this
culinary bookstore is a rare find, with an
amazingly extensive stock—somewhere
around 22,000 volumes at any one time—
of books about food and wine, both new
and secondhand (including many rare vin-
tage books and even a number of titles in
languages other than English). Spread
across a double-wide storefront, it's the
sort of clean, well-lighted place where you
could browse for hours.
While the London shop of the same
name (4 Blenheim Cres;
&
44 20
72211992;
www.booksforcooks.com) has
come to be known for its cooking classes
and recipe testing, its Australian counter-
part remains squarely a bookseller, taking
distinctive pride in tracking down any title
a customer might want. The selection is
constantly changing as the staff acquires
books from an ingenious variety of
sources. It's not just cookbooks; they also
offer scholarly food history, food science
books, wine guidebooks, and other essen-
tial reference works.
233 Gertrude St, Fitzroy (
&
61/3/8415
1415;
www.booksforcooks.com.au).
(
Melbourne (24km/15 miles).
L
$$$
The Como Melbourne,
630
Chapel St., South Yarra (
&
1800/033 400
in Australia, or 800/552-6844 in the U.S.
and Canada; www.mirvachotels.com.au).
$$
Fountain Terrace,
28 Mary St., St.
Kilda (
&
03/9593 8123;
www.fountain
terrace.com.au).
Food Museums
55
The Food Museums of Parma
The Treasures of Food Valley
Parma, Italy
It's known as Food Valley—the scenic
province of Parma, long hailed for its
world-famous luscious ham, tomatoes,
and, of course, its hard, pungent, delicious
Parmesan cheese. Parma's Musei del
Cibo—the Museums of Food—had an
intriguing idea: Instead of stuffing food
exhibits together in one central museum,
why not spin off three small museums
throughout the region, each one devoted
to another of Parma's signature foods?
The first to open was in the medieval
town of Soragna, with its 15th-century
castle. Here, in a gated courtyard just out-
side the castle walls, the
Parmesan
Cheese Museum
(Via Volta 5;
&
39/521/
596-129
) opened in 2003 in a round white-
washed building, originally built in 1848 as
a cheese factory. (It looks almost like a big
wheel of cheese itself.) Five different prov-
inces of the Emilia region are officially
allowed to call their cheese “Parmigiano”;
