Fewer than 1100

Beard on Food
By James Beard
Bloomsbury USA, 2007; $26.50

James Beard is credited as the first television chef, having demonstrated cooking techniques on the NBC show Elsie Presents in 1946. He was a profoundly influential instructor and columnist, though his reputation has not gone unscathed: Since his passing in 1985, there has been much talk (not least in a 1993 biography by Robert Clark) about some of the complexities and compromises of life as the first culinary celebrity. There was his endorsement of industrial food products from companies including Pillsbury, Omaha Steaks, Green Giant, and Planters Peanuts; the frustration of his closeted, seemingly lovelorn homosexuality; and his general discomfort in his own girthy body—at 6 foot 2 and 300 or so pounds, he was not, perhaps, as jolly a giant as people once thought. Craig Claiborne, in his posthumous tribute to Beard, said Beard’s discomfort in tatami rooms led to a general dismissal of Japanese cuisine: “when it came to the ups and downs of sitting on a straw mat, Jim was as aggravated as he was frustrated. To the end, I believe, he never accorded the Japanese kitchen anything other than routine marks.” Even the foundation created in Beard’s name after his death has been tarnished by financial scandal—nothing to do with him, of course, but it doesn’t help his name.

Given the decades since his death and the slight patina on his reputation, it is, perhaps, the right time to have another look at his writing, the very thing that made him the face of American cuisine, and Beard on Food, a compendium of his newspaper columns that was first published in 1974, has been rereleased this fall to coincide with the 20th anniversary of the James Beard Foundation.

Beard writes with a sunny disposition, always charming and always charmed by his subject. His description of a proper flank-steak sandwich reads like a motto: “The bread must be crisp, the meat rare, the seasonings zippy.” Indeed—and to think that he was singing the praises of flank steak before a whole cadre of chefs celebrated the virtue of nonloin steaks like flank, hanger, and skirt. He is more food-focused in his writing than, say, M. F. K. Fisher, who wrote as much about psychology as food. In that light, he’s also, in the end, probably more helpful in the kitchen—both as a muse reminding you of good dishes you’ve been meaning to make, and as a teacher, easing the pressure you might feel when taking on a fruit tart or a hollandaise sauce.

The Freewheeling Cook

In his introduction to the reissue, Mark Bittman points out the crucial difference between Beard and Julia Child: Her recipes are so precise that you feel like a single deviation will screw things up; Beard on the other hand is suggestive rather than commanding. He might give a recipe for deviled beef bones, then tell you offhandedly that you could just as easily use its tarragon-butter-breadcrumb mixture to devil chickens or honeycomb tripe.

It is a little bit shocking to see how much Beard predicted about American cuisine today. No longer do ingredients like roasted red peppers or booze-soaked prunes seem novel, but once upon a time they needed a champion. (Onion sandwiches made with raw onion probably continue to need, and deserve, a backer on the order of Beard.) But Beard still seems part of the zeitgeist. Take his advocacy of farmers’ and international markets: “It is my dream to see the continent spanned, from coast to coast, with markets like this.” His prescience is evident also in his romance with American regional ingredients like country hams, Maryland blue crab, and pinto beans; his pleasure in offbeat cuts of meat (braised oxtail, tongue); and, of course, his curiosity about other cuisines—French and Italian, yes, but also Mexican, Norwegian, Middle Eastern, Scottish even. Beard wasn’t afraid of technology either: He was an early adopter of and evangelist for the food processor, with which he made kibbe naye, a Middle Eastern dish of raw ground lamb and bulgur. (These days, he’d be more specific about precisely which region in the Middle East his recipe came from, but give a guy a break.)

Although I am not one to worry much about salt or fat in my cooking, there are several instances in which Beard’s recipes (at least until he started watching his own diet later in life) are skewed toward an earlier taste: This is a man, after all, who liked to add heavy cream to his hamburger. There is a creamy chicken and mustard dish that I cooked up (see below), and I liked almost everything about it, but still, you gotta admit that 4 tablespoons of butter plus 2 tablespoons of oil is a lot of grease with which to start a fricassee. With a little less grease, the sauce would have been prettier and less oil-slicked. And in his otherwise lovely recipe for Irish soda bread, there’s a tablespoon of salt—I winced as I put it into the recipe and grimaced as I ate the final product: just a little too salty even for briney old me. I point out these qualms only to make certain that you taste as you go along, as you should, really, with any recipe. James Beard was a man of monumental appetite—you might not be able to compete with him in all things.

Mustard Chicken

To make Mustard Chicken for four, dust 4 half chicken breasts lightly with flour, and sauté in a heavy skillet in 4 tablespoons butter and 2 tablespoons oil {As I said above, this is an awful lot of fat for sautéing, but it sure smells nice!} until nicely browned on all sides. Remove, spread each piece liberally with mustard (Dijon or herbed mustard or a paste of hot mustard or whatever you like) {Here’s the part of the recipe I love: The mustard isn’t stirred into the sauce, but smeared on the chicken like a poultice, thus preserving its intensity; as such, don’t use something weak like a honey mustard, lovely in other contexts but too mild mannered here.}, and put in a shallow baking dish.

In the fat remaining in the pan sauté 1 finely chopped medium onion for a couple of minutes, and add another tablespoon of butter if needed {This is not something you will need to do, I think.} and about 1/2 cup finely chopped mushrooms. {I hardly ever use button mushrooms anymore, but they do wonderful things for a dish like this, softening and enriching it like a kind of vegetal cream.} Sauté with the onion, then add 2 tablespoons chopped parsley, and salt and freshly ground pepper to taste—you won’t need much pepper because of the mustard. Then blend in 1 cup heavy cream and let it just heat through. Pour the mixture over the chicken, and bake in a 350-degree oven for about 30 to 35 minutes {I’d check the doneness earlier next time}, or until the chicken is tender when tested with a fork. Taste to see if the sauce needs more salt, and add a few drops of lemon juice. Serve at once with fluffy rice. {I can’t say how nice the combination of chicken and cream and mushrooms is here—it’s classic, but overlooked these days. If I did it again, I’d be inclined to use thighs, but that’s just because I like thighs better than breasts any day, especially in something braisey like this. I’d also cut the butter/oil back by half.}

A Twist of the Wrist
By Nancy Silverton
Knopf, 2007; $29.95

I was somewhat flabbergasted to read a couple of years ago that Los Angeles restaurant potentate Nancy Silverton—her most recent project is Mozza with partners Mario Batali and Joe Bastianich—was writing a book on the virtues of cooking with jarred, canned, bagged, and boxed foods.

In addition to Mozza, Silverton founded the La Brea Bakery and Campanile (with ex-husband Mark Peel). My first job in the kitchen was at Campanile, working for Silverton, Peel, and Chef de Cuisine Suzanne Goin (who left to start Lucques, and eventually AOC). With Silverton, I learned to shop at a farmers’ market, tasting Blue Lake beans from every vendor in the huge Wednesday Santa Monica market before deciding which batch to buy. It was under Goin, Silverton, and Peel that I learned to make mayonnaise and pesto and green goddess dressing from scratch—the mortar and pestle was my nemesis, but one I grew to love over the years. I couldn’t really believe that Silverton’s heart was in a book of shortcut cooking.

The resulting book debuted this year. A Twist of the Wrist, cowritten with Carolynn Carreño, isn’t quite the straightforward, quick-and-easy cookbook I was dreading. It’s a cautious celebration of less time-intensive cooking, and implicitly a rebuke to those who compromise too much in the name of convenience. “We’ve moved so far from the kitchen,” Silverton writes, “that I felt that what people needed was a gentle, realistic way back.” She presents herself as the anti–Sandra Lee, giving her readers relatively simple recipes made from prepackaged ingredients, but only prepackaged ingredients that have met with her finicky approval. That means a sort of surprising yes to canned potatoes and bottled stuffed grape leaves, but a resounding no to bottled vinaigrettes and marinades (use dried meat rubs instead, she suggests). Many of the jarred and canned goods she recommends are already chef-approved imports with Mediterranean or Mexican origins, like chipotle chiles, Spanish ventresca tuna, anchovies, and piquillo peppers. The book is lean on East and South Asian flavors—too bad, since there are so many brilliant packaged foods from that part of the world.

Silverton’s got a section of traditional entrées, but the book favors snackier meals—ones that revolve around soups, salads, crostini, and egg dishes. Although many recipes echo classic Campanile/La Brea preparations, Silverton also solicits quite a few contributions from chef friends like Goin, Gale Gand, Charlie Trotter, and Jean-Georges Vongerichten. The chef contributions help fill out Silverton’s Cal-Med-centric focus. The guest chefs are also more willing to get a little trashy with the packaged-food concept: Take Tom Douglas’s (of Seattle’s Dahlia Lounge) stir-fry of Costco gyoza, or Hiro Sone and Lissa Doumani’s (of Napa’s Terra) recipe for a spaghetti sauce made of canned tuna and V8.

