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.