"For my mind and money, John Thorne is the best American food writer alive, and Outlaw Cook is the Physiology of Taste of our time." —Alton Brown

In essays ranging from his earliest cooking lessons in a cold-water walk-up apartment on New York's Lower East Side to opinions both admiring and acerbic on the food writers of the past ten years, John Thorne argues that to eat exactly what you want, you have to make it yourself. Thorne tells us how he learned to cook for himself the foods that he likes best to eat, and following along with him can make you so hungry that his simple, suggestive recipes will inspire you to go into the kitchen and translate your own appetite into your own supper.

"This book—part cookbook, part essay collection, part campfire meditation on the joys of slow and simple cooking—occupies a rightful place among the world's celebrated culinary tomes." ―Men's Journal

"Thoughtful, witty, and deliciously eccentric, John Thorne is determined to abolish dumb submission in the kitchen, to make his readers free." —Richard Olney, author of Simple French Food

"The essays delight with passion and originality. This is one of few recent books that can successfully encompass the history of the recent enshrinement of pesto, an analysis of Martha Stewart's need to be loved and a culinary awakening caused by Gunter Grass's The Tin Drum." —Publishers Weekly

"This is the type of cookbook an avid cook would like to curl up with and read from cover to cover on a cold winter's day." —Library Journal