Silverton has two great gifts. One is a knack for maximizing flavor from relatively simple ingredients: braising leeks, cultivating sourdoughs, using caramelized sugar as the basis of a pie filling rather than just plain sugar. Most of these flavor-enriching processes take more time than can be spared in an easy-weeknight cookbook; her previous cookbooks are full of them, though (Nancy Silverton’s Pastries from the La Brea Bakery, Nancy Silverton’s Breads from the La Brea Bakery, and Nancy Silverton’s Sandwich Book). But Silverton also has a superb palate (I remember her as a great nibbler of mise en place, making sure that every element going into a dish was just right), and for this book she clearly sampled almost every prepackaged ingredient under the sun. One can trust implicitly her conclusions about which to use. If she says not to use jarred chopped garlic—”It ruins any dish you add it to,” she would say—don’t do it.

Silverton’s attention to process pays off here. After all, it’s the prep for dishes that takes up most active cooking times. She doesn’t include any greens that are hard to wash, just bagged greens, hydroponics, or tightly wrapped heads like endive or radicchio, which she doesn’t wash. Same goes for meats: She only picks cuts that can be relatively quickly seared or pan roasted, not sinewy braising meats.

The problem with some of the recipes is the inconvenience of sourcing some of the ingredients. I loved the concept of an ice cream pie—a way to seriously but simply transform store-bought ingredients, and one that I think I’ll borrow for a long time to come. I made her recipe with dulce de leche ice cream and what was supposed to be cajeta (Mexican goat’s milk caramel) and Spanish peanuts; the only problem is that near me, the store that sells Häagen-Dazs dulce de leche ice cream and graham crackers is not the same store that sells cajeta and unadulterated, skin-on peanuts; I approximated with a regular caramel sauce and Planters peanuts that I reroasted for extra flavor. To really work with this book, I think you need to take a few focused pantry-stock-up trips: to the fancy-foods store, to the regular grocery, to the Latin and Asian groceries. Get a surplus of stuff, since most of the key ingredients are nonperishable, then after that, get your fresh ingredients for the meal at hand and start cooking.

Among the dishes I sampled, I thought a chipotle seasoned chicken salad (made with preroasted chicken and jarred mayo) was a pleasant cold supper. Ricotta crostini with a Sicilian condiment of currants and pine nuts in balsamic syrup was pretty good, but it made me regret not venturing downtown for higher-quality ricotta. And a pasta dish made with garbanzos, anchovies, and celery (see below) will probably enter my playbook for easy dinner pastas.

Although Silverton’s assertion that conscientiously produced food can be uncomplicated too is admirable, in the end I’m not sure I’ll ever really turn to her for convenience. I most admire her for the way she’s complicated my life in the name of flavor—how I cannot put an untoasted nut into any recipe I prepare, how I still feel a wince of guilt if I use a blender to make mayonnaise, how I learned that blanched broccoli is one thing but broccoli braised for two hours or more is something transcendental. Her sandwich book is probably the most complicated sandwich book ever written, but it produces fantastic results, even if you dismantle the sandwiches into their component elements and serve those elements on their own. I’ll happily turn to Mark Bittman for short, sharp quick-cooking ideas, but from Silverton, I find myself hooked on the arduousness of it all.

Here is one of the simplest recipes from the book, a contribution from Saveur cofounder Colman Andrews. It is seriously easy-weeknight food.

Rigatoni with Anchovies, Garbanzo Beans, and Celery

Kosher salt
8 ounces rigatoni rigate
12 anchovy fillets (including about 1 tablespoon of the packing oil or extra-virgin olive oil)
1 15-ounce can garbanzo beans, not drained
1 small celery stalk, trimmed and minced
2 tablespoons extra-virgin olive oil
Parmigiano-Reggiano wedge, for grating
Freshly ground black pepper
High-quality extra-virgin olive oil, for drizzling

1. Bring a large pot of water to a boil over high heat and add a generous amount of kosher salt. Stir in the pasta, return the water to a boil, and cook the pasta, stirring occasionally, until it’s al dente. (Since cooking times vary depending on the thickness of the pasta, for perfectly cooked pasta, refer to the package instructions for the recommended time and taste the pasta frequently while it cooks.) {This may be an easy recipe, but Silverton never slacks off when it comes to precise instructions; most recipes would have covered this step in 15 words or fewer.}

2. While the water is coming to a boil and the pasta is cooking, use a fork to crush the anchovies, with their oil, in a medium bowl. {If you have a pestle—and I do, of course, as a result of my Campanile tutelage—you might want to use this to get a little muscle on the anchovies.} Strain the liquid from the garbanzo beans into the bowl with the anchovies. {I don’t know why, but I’ve always treated canned bean water as quasi-industrial waste; I was pleasantly surprised to see how the starchy water worked its way into a nice clingy sauce.} Set the garbanzo beans aside and stir the liquid and anchovies together to form a thin paste. Stir in the minced celery. {I love how almost everything lands in one bowl here—the sign of an actually easy recipe.}

3. Drain the pasta and, while it’s still dripping with water, return it to the pot it was cooked in. Add the anchovy mixture and toss well. Add the garbanzo beans and olive oil, grate about 1 tablespoon of Parmesan cheese into the pot, and season generously with freshly ground black pepper. Toss to combine the ingredients and season with kosher salt.

4. Spoon the pasta out of the pot and pile it onto four plates, dividing it evenly. Drizzle with the high-quality olive oil, top with a few celery leaves, and serve with grated Parmesan cheese on the side. {This is a spare-looking dish; don’t skimp on the celery leaves—I chopped mine, and you might even want to add some chopped parsley too, but then it starts to get a little complicated and you don’t want that … I actually admired this dish for its plainness as well as its flavor: You can never go wrong with anchovies to deepen the palate of a dish. Although I like to serve pasta piping hot, I have to say the noodles that sat in the pan during dinner only to be picked out come dishwashing time had an even finer flavor—consider adding a 10-minute wait while the rigatoni takes a warm anchovy bath before serving.}

The Silver Palate Cookbook (25th Anniversary Edition)
By Julee Rosso and Sheila Lukins
Workman Publishing Company, 2007; $29.95

Twenty-five years ago, Sheila Lukins and Julee Rosso released their Silver Palate Cookbook, full of recipes from their gourmet shop on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. It became one of the most influential cookbooks of the century, selling millions of copies. It’s recently been rereleased, this time with color photography, and as Lukins and Rosso tour the country—together!—the nostalgia is flowing freely. I recently went to a press event for the book (read my interview with the authors), and the room was full of bobbed-hair women in their 50s, their old sauce-spattered copies of the original in tow.

For such a popular volume, today The Silver Palate Cookbook seems unassuming—antiencyclopedic in its organization, illustrated with Lukins’s cute drawings, quotes littering the margins of the book. It promulgated ideas that would become 1980s food clichés, but that at their core were good ideas: flourless chocolate cake, miniquiches, baked Brie, and pesto, pesto, pesto!

Lukins and Rosso’s great achievement was taking the snobbery out of gourmet food. They made good food seem like a party, and they sensed the kinds of parties people would actually want to throw in a working woman’s world: easy brunches, stewy suppers, and unfancy desserts. Some of the recipes—like the Big Bread Sandwich, their giant sandwich made from a whole loaf of bread—seemed like showy gestures to entice traditionalists into the gourmet shop. But for a while there, Lukins and Rosso had a bead on just how far Americans wanted to experiment with new things, and they toed the line between safe and truly experimental. The Silver Palate was the ultimate middlebrow cookbook.

It and the pair’s subsequent books, The Silver Palate Good Times Cookbook and the ever helpful The New Basics Cookbook, were vastly influential on me—as a child I was given a lot of liberties in the kitchen, and the Silver Palate books seemed like just the right way to modernize our family meals. (I made a lot of mousse and pesto and hummus, and still use the Silver Palate recipe, long ago memorized, for chocolate chip cookies.)

In some ways the authors were too successful: All across the country little gourmet/catering shops opened serving tarragon chicken salad and blueberry soup and selling Silver Palate mustards, vinaigrettes, and sauces. “Gourmet” began to taste the same no matter where you went in the country. The French-country cute look eventually seemed dated, but not until many millions of cookbooks had been sold. And then in 1993, after they had sold the Silver Palate brand, the girls broke up—suddenly and decidedly.

Sometimes it’s hard to resist a reunion tour, even when the blood has been bad in the past (see the Police and the Stooges). For the 25th anniversary issue of their first cookbook together, Rosso and Lukins decided to get the band back together. The rereleased book has the familiar checkerboard cover, though the shot of the shop’s storefront (the one with the geraniums that I pored over as a child) is reduced to an inset photo. Inside, there is that strange format: a whole chapter for vegetable purées, for fork suppers, for mousses (such gummable food—makes you wonder if there were any dental issues afoot). In 25 years a lot more artisanal food has come onto the market, so the new edition includes notes on cheeses, salamis, and pastas. The recipes have been retested, and some added: a new barbecue sauce, a new turkey.

The most striking change is the photographs—some inset, replacing Lukins’s sketches; some full-page plates of chicken Marbella or linguine with tomatoes and basil. They are heavy-handed photos, many with a yellowish cast, and they are not particularly appealing: The image of two stiff, chocolate-shellacked poached pears is one of the least inviting food photographs I’ve ever seen.

