Friday , March 29 2024
One hundred seventy-six pages of pure food porn.

Book Review: Slurp – Drinks and Light Fare, All Day, All Night by Nina Dreyer Hensley, Jim Hensley, and Paul Løwe

Norwegian Nina Dreyer Hensley and her North American transplant partner Jim Hensley are photographers based out of Oslo. Along with stylist Paul Løwe, the pair have contributed to several magazines and have created more than 15 cookbooks. Slurp – Drinks and Light Fare – All Day, All Night is their latest, and it is 176 pages of pure food porn.

By "food porn" I mean photographs of food that are hyper-real and cause the reader to involuntarily head to the kitchen to attempt to recreate the beauties displayed in the book. Slurp plays the role of an art book in as much as it is a cookbook, and it is more likely to be found on coffee tables than in the kitchen.

The book is broken up into four main sections, beginning with drink accessories. These are things like fancy ice cubes with items frozen into them that will compliment your drinks, such as fruit or herbs. Drink accessories also covers barware basics, from simple syrups to cocktail shakers.

The other three sections are for drinks and snacks to cover the morning, daytime, and evening. Each recipe is illustrated with tantalizing images of the product, emphasizing that this book is more about the images than the recipes, so you may want to test them before dazzling your friends and family.

Most of the drink recipes in Slurp are alcohol based, as one might expect from a book with a Captain Nemo martini on the cover. However, there are many non-alcoholic recipes that are family-friendly and fun, albeit mainly located in the "morning" section of the book.

Recipes aside, the main draw of this book is the presentation. The photographs are fine examples of how to do it right, and combined with the layout and typography, one could read the book from cover to cover and be satisfied with consuming the contents visually. As a fan of macro photography, this book is right up my alley. The photos not only illustrate the food and drinks outlined in the recipes, they also present the items in a different perspective than what one might have at a cocktail party.

About Anna Creech

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