THE CULINARY CANINE:
Great Chefs Cook for Their Dogs—And So Can You!
Written by Kathryn Levy Feldman LPS’09
Photographed by
Sabina Louise Pierce
Bowtie Press, 2011. $14.95.
Kathryn Levy Feldman has written for the Gazette on a wide variety of subjects (most recently on HUP’s chaplains in our Nov|Dec 2011 issue), and several years ago she collaborated memorably with photographer Sabina Louise Pierce in our coverage of the tragic injury and death of the thoroughbred racehorse Barbaro, who was treated at Penn’s New Bolton Center [“Something About Barbaro,” July|Aug 2006; “Barbaro’s Race Ends,” Mar|Apr 2007].
Feldman and Pierce’s current joint project is in a much lighter vein. In The Culinary Canine, they tell and show the stories of 30 leading chefs from across the country, their pets, and the meals they cook for them—recipes included. Veterinarian, writer, and self-described “foodie first,” Patty Khuly, who wrote the book’s introduction, provides notes on edibility and nutritional value for each recipe, and adds that all the ones she’s tried to cook herself “have proved not only doable, but—at least from my dogs’ point of view—foolproof.”
The chefs profiled include contestants from Top Chef Masters, Iron Chef America, and Chopped!, as well as pre-reality-TV-era stars like Le Bec Fin’s legendary chef/proprietor Georges Perrier, who contributes the dish he feeds daily to his beloved Bichon Frise, Isabelle—and to the occasional human visitors to his Chestnut Hill home, who “have been known to request a late-night snack of ‘Isabelle’s food.’”
“Oh, to be Isabelle and dine exclusively on la cuisine Perrier!” Feldman writes. “C’est la vie!”
—J.P.