Most recipes, though, hold up well. Airy and verdant, the asparagus-Parmesan soufflé reminded me how nice it is to sometimes make a fancy side, and not just toss the stalks on the grill. Lemon cake with lemon glaze—absolutely plain and absolutely delicious—is a breakfast cake of the first order that would displease no one if it were served at dinnertime, especially if it were served with berries. And as overrepresented as the tarragon chicken salad was, I still love it, especially when garnished with green grapes—although unlike the existing recipe, I’d toast the walnuts and use fresh tarragon instead of dried. Only the raspberry chicken seemed truly out of time to me, even a little bit tragic, since the sauce was rather grayish, not cheery and pink as you’d imagine.

I might be a grouch about the raspberry chicken, but I’m still bowled over by the book in context, the very gameness of it all: Why not put fruit and meats together in the same dish, why not make your fruit salads by color, why not try rabbit, or escabèche, or put prunes in your chicken? Even if we’d later strive for authenticity in our cooking, the Silver Palate girls gave Americans, including me, the courage to be playful, and I’m ever grateful for the guidance.

Salmon Mousse

1 envelope unflavored gelatin

1/4 cup cold water

1/2 cup boiling water

1/2 cup mayonnaise, preferably Hellmann’s {Actually, preferably homemade.}

1 tablespoon fresh lemon juice {Fresh not naturally a given in 1982.}

1 tablespoon finely grated onion {Grated onion is rarely seen in recipes that postdate 1985, but it’s a nice way to add a little raw-onion oomph without chunking up the texture.}

Dash of Tabasco

1/4 teaspoon sweet paprika {This tiny bit of sweet paprika doesn’t do much flavorwise—might want to change to smoked or cut back a bit and use cayenne.}

1 teaspoon salt

2 tablespoons finely chopped fresh dill {Every salmon recipe in the book calls for dill—funny that salmon has found other companion herbs these days.}

2 cups finely flaked poached fresh salmon or canned salmon, skin and bones removed {Canned salmon! That’s something I haven’t had to think about in a couple of decades.}

1 cup heavy cream

Watercress, for garnish

Toast, pumpernickel, or crackers, for serving

1. Soften the gelatin in the cold water in a large mixing bowl. Stir in the boiling water and whisk the mixture slowly until the gelatin dissolves. Cool to room temperature.

2. Whisk in the mayonnaise, lemon juice, grated onion, Tabasco, paprika, salt, and dill. Stir to blend completely and refrigerate until the mixture begins to thicken slightly, about 20 minutes.

3. Fold in the finely flaked salmon. In a separate bowl, whip the cream until it is thickened to soft peaks and fluffy. Fold gently into the salmon mixture.

4. Transfer the mixture to a 6- to 8-cup bowl or decorative mold. {Where is a copper fish mold when you need one! I would have gained serious retro-cred for serving my mousse in the form of a salmon.} Cover and refrigerate for at least 4 hours.

5. Garnish with watercress and serve with toasts, pumpernickel, or crackers.

At least 12 portions

{In this day of raw-fish ceviches, this recipe, with all its cream and mayo, almost a salmon Bavarian, is interesting because it seems to hearken back to a time when salmon needed to be a little diluted, and also a little stretched. I found it gentle and tasty, but if I redid it, I would be inclined to push the flavors a little harder—use smoked salmon perhaps, maybe a few capers, too, or simply up the quantity of fish. That said, I took it to a party, and the crowd went nuts for the spread; obviously Rosso and Lukins are still tapped into the zeitgeist in a way I can only dream of.}

Pork & Sons
By Stéphane Reynaud
Phaidon Press, 2007; $39.95

There has been a lardy avalanche of pig prose of late—celebrations of all the edible glories of pig: its snout, ears, and tail; its blood, belly, and liver; and I suppose, if you have to be boring, its plain old meat (I wrote about the phenomenon in Slate). New York magazine food critic Adam Platt has recently dubbed carniphilic chefs of the Mario Batali/David Chang/Paul Bertolli variety “meatheads,” and emphasized that it is pig they worship above all other animals. Add one more to that list: Stéphane Reynaud, chef-owner of Villa 9 Trois outside of Paris, is without a doubt a meathead of the highest order.

Padded and pink, his cookbook, Pork & Sons, looks like a girl’s baby album on the outside. Inside is a scrapbook of sorts, but a very different kind: It’s a loony and amusing and utterly French homage to the pig and its parts. Oh, and there are some recipes—I’ll get to them later, but first there is so much else going on.

Reynaud’s grandfather and uncle were butchers in the Ardèche region, and the book gets rolling with a semisociological tribute to the hale and hearty men who help off a pig on a bitter-cold winter morning. Interspersed with pictures of the event—the crackling fire, the barn, the blood sausage–making—photographer Marie-Pierre Morel takes rakish portraits of Eric the pig farmer swaddled in a woolly sweater, Aime the pig butcher, with rivulets of blood on his apron, and two old-timers, Pierre and Charlou, who come for the camaraderie. These guys are tough, professional, and proud of their work. The pigs themselves are kept from sight—out of respect, I suppose—we see an inset shot of two hooves bound to the slaughter bench; another shot of the bench post facto, with steam rising into the air; and a cow in the background, counting its blessings perhaps.

If there aren’t many photos of pigs, there are plenty of illustrations of them, by Jose Reis de Matos. His piggies look a good bit like Eloise (if Eloise were a pig), and they are dropped in throughout the whole book: on chapter dividers, in margins, even embroidered into some of the napkins in the photographs. The little porkers are the twisted heart of the book—the chapter on blood sausage shows a series of drawings of a pig jauntily crawling into its own sausage casing, and another chapter is littered with pictures of pigs schtupping. The book’s strange blend of photojournalism, gallows humor, and cutesiness might put some people off, but Pork & Sons is so much more dynamic than most cookbooks that I think there’s something to be said for being a little unhinged.

Added to this kooky mix are a whole bunch of pork recipes. There are plenty of pâtés, natch, but also more elegant fare. Reynaud specializes in groovy half-peasant recipes like pig ears stuffed with sweetbreads and foie gras, fresh ham steamed in hay, blood sausage roasted with a veritable still life of winter fruit, and pig liver parfait with muscatel. He throws in the necessary classics as well, jambon persillé, say, or his “super maxi royale” choucroute.

Don’t expect much, however, in terms of precision with the recipes. You should cook from them with a strong dose of your own judgment. Between Reynaud’s gestural writing style and the difference in size, for example, between an average French pig foot and an American one, you might find that some of the recipes seem a little out of whack. I made a rack of pork braised in hard cider with apples and onion, and ended up with a month’s worth of applesauce long after the meat was gone. The timing on the sauce was off, no doubt because of my outsized American apples, but in the end the recipe tasted just fine—a pinch of ground ginger and lots of butter took the dish beyond the standard pork chops and applesauce.

Ingredients for the recipes can be hard to track down, too, through no fault of Reynaud’s. Several dishes call for French sausages that need to be special ordered, and when I set out to make Bibi’s Head to Toe Terrine (essentially a head cheese) I drove first to the best Asian butcher in town, and then to the best Mexican one, in search of fresh pig ears; both told me to come back another day. I made up for it with a couple of extra snouts and tongues, and managed to make a very tasty terrine indeed, the meatiness made sweeter with the long-cooked essence of carrot, celery root, and fennel. Pork & Sons might not be a foundation book, but it’s got plenty of great ideas for how to use all those pig parts. And should you get bored waiting for your terrine to set, there’s always another naughty little picture to discover.

Blood Sausage, Apple, Potato, and Fennel Tart

{The book’s photo of this tart is amazing (the one shown is my tart). The dish is sort of a hyped-up Alsatian tart in concept. The blood sausage is black as night, the potatoes brownly blistered, the bacon glistening. I’ve never wanted to eat a picture more.}

Preparation time: 50 minutes {About right.}

Cooking time: 20 minutes {I needed five more minutes to brown everything up.}

Serves 6 {A hungry six.}

3 shallots, thinly sliced

4 tablespoons crème fraîche {I’d do more next time.}

3 tablespoons olive oil, plus extra for drizzling

4 waxy potatoes

2 eating apples

Generous 1/2 cup chopped smoked bacon

14 ounces blood sausage

12 ounces puff pastry dough, thawed if frozen

All-purpose flour, for dusting

1/4 fennel bulb, thinly sliced

1 bunch of arugula, optional, torn into pieces

Salt and pepper

1. Combine the shallots and crème fraîche in a bowl. Add 1 tablespoon of the olive oil and season with salt and pepper. Set aside.

2. Cook the potatoes in lightly salted boiling water for 15–20 minutes, until tender. Drain well, then cut into thin rounds. Preheat the broiler. {I didn’t score on my potatoes this time—they were a little bitter, not sweet and buttery as they should have been. Next time I’d be inclined to use a little less potato, but that might not be true if they were perfect potatoes.}

3. Peel, core, and slice the apples. Heat the remaining olive oil in a skillet, add the apple slices, and cook until they are just beginning to color. {Single layer of apples only—you’ll probably need to do a couple of batches.}

4. Spread out the bacon on a cookie sheet and cook under the broiler, turning once, for 5–8 minutes, until tender. Meanwhile, remove the skin from the blood sausage and cut the sausage into thin slices.

