Feed Your Mind: How I Learned to Cook

Feed Your Mind is a new column that will focus on food-related books.

Have you ever wondered what sparked the culinary careers of the world's top chefs? Sure, they may be huge names today, but where did they start and how did they get there? How I Learned to Cook: Culinary Educations from the World's Greatest Chefs is an entertaining view into pivotal moments in the lives of culinary leaders like Mario Batali, Anthony Bourdain, and Eric Ripert.

Some were always on the path to becoming chefs, while others started elsewhere. Fergus Henderson was once an architect with a fondness for long lunches; Masaharu Morimoto might have been a pro baseball player were it not for a shoulder injury. And the road to success was, for many, not a smooth one. Gabrielle Hamilton nearly lost an eye from exploding fava beans, tossed wet into a vat of frying oil, and Ming Tsai practically drowned in chocolate ganache when he miscalculated the proportions of his ingredients. Some are funny, others touching, but each chef's story lends a fascinating insight into his or her journey towards chefdom.

Edited by Kimberly Witherspoon and Peter Meehan; published by Bloomsbury. Available on Amazon.com.