5. Preheat the oven to 350°F.

6. Roll out the puff pastry dough on a lightly floured surface to a 10-inch round and place on a cookie sheet. Spread 2 tablespoons of the shallot cream evenly over the dough round. Sprinkle with the fennel and lardons {He means the bacon.}, then arrange alternate layers of blood sausage, potato, and apple slices on top. {Don’t forget to season with salt and pepper!} Cover with the remaining shallot cream. Bake in the oven for 20 minutes. {Or until golden brown on the potatoes and the crust.}

7. Sprinkle the tart with the arugula, if using, drizzle with olive oil, and serve immediately.

{I love savory tarts, and I love blood sausage, but when I make this recipe again, I’d tweak it a bit. I just came back from Lyon where I had stellar French boudin noir, and I was sorry I couldn’t use it for this recipe. I had to go Spanish for my blood sausage this time—not quite ideal, as morcilla is a little drier than French-style boudin noir, and has a dose of smoked pimentón in it that was a little distracting here. Reynaud actually does provide a recipe to make your own boudin noir, but you’ll have to decide whether you’re ready to inflate the pig intestine with your mouth to check it for leaks like Aime the butcher does. Me, I think I’ll order from an online store. Maybe it was just my boudin, but I wanted this recipe to be juicier and lusher; next time I’d up the apples and the crème fraîche and either forgo or cut back on the potatoes. My enthusiasm for the general concept—the sheer exuberance of ingredients—is undeterred.}

The Kitchen Diaries: A Year in the Kitchen with Nigel Slater
By Nigel Slater
Gotham, 2006; $26.40

Food writer Nigel Slater has long been an advocate of a certain cuisine of ease, built around good shopping and minimal intervention with ingredients. (Is it an English thing? Fellow Brits Nigella Lawson, Rose Gray, Ruth Rogers, and, I suppose, Jamie Oliver are all adherents.) Perfection is never the obvious goal of this kind of cooking—in its stead are big flavors, soulfulness, and a certain emotional connection.

Slater’s latest book, The Kitchen Diaries: A Year in the Kitchen with Nigel Slater, is a glorification of this approach to cookery. It is a diary of a year’s meals, tracing the seasons as well as Slater’s whims. He includes recipes or half recipes, sometimes just poetic observations, and elegiac photographs of the meals, taken, we are told, as they happened—a cookbook with a neorealist touch. Those traces of real time and real meals serve to heighten the sentiment and immediacy of the work.

All that reflection is ambitious for a cookbook, and could easily flop if the writer weren’t as surefooted as Slater, who knows how to unearth emotions about food without overdoing it. In his memoir about his lonely childhood, Toast, he wrote of his mother—who always burnt the bread and who died when he was a boy—“It is impossible not to love someone who makes toast for you.” The journal format of The Kitchen Diaries allows him to capture moments that are perhaps less heart-wrenching but remind you still of the connection between hearth and heart. There are boisterous dinners with friends and solitary, TV-lit meals of frozen fries and baked beans; an instance of boredom at a late-winter market and plenty of minor failures, like a caprese salad ruined by an experimental touch of blue cheese.

I am a sucker for food writers who reveal their failures and dislikes, since so much of a passionate cook’s work is experimentation and judgment. Like a salesperson who tells you when not to buy an article of clothing, Slater inspires trust because he reminds you that not all food is equally delicious. “Yesterday produced a white cabbage and apple salad that was no nicer than it sounds,” he notes, or “Supper is boiled purple beans tossed in olive oil, which turn out to be more interesting raw.” And like me, Slater always seems to have something wasting away in the fridge or the pantry. “I want the last of the melons out of the larder,” he writes in late July (to get rid of them, he makes melon sorbet). Maybe it’s because of Toast, but I find it hard to shake a slightly mournful tone in the book: in its unpeopled photographs, passing seasons, snail-eaten tomatoes, and moldering kiwi fruits.

Don’t misunderstand: Slater’s year is full of happy moments and plenty of good, inspiring food; in fact it’s crowded with recipes. He’s not quite an innovative cook, but he knows how to revive simple, oft-forgotten pleasures, and he carves a bit of lyricism out of every dish, no matter how straightforward. “A plum is never worth eating,” he counsels, echoing the great Jane Grigson, “unless you have to shoo the wasps away with a dish towel.”

Occasionally, Slater’s prose can get overripe. It’s hard to buy his description of mackerel skins “shining like something from Tutankamen’s tomb”; but within a sentence he redeems himself with an oddly evocative bit of olfactory depiction: The same shiny fish have a “tarry smell that reminds me of oak, boats, and old string.”

One might argue that all this description gets in the way of the cooking. Simple as the recipes are in the book, they’re perhaps a shade too gestural for someone who doesn’t already feel at ease in the kitchen, with vague directions for heaping tablespoons of this and handfuls of that. But Slater’s recipes are appealingly minimalist: Most call for fewer than 10 ingredients, including the salt, and with a few gamy exceptions, most are made with readily accessible ingredients. (Although I am envious of his seemingly endless supply of red mullet, which I can never seem to find.) He’s even got a couple of recipes for chicken wings—try the one with lemon and black pepper.

Slater knows how to nail a culinary grace note, that extra fillip that makes an easy meal stand out. I took his cue and strewed some quick-grilled lamb chops with thyme and crumbled feta; the thyme would have been enough, but the white cheese made an awfully pretty picture in the book and on my dinner table, and it added a lively piquant note to the already succulent lamb. His desserts are also simple—picnic cakes and cobblers and such—but with nice touches like the tiny hint of rose water in a pistachio cake so dense it had to be eaten in slivers. With the exception of his Christmas fare, most of the recipes Slater provides are just as uncomplicated as those found in the “quick,” “easy,” or “weeknight” cookbooks that crowd the store shelves these days, but his sensory-rich prose reminds you that meals inspire declarations beyond “Yum-o!” And it’s that kind of writing that gets me back in the kitchen when I’m feeling burnt out.

Warm Pickled Mackerel

{This dish had one of the loveliest photos in the book. The photos might be “real time” and rustic, but they are still styled in their own way: The knot of onions on the fish is carefully arranged, and I noticed some dill-like fronds garnishing the dish that didn’t make it into the recipe.}

mackerel—3 filleted {Obviously Slater and I get different kinds of mackerel in our stores—I had to go with larger horse mackerel; the fillets from one fish, each cut into thirds, made for three very hearty appetizer portions. You could bulk it up to an entrée by serving more potatoes.}

a small onion {Note the lowercase—suggesting a low-key attitude in the recipes—it’s a slightly twee conceit, but I let it slide.}

tarragon vinegar—2/3 cup {Again, here I failed—tarragon vinegar has gone out of fashion it seems—I threw a few stalks of tarragon in with the pickling juices to make up for it.}

white vermouth or white wine—1/4 cup

juniper berries—12, lightly crushed

mustard seeds—3/4 teaspoon

white peppercorns—6 {Am I the only one who hates the smell of white peppercorns? I used them anyway, because they taste OK.}

black peppercorns—9

superfine sugar—2 generous tablespoons {More of that offhandedness: things only half measured.}

bay leaves—2

sautéed potatoes, to serve {If you hunt around the book, you can find a few notes on how he makes these.}

Set the oven to 350F. Rinse the mackerel fillets and lay them in a shallow oven-safe dish of china, glass or stainless steel (not aluminum). Peel and thinly slice the onion and put it in a non-corrosive saucepan, together with the vinegar and vermouth or wine. Then add the juniper berries, mustard seeds, white and black peppercorns, sugar, bay leaves, and a good pinch of salt. Bring to a boil, then pour the mixture over the fish. Add enough water just to cover the fish—no more.

Cover the dish lightly with aluminum foil and bake for twenty minutes. Serve the fish warm, two fillets each, with sautéed potatoes. {Or beets—this recipe would pair beautifully with salty roasted beets. In any case, it is very tasty. I am a big fan of even cheap pickled herring, and this recipe is a slightly more refined version—less sweet, and less firm, with a gentler pickle than the jarred stuff. Don’t ignore the onions, which are delicious in their own right. The mackerel was a big hit at a dinner party; one friend copied down the recipe and made it again within the week.}

Enough for 3 {Double-check the amounts in this cookbook, because often they cook up to just two portions, or, as here, an odd number.}

Memories of Philippine Kitchens
By Romy Dorotan and Amy Besa
Stewart, Tabori & Chang, 2006; $35

Think you know sour? You don’t know sour, unless you know the food of the Philippines: the kalamansi lime, the kamias fruit used in ceviche-like seafood combos called kinilaw, the tamarind-soured sinigang soup, the fruit vinegars made with wild guava, with coconut, with cashew. I still don’t know most of these flavors, but I have a better grasp of the uses of sourness thanks to Memories of Philippine Kitchens, by Romy Dorotan and Amy Besa, the couple that own New York’s Cendrillon restaurant. From the book, I cooked the mellow-sour chicken adobo, which was softened by soy sauce and coconut milk (see recipe below); the pickle-sour achara, a handy green-papaya condiment as comfortable on hot dogs as it is with Philippine fare; and the just-shy-of-brutishly-sour squid adobo, blackened with squid ink, peppered with jalapeños, and tarted up with a whole cup of red wine vinegar. Of course, Philippine food isn’t just sour, it’s sweet and bitter and savory and salty too, but the diversity of sourness described in the book gives a sense of what we’re missing when we overlook the food of the Philippines.

It’s astounding that we don’t yet know Philippine food better—there are far more Filipino Americans in this country than Thai Americans, but you wouldn’t know it from the restaurant listings in the phone book. Philippine fare seems to be one of those cuisines that are just better expressed in home kitchens. To this day I still covet another pass at the jaw-dropping banquet that my high school friend Bob’s family prepared for his graduation party: a wall of lumpia, a vat of adobo, a mountain of spicy crabs. Dorotan and Besa, who are married, opened Cendrillon in SoHo in 1995. They had individually left their native Philippines in the early years of the oppressive Marcos government (1965 to 1986), and met as Temple University graduate students before settling in New York in 1979. Originally, Cendrillon had a more general pan-Asian approach, but as time went on, the couple focused more on trademark Philippine dishes.

In their book, Dorotan and Besa don’t just describe the food that they make in the restaurant or dig up family recipes. They revisit the islands, seeking stellar home cooks in different regions to learn how and what they cook. Although much of the book is devoted to the canonical dishes of Philippine cuisine—the adobos, the spring-roll-like lumpia, the stir-fried noodle pancits, the sweet and cheesy rice cake bibingka, the pig, whole and in parts—the impression one gets is of a somewhat unmasterable cuisine that varies from region to region, town to town, cook to cook. No doubt this is true of all cuisines, but there is something about Philippine cookery that seems particularly ineffable—at least when one confronts the sheer volume of information in Dorotan and Besa’s book. “Filipinos,” the authors write, “are as likely to agree that adobo should be considered the national dish of the Philippines, as they’re liable to disagree on every other point about its preparation and enjoyment.”

That slipperiness has something to do with history. The Philippine kitchens of the title—notice the plural—have many, many sources for their flavors. There are the traditions of the earliest settlers (the kinilaw, and the soured stews like adobo and sinigang), the Chinese influence (noodles, spring rolls, and ducks), and the Spanish influence. The Philippines were “a colony of a colony,” overseen by the Mexican bureaucracy rather than Madrid, so the influences were both old world and new: paella-like dishes, pork sausages, tomatoes, and chiles. Then, of course, there is the American presence—the Philippines were an American territory for more than four decades after the Spanish-American War. The U.S. food legacy? Desserts, for one. In addition to providing a recipe for banana cream pie, Dorotan and Besa write that chiffon cake remains the favorite cake in the Philippines and include a recipe for one with jackfruit icing. They also say that the American influence served to glamorize prepared foods—Spam, Vienna sausages, and fruit cocktail—over perishables.

Regionalism is layered upon those multinational influences. In the Ilocos region, bagoong monamon, the fermented seafood paste used in the vegetable medley pinakbet, is popular. From Quezon province comes a kind of barbecued coconut milk, extracted from coconut flesh that’s been charred by a live coal. For an outsider like me, one can get a little lost amid the book’s definitions, oral histories, recipes, and travelogue, but it’s a pleasant kind of disorientation, made more so by Neal Oshima’s lively photos. Each time I dip into the book, I find recipes I must try: their version of longaniza, boar sausage laced with lime zest and annatto; a salad of salted duck eggs and tomatoes, the Philippine answer to caprese salad; or Dorotan’s more high-style dish of coffee and coconut-milk-roasted pompano.

Despite their thoroughness, Dorotan and Besa also have limits. Not everything can be re-created outside the Philippines. They describe, but give no how-to, for lechon, the whole roasted pig, and the pair have given up, for now, on a recipe for puto, the steamed rice cakes eaten for dessert, which “came out like a brick every time we tried to experiment with it.” Thanks to their good judgment, the dishes I did try all came out well, including the adobos I mentioned earlier; a fragrant rice pilaf with turmeric, mushrooms, and bamboo shoots; and a nifty annatto-laced quick cure for pork shoulder “bacon.” On top of that, most of the recipes—with some notable exceptions, like the pancit—have less-arduous shopping lists than some other Southeast Asian dishes I’ve taken on in the past.

It’s still a bit of a mystery why Philippine food has not been more embraced in the U.S. (why, for that matter, are there not more Indonesian and Moroccan restaurants?). But Dorotan and Besa give a newfound impetus to explore it at home—where, with a future squid adobo, I can pull back a bit on the vinegar, and no one will question my dish’s authenticity.

The recipe below, for chicken adobo, has relatively few annotations, because it was as simple as pie.

Chicken Adobo

Serves 4 to 6

Marinade: 1 1/2 cups rice vinegar {No guava or coconut vinegar here—too bad for the part of me looking for an exotic sour, but the rice vinegar is mercifully easy to find and packs a gentler acidity than others. If you are seeking a fruity vinegar to experiment with, there is a groovy recipe for pineapple-infused vinegar in the book.}

1 cup coconut milk {This also softens the sour blow.}

1/4 cup soy sauce {A decidedly Chinese influence.}

12 garlic cloves, peeled {That’s a lot, but the dish is stewed, so it’s not harsh.}

3 bay leaves {A Spanish note, no doubt.}

3 whole birdseye chiles {Spanish again, via the New World. Notice that the chiles are kept whole—Philippine cuisine generally packs less capsicum heat than other cuisines in Southeast Asia.}

1 1/2 teaspoons freshly ground black pepper

One 3 1/2-pound whole chicken, quartered and cut into pieces

1. In a large, nonreactive bowl or heavy-duty, resealable plastic bag, combine all of the marinade ingredients. Add the chicken pieces and turn to coat in the marinade. {I found the rather acidic marinade a little freaky, as if I were making chicken ceviche, but the resulting stew isn’t tough.} Refrigerate for at least 2 hours or overnight.

2. In a large casserole or Dutch oven, heat the chicken and marinade over high heat. Bring to a boil, then reduce the heat and simmer, stirring occasionally to make sure the chicken is covered in the marinade, until the chicken is cooked through and tender, 20 to 25 minutes.

3. Transfer the chicken pieces to a large bowl, raise the heat to medium-high, and reduce the sauce until it has the consistency of heavy cream, about 5 minutes. Remove the bay leaves and chiles. Return the chicken to the sauce and cook until just warmed through. {Though it doesn’t take long to cook, this is one of those leave-it-around dishes that gets better with time. Do not hesitate to let it sit in the refrigerator and make a midweek meal of it. The resulting taste is not dissimilar from Thai tom ka gai—less perfumed, perhaps, without the lime leaves, lemongrass, and galangal, but powerfully satisfying in its own way.}

Into the Vietnamese Kitchen: Treasured Foodways, Modern Flavors
By Andrea Quynhgiao Nguyen
Ten Speed Press, 2006; $35

Everybody loves a make–your–own–banh mi station. At least, that’s what I took away from a recent party I threw, where I followed Andrea Nguyen’s recipe for grilled lemongrass beef skewers and laid out the elements for my guests to assemble Vietnamese sandwiches. It was like a sundae bar, but with lots of lemongrass and fish sauce.

Vietnam-born Nguyen has written about Vietnamese food for the San Jose Mercury News, Saveur, and the Los Angeles Times, and runs the nifty website Viet World Kitchen. (In her list of tips on where to find Vietnamese ingredients, she suggests: “Your Vietnamese manicurist. Where does she or he eat and shop?”)

Her cookbook, one of the best of 2006, is written with an eye to how traditional Vietnamese recipes are adapted by Vietnamese cooks (particularly her mother) in America. She notes how equipment and ingredients in American kitchens differ from those in Vietnamese kitchens. We learn that chicken was reserved for special occasions in Vietnam, but “America must have seemed like chicken heaven to my parents when our family arrived here.” She continues that her mother would look for specials on chickens, then buy them in large quantities (“typically six”). These were awkward moments for Nguyen as a girl: “Our bulk chicken purchases seemed to underscore our outsider lifestyle.”

Nguyen allows for efficiencies amid the quest for authentic flavors, as long as they seem in keeping with how Vietnamese cooks actually work: A chapter on Vietnamese charcuterie mercifully allows readers to use a food processor, not a mortar and pestle, to grind meat; and Nguyen writes of her parents’ excited discovery of nonstick pans, which made banh cuon (steamed, filled rice-paper rolls) much easier to cook.

Still, Nguyen is exhaustive in her directions, which can make them look challenging on the page. Take this single step from her green papaya salad: “Working in batches, wring out excess moisture from the papaya in a nonterry dish towel: position a mound of the papaya in the center, roll it up in the towel, and then twist the ends in opposite directions to force out the water. Do this 3 or 4 times. You want to extract enough water from the papaya yet not completely crush it. Transfer the papaya to a large bowl and fluff it up to release it from its cramped state.” Procedurals like this verge on exhausting, but I appreciate this sort of precision. Nguyen knows that most of us are new to this cuisine, and she doesn’t want to leave any detail hanging. She’s got a nicely literary style, too, telling us to cut pork shank into “domino-sized pieces,” calling for “chubby” pieces of ginger, and telling readers to make sure their star anise has “robust” points.

I’d wanted to make pho for the party I mentioned above, but once I realized that the 18-step recipe called for blanching the beef bones and thinly slicing acres of beef and vegetables, I tabled the project. The fascinating recipes for charcuterie and the cellophane noodles with hand-picked crab also fell by the wayside. Many of these recipes demand one of those long, leisurely Sunday-cooking-project days, which I didn’t have. So I settled for banh mi with lemongrass beef. It still had a lot of elements—the slivered, skewered beef and its marinade; the carrot and daikon pickle; the doctored hoisin sauce; the shaved cucumber; the herbs; and the Maggi Seasoning Sauce drizzled on top—but I could spread out the tasks over a couple of days. The grilled lemongrass beef skewer recipe reprinted below, which served as the base for my sandwiches, is one of the simpler preparations—but the real beauty of this book is in the painstaking recipes that challenge you to learn the mindset of Vietnamese cooking.

Grilled Lemongrass Beef Skewers (Thit Bo Nuong Xa)

Makes 24 to 30 skewers, to serve 6 to 8

Marinade:
1 shallot, chopped (about 1/4 cup)
1 teaspoon brown sugar
1/8 teaspoon salt
1/4 teaspoon black pepper
1 1/4 teaspoons fine shrimp sauce {Nguyen explains some of the less common ingredients in a glossary, but this was the hardest ingredient to find—I ended up using Indonesian shrimp paste, but I don’t think that was right.}
2 teaspoons fish sauce {Nguyen has helpful suggestions on which fish sauces to look for—of course, in typically Saveur fashion, the really good stuff is nearly impossible to find in the States.}
2 tablespoons canola or other neutral oil
1 stalk lemongrass, trimmed and minced (about 3 tablespoons)
1 1/2 tablespoons sesame seeds, toasted (page 332)

1 1/4 pounds tri-tip or flap steak, well trimmed (about 1 pound after trimming)
1 1/2 cups Spicy Hoisin-Garlic Sauce (page 310) {This is basically a doctored hoisin sauce, augmented by chicken livers, or, in my case—since there were to be vegetarians at the party who would want a beefless sandwich—peanut butter; it’s not complicated, but keep in mind that each of these little sauces or marinades takes up time, and dishes.}

1. To make the marinade, combine the shallot, brown sugar, salt, and pepper in a mortar and pound into a rough paste. (Or, use an electric mini-chopper.) {I don’t know about you, but ever since my pestle broke, I haven’t found any urgent need to replace it. I used my ancient full-sized food processor: The resulting mix might have been a little rougher than Nguyen intended, but I thought it was just fine.} Transfer to a bowl, add the shrimp sauce, fish sauce, oil, lemongrass, and sesame seeds, and stir to mix. Set aside.

2. If you have time, place the beef in the freezer for about 15 minutes. It will firm up, making it easier to cut. {This is true, although next time I’d take advantage of all the precut beef strips that are sold at my local Asian grocery—they’re intended for sukiyaki.} Slice the beef across the grain into thin strips a scant 1/4 inch thick, about 1 inch wide, and 2 to 3 inches long. (You may need to angle the knife to yield strips that are wide enough.)

3. Add the beef to the marinade and use your fingers to combine, making sure that each strip is coated on both sides. {Most recipe writers would probably write, “Mix the beef strips with the marinade.” It’s these little details that make Nguyen’s recipes a little bit tedious, but also kind of sweetly thorough.} Cover with plastic wrap and marinate at room temperature for 1 hour. (For more tender meat, marinate in the refrigerator for up to 24 hours. Remove from the refrigerator 30 minutes prior to skewering.) Meanwhile, soak 24 to 30 bamboo skewers, each 8 to 10 inches long, in water to cover for at least 45 minutes.

4. To grill the beef, prepare a medium-low charcoal fire (you can hold your hand over the rack for no more than 5 or 6 seconds) or preheat a gas grill to medium-low. {I fired up the big green egg for this, but if I had my druthers, next time I’d cook the beef in a grill where the grate is closer to the fire, for a bit more flame-kissed character.} To broil the beef, position a rack about 4 inches from the heat source and preheat the oven for 20 minutes so it is nice and hot.

5. While the grill or broiler heats, drain the skewers and thread the beef onto them, putting 1 or 2 strips on each skewer. If you are broiling, put the skewers on an aluminum foil–lined baking sheet. Place the skewers on the grill rack or slip the baking sheet under the broiler. Grill or broil, turning the skewers once, for 3 to 4 minutes on each side, or until the beef is browned and a little charred at the edge.

6. Arrange the skewers on a platter and serve at once with the sauce on the side. Diners can dip the skewers in the sauce or spoon the sauce onto the skewers.

Note: These grilled beef strips are wonderful stuffed into a sandwich {That’s what I did, and it made for fantastic banh mi; remember that I also had to sliver jalapeños and cucumbers, as well as prepare a simple relish of matchstick carrots and daikon radishes, and if I hadn’t made my guests assemble the whole number, I would have had to spread bread with mayo and Maggi Seasoning Sauce and layer in all the other elements. Again, easy work, but lots of little steps—the kind of thing where several extra hands in the kitchen might make the work more fun.} (page 34) or featured in a salad roll (page 32). They may also be used in place of the stir-fried beef in a rice-noodle bowl (page 224). Or, roll them up with lettuce, mint, and cilantro in fresh rice-noodle sheets; cut each roll into 2- to 3-inch lengths and serve with the hoisin-garlic sauce. {OK, so you get the picture that once you get the basic lemongrass beef thing down, you can use it in a million different ways. I think that’s what the takeaway of this book is—the basic building blocks that you can layer into any number of dishes.} You don’t need to skewer the beef if using it in these ways, though it makes grilling the strips easier.

Heston Blumenthal, chef at the three-star Fat Duck in Bray, England, is one of the leaders of the molecular gastronomy movement, in which chefs look to science and technology for their cooking innovations. Not only is Blumenthal enamored with the technical gadgets he might use in the kitchen—ultrasound guns, filters, vacuums, and the like—but he is also a self-styled scientific investigator of food, seeking to augment the folk wisdom of the kitchen with hard numbers. For example, how does the dry matter in a particular type of potato, for example, affect its performance in the deep fryer?

The self-taught Blumenthal is also, of course, an imaginative chef, and the effect at the dinner table is a sumptuous meal of party tricks: frozen mousse poached in liquid nitrogen; a mysteriously whole but boneless mackerel, poached salmon in a gelled envelope of licorice, and the like. I had the opportunity to eat at the Fat Duck two years ago, and I found it both extraordinary and an altogether different category of eating. It was more like a five-hour Cirque du Soleil performance inside my mouth.

Blumenthal’s latest book, In Search of Perfection: Reinventing Kitchen Classics (Bloomsbury USA, 2006), has recently been released in the United States. It is not a primer on how to make a tasting menu like that served at the Fat Duck, which would be nigh impossible for the home cook. Instead, it is a companion book to his BBC program of the same title. The book’s premise, and that of the television show, is Blumenthal’s quest to “perfect” eight classic comfort-food dishes: roast chicken and potatoes, pizza, steak, fish and chips, bangers and mash, spaghetti Bolognese, Black Forest cake, and treacle tart with ice cream.

Redefining Perfection

Blumenthal knows that messing with the word perfection is tricky, and he doesn’t take a universalist’s view with his recipes—they are perfect only insofar as he has customized them to his own ideals. In fact, he suggests that his concept of perfection is rather more akin to a very refined version of novelty, “which brings me to the second meaning of perfection: honing a recipe through continuous experimentation. Trying out ideas and then revising and retrying them until you’ve got something special, unique.”

Perfection thus redefined, the book allows readers to witness Blumenthal’s own quirky, obsessive creative process. It isn’t journalistic, of course, so we don’t quite witness raw process, but one does get a glimpse of the curious amalgam of inventiveness, scientific gestures, and theatricality that Blumenthal so winningly achieves.

For each food, he goes on a telegenic fact-finding mission: to Lyon to learn about Bresse chickens and chat up Georges Blanc; or to New York to eat and talk steak in a strip club with Jeffrey Steingarten, and to check out a simulacrum of a British fish-and-chips place in Greenwich Village. All of this voyaging is, in theory, fodder for his master recipes. A note of warning: This book is a slog for nonfoodies—hell, even for foodies. Blumenthal should have been better edited, and he comes across as tedious and pedantic in some of his essays. There are also only so many people who will get as worked up about the starch and water contents of various British potato varieties as Blumenthal in his full gentleman-scientist mode:

“It was exciting to find a potato that outplayed Maris Piper. But equally exciting to learn something about the limits of dry matter: all the high-percentage potatoes (Russet Burbank, Lady Rosetta and Bruise) had turned out too tough, and it seemed that as little as 0.5 per cent [dry matter] could make a huge difference to the end result. It was an area that clearly deserved more exploration in the long term.”

The recipes, on the other hand, are fun to read: to see where Blumenthal sticks to classic techniques (glazing carrots in a pan with butter, just like the rest of us mortals), and where he feels the need to embellish (gelling butter with agar to top a dollop of mashed potatoes, aerating chocolate with a vacuum bag). Blumenthal has tried to rein in the gadgetry so that home cooks can follow his methods, but these are recipes for the real enthusiast and the well equipped. You may already have the whipped cream canister (for fried-fish batter and chocolate mousse), the paint gun (for chocolate spray-painting), and the vacuum-seal bags (for bubbly chocolate) lying around from previous molecular gastronomical experiments, but I don’t.

More Is Better

On the whole, Blumenthal is a maximalist, happier in a crowd of ingredients than in a handful. I tried out his recipe for spaghetti Bolognese, which, at eight hours and four pots is one of the easiest recipes in the book. There is much of the classic ragu in Blumenthal’s recipe—it is basically an all-day braise, as it should be, of carrot-onion-celery soffritto, pork, oxtail, wine, and milk. Later in the day, the meat is supplemented by a fried-tomato concassé. But Blumenthal enhances his sauce with surprising herbs and spices (coriander, clove, star anise, and tarragon), and loads it up with umami boosters (Parmesan cheese, caramelized onions, oaky Chardonnay, Worcestershire sauce, and even nam pla). Just for good measure, he calls for a stick of butter at the end (a sure giveaway that his mentors are French, not Italian). If there is one thing an eight-hour slow braise does not need, it’s a stick of butter. The meat flavors were wonderful in the sauce, but Blumenthal’s ragu tasted too sweet to me.

Blumenthal is open about his deep interest in nostalgia. What he seems to be aiming for with these remastered recipes, as well as with other dishes, is a layering of nostalgia with the novel: new textures, new intensity, new refinement. It’s an ambitious goal, and of course one that’s fraught with difficulty. When one is dealing with those reptilian, limbic memories of smells and flavors, one can refine too much, and lose the originating nostalgic force. Blumenthal acknowledges this issue—he frets that his spaghetti Bolognese might be too far from the average Briton’s perception of the dish—but in the end he runs with it. Similarly, I was little tempted to make his roast chicken (and, in fact, I couldn’t: My oven will not cook at a low-enough temperature). I’m sure Blumenthal’s brined, blanched, blotted, six-hour-roasted, skillet-browned, and pan-juice-injected bird was a marvel. But in the photograph of the finished dish, the bird was pale on all but the breast and tops of the thighs. The thing that I most value in a roast chicken, the lip-greasing crackly skin, seems to have been sacrificed in favor of succulence. To each her own perfection, I suppose.

That said, it is interesting to see when a traditional method needs a modification, especially when the deviations are really not all that high tech. For example, he cooks a large steak, bone in, for 18-odd hours at 120 degrees, before dividing it in two and crusting it up in a hot pan. I like the sound of that. Now I just need to arrange a sleepover with a friend who has a fancier oven than mine.

The ice cream recipe (paired in the book with the treacle tart) follows, with my notes. It’s one of the simplest in the book.

Heston Blumenthal’s Ice Cream

For the Jersey milk ice cream:

500 ml Jersey whole milk {Getting milk from a Jersey cow can be tricky. Fortunately, my friend K. has a tiny Jersey cow dairy. I have noticed that raw Jersey milk is also available at my local Whole Foods; I’m not sure whether that’s universally true, however.}

300 ml double cream {OK, so we can’t get double cream (with a considerably higher fat content than heavy cream) very easily. For comparable fattiness I could have used mascarpone, I suppose, but I went with heavy cream here.}

80 g unrefined caster sugar {Caster sugar is finely granulated; fortunately, I had unbleached, superfine organic sugar lying around, the only ingredient that did not require a special trip.}

100 g glucose syrup {This, it turns out, is super-strength corn syrup, and I found it at a kooky, cluttered cake-decorating-supplies store.}

1 kg dry ice {Blumenthal argues that home ice cream machines just don’t freeze cold enough, and in place of the hard-to-handle liquid nitrogen he uses at the Fat Duck, he recommends that his readers try dry ice, which is –80°C, for home ice cream making. To get it, I grabbed a cooler and headed out to a company that sells liquid nitrogen and welding supplies, along with dry ice. They were very nice—my guess is they don’t get too many women customers.}

Preparing the ice cream:

1. Put the milk, cream, sugar, and glucose syrup in a pan, and heat gently until the sugar has dissolved and the glucose is liquid. Set aside.

{Let it cool or not? I wondered, but went ahead and processed it without cooling.}

2. Put on safety gloves… {fleece snow gloves in my case; all my leather gloves are covered with garden dirt} ...and protective goggles, and open the packet of dry ice. {my dry ice came in nuggets} Wrap it in a tea towel and then a hand towel… {I don’t have tea towels or hand towels, so I went with a dishtowel and a bath towel} ...and smash it into a powder with a rolling pin. (Make sure that there are no large lumps of dry ice, as these will remain as lumps in the ice cream.)

{Easier said than done—first of all, I found the rolling pin too mild-mannered for the job. Eventually, I took to bashing at the ice with a stainless steel pestle I have in my kitchen. After 15 minutes of crushing, I was still finding lumps, which I picked out as best I could.}

Unfold the towels and shake the powdered dry ice into a glass bowl.

3. Pour the milk and glucose mix into the bowl of a food mixer. (From now on, you need to work reasonably rapidly to avoid freezing up the equipment.) Shake a little of the dry ice into the mixing bowl and, using the mixer’s paddle, mix on the first (lowest) speed until the dry ice dissolves and its vapour clears.

{This instruction directly contrasts with the instruction to work rapidly, since it takes a long time for the vapor to clear. And things seemed to be seizing up rather quickly. I love my KitchenAid mixer and would be seriously peeved if this little experiment caused my machine to break. That said, this step is fun, if a little harrowing. After one enthusiastic addition of dried ice, the mixture boiled and bubbled all the way to the rim of the bowl, threatening to overflow like a clogged toilet, before subsiding at the last minute.}

Continue to add dry ice a little at a time until the ice cream has absorbed all of it. (It may be easier to do this in two batches. It’s important to add the dry ice in small quantities to prevent the ice cream from going grainy.)

{My ice cream froze before all the dry ice could be absorbed. I wondered, had I not powdered it enough? Had I gone too slow? Too fast? I was left with a vein of powdery dry ice in the ice cream, and scooped around it.}

Once the dry ice is absorbed, beat the ice cream on the second speed until smooth.

4. Quickly scrape the ice cream out of the mixer and into a container. Store in the freezer until required. It is best eaten within 24 hours.

{I met with only partial success here. Each bite I took was a little tentative, because I didn’t want to get into a pocket of dry ice. Maybe if I had batched it, or stopped when I thought the ice cream looked done, it would have worked better. I suspect that with practice I could get the process down just right, but unless I am looking for a way to entertain someone in the kitchen with all the vapors, I can’t really imagine trying too hard. That said, Heston is right about a few things: Temperature makes a bigger difference to ice cream than I’d imagined it would—it adds a distinct extra thrill. (I’m less fond of the carbonated prickles one gets from the sublimating dry ice.) Also, he’s right about Jersey milk: I applaud my friend K’s hard-working cows, and an egg-free ice cream mix like this really lets you appreciate the milk in question. Next time I’d just throw it in my Cuisinart ice cream maker and settle for slightly warmer ice cream. It might not be perfection, but at a certain point, I just have to leave well enough alone. Which is why I don’t run a three-star restaurant.}

Dorie Greenspan had almost completed her doctorate in gerontology, and then she veered off that path and became a baking expert and ace food writer instead. She’s a special correspondent at Bon Appétit and pops up regularly on NPR’s The Splendid Table to talk about the latest kitchen gadgets, but she is probably best known as a cookbook collaborator. She has worked with Julia Child (Baking with Julia [Morrow, 1996]), Daniel Boulud (Daniel Boulud’s Café Boulud Cookbook [Scribner, 1999]), and Pierre Hermé (Desserts by Pierre Hermé [Little, Brown, 1998] and Chocolate Desserts by Pierre Hermé [Little, Brown, 2001]).

Now Greenspan has come out with her own grand tome, a compendium of her favorite homemade pastries: Baking: From My Home to Yours (Houghton Mifflin, 2006). I’ve already used recipes from the book to bake my son’s birthday cake (the fluffy feather boa of a cake that’s pictured on the book’s cover), to quell an overwhelming chocolate pudding urge, and to supply an elegant torte for a chic dinner party (her chocolate-Armagnac-prune number, which apparently got her fired from her first baking job for creative insubordination). Though the Hermé books proved that Greenspan can hang with the most finicky techniques of French patisserie, her new book is entirely approachable—Greenspan’s observant prose is one of the best coaches a novice baker could have in the kitchen. The advanced baker has plenty to learn from her, too: She convinces you of the glory of both homespun American desserts and more elegant composed sweets with a European edge. It’s among the best bakery text to come out in years: warm and ebullient, but with that sensible spine that a cookbook needs to help you get things made. I talked with Greenspan recently, while she was on her exhaustive book tour.

Your book is a tribute to home baking. Do you find that there’s an advantage to home-baking over just ordering it at a restaurant?

It’s more than you’re going to want to know, but I’ve been thinking about it lately. Sometime in 1987 or 1988 or so, fancy French restaurants stopped wheeling around the dessert cart and went to plated desserts. So a restaurant at a certain level lost the ability to present a whole cake, to have the pleasure of seeing something whole. There’s something really wonderful, and this is what you can do at home, about bringing out a whole cake, bringing out a whole pie, and cutting it and sharing it with your friends. There’s something very generous about it.

Are there any restaurant dessert trends you think are interesting right now?

Lately, you see desserts that seem to be coming from the savory side of the kitchen; they might be baked, but they seem to be using some cook skills as well as some pastry chef skills. This has been going on for a while, but you see a lot of herbs in desserts—bay leaf, basil, rosemary. When I was working on the book, I went back and remade—rejiggered in some cases—recipes that had been favorites in the family, and I found that in the old recipes there was much less salt than I’m now using. Pierre Hermé said to me, “You know, you’re very timid with salt; salt is a really important ingredient in sweets.” [And so,] I found myself upping the amount of salt in the desserts I made with butter, with chocolate, with caramel, just getting to understand that salt was an important part of dessert.

How has it been different to be able to work on your own, and create your own recipes?

It’s been both liberating and lonely…. It was fun to have the freedom, the liberty, to be so selfish as to just use the recipes that I wanted to use, my favorites; to write my stories, but I missed having a partner.

Are you going to go back to any collaborations?

I don’t know, I might do another one. I learn so much working with other people. I don’t know how many hundreds of génoises I’ve made in my life, but I believe if I were to watch somebody make a génoise, or, you know, a brownie, I’d learn something. Pierre and I have been talking about something, but the next book that I know I’m going to do is going to be about French home cooking.

How much time do you spend in France?

Usually about three to four months a year, but in little pieces.

When you’re developing a recipe, do you find you work in a French mode when you’re working on a French recipe, and in American mode when you’re working on, say, a Bundt cake?

I’ve learned so much working with French pastry chefs, but when I’m developing a recipe, I think I am at heart an American baker. I like crunchy, I like chunky … I think of those as very American, but there are things I’ve learned working with French chefs: My cakes are a little lower; I’ll go for a ganache before I go for a powdered sugar and butter frosting. I think some of my flavor combinations might be Frencher, with ground nuts and things that are more European. But in the end, when you taste what I make, I think it’s pretty American.

One of the things you’re so good at is describing these things that I know are hard to describe—how, for instance, you perch a pan full of water filled with custards on the edge of the oven. Do you have a hard time coming up with the descriptions for physical acts like that?

When I was in high school, we had sororities, and when you went for your sorority interview, they asked you to describe a spiral staircase without using your hands. There are times when I’m trying to describe something and I’m sitting in front of the computer and I’m making the hand motions and trying to figure it out. I always think of “describe a spiral staircase without using your hands.” There are some things that are so hard, even talking about how to make the rim of a pie crust—as I say this to you, I’m making it with my fingers. When describing making caramel, trying to talk about how the size of the bubbles changes in the sugar, or, for the most extraordinary French lemon cream, which I adore, how the texture comes together—you can check it by temperature, but you can also see it. When I am making the recipes, I take notes as I’m making them, on the visual, how things look: It might curdle, or it will thicken; it will be thicker or thinner than you would expect. When I’m writing the recipe, I actually think about somebody being in the kitchen. I imagine myself talking them through the recipe. How to give all the warnings: It may bubble up furiously if you’re doing caramel … it’s supposed to. Or, it may smell like you’re burning it … it’s OK. It’s a lot to keep in mind if you want to be able to help people get through each stage.

What baking problem are you most asked about?

People talk a lot about pie crusts. There’s the myth of pie crusts, that you have to be born being a pie hand. I actually was afraid to make pie crusts—and I’d been baking for a while—until a friend of mine came over and said, “I’ll teach you how to do it.” Then I realized that I loved doing it; there’s something so satisfying about rolling it out, lifting it up, and getting it fitted into the pan. I make both my pie crusts and my tart crusts in the food processor. The important thing is to keep the ingredients cold, and you can make it so quickly in a food processor that they stay cold and the dough doesn’t toughen.

Is there one kind of sweet that you just crave and adore on a fundamental level more than others?

Ice cream. I know it’s not baked, but it’s the one thing that I am actually totally out of control about.

Vij’s: Elegant and Inspired Indian Cuisine
By Vikram Vij and Meeru Dhalwala
Douglas & McIntyre, 2006; $29.95

Why is it that I so rarely cook Indian food at home? It is one of my favorite cuisines, if you call it a cuisine; it’s really a most satisfying hybrid of cuisines, with many regional styles. But I always seem to eat Indian food out. In truth, I don’t have the gut knowledge of spices that is necessary to cook it casually, which is how I prefer to cook. If I am going out, there is no place I’d rather go than Vij’s, a few hours north of me in Vancouver, where Vikram Vij and Meeru Dhalwala have managed to develop a wonderfully nuanced Indo-Canadian style. They are virtuosic with spices. Each curry they create lets a single spice or flavor element shine against a supporting cast of other spices: In the goat curry, it’s kalongi (a.k.a. nigella seed), in the short ribs it’s cinnamon, in a grilled asparagus and corn dish it’s fenugreek.

Now the couple have published a cookbook, and I hope their starring-spice approach will give me the tools to finally grasp the nuances of complex masalas. Vij’s is very much a restaurant-based cookbook, which means that if you are looking for an encyclopedic scope and authenticity, you may be happier with the books of Madhur Jaffrey, Julie Sahni, or Yamuna Devi. The hybrid style of Vij’s makes the book inviting: It is driven by taste and curiosity as much as by tradition—and the Pacific coast is constantly making its presence felt in the preparations. I like seeing an Indian approach to mussels or a hunk of Columbia River sturgeon; and when it comes to the stuff that’s important—toasting one’s own spices or patiently preparing a sofrito-like wet masala, Vij and Dhalwala are traditionalists.

It should come as no surprise that, restaurant-inspired as it is, this is also a bit of a project book; the methods aren’t too daunting, but there can be a lot of elements. The most complicated recipe is for venison medallions that sandwich a filling of milk jam (khoa) and figs, served with pomegranate curry. Most recipes are a good deal simpler, but they still reflect a certain restaurant mentality: The shopping lists can be quite long; the preparations require lots of pans. It is hard to imagine doing an appetizer, a side, and a main course from this book without making sure that someone else is washing dishes.

I’m hoping I’ll have the time to make the tomato and coriander quail cakes or the venison recipe sometime (my guess is that I’ll try that pomegranate curry and forgo the stuffing), but meanwhile I find myself poring over the entry-level recipes: a mustard-seed curry with long beans and potatoes; an eggplant, tomato, and green-onion curry; or the book’s most basic chicken curry recipe, reprinted here, which works as a sort of baseline reading of the recipes.

Vij’s Family Chicken Curry

{I tried the basic chicken curry; it stood out among all the more exotic curries because even though I know that Indian cooks make their own spice blends for each curry, I’ve always just done chicken curries with curry powders—good ones —but ready-made mixes nonetheless. The family chicken curry, while of the familiar yellowish sort, called for its own blend of spices, so I followed along.}

1/2 cup canola oil {This is a lot of oil, which pays off in the silkiness of the sauce}

2 cups finely chopped onions (2 large)

3-inch stick of cinnamon

3 tablespoons finely chopped garlic

2 tablespoons chopped ginger

2 cups chopped tomatoes (2 large)

1 tablespoon salt

1/2 teaspoon ground black pepper

1 teaspoon turmeric {There’s not as much turmeric here proportionately as in most commercial curry powders—a good thing, because too much brings a leafy astringency to the table. Also note that there’s no fenugreek in this curry—another typical curry powder spice.}

1 tablespoon ground cumin

1 tablespoon ground coriander

1 tablespoon garam masala (recipe p. 26) {Making garam masala is really just a game of chicken played on a stovetop—I toasted the cumin, black cardamom, clove, and cinnamon in a dry pan on the stovetop; the smoke started billowing upward, and my two-year-old son and I started hacking. Stirring, stirring—how dark should the cumin seeds get? I settled for a dark coffee color and let the mixture cool off. According to the book, many commercial garam masalas aren’t toasted, so they lack the depth this one adds to the curry.}

1/2 teaspoon ground cayenne pepper

3 pounds chicken thighs, bone in {My husband asked for “legs” at the grocery store, and we ended up with drumsticks—more tendons to navigate, but still tasty.}

1 cup sour cream, stirred {For those of us who always marvel how creamy Indian sauces can be, I suppose it shouldn’t be a surprise that, in fact, they contain cream. Score one for the moghuls.}

2 cups water

1/2 cup chopped cilantro (including stems)

In a large pan, heat oil on medium heat for 1 minute. Add onions and cinnamon, and sauté for 5 to 8 minutes, until onions are golden. Add garlic and sauté for another 4 minutes. Add ginger, tomatoes, salt, black pepper, turmeric, cumin, coriander, garam masala, and cayenne. Cook this masala for 5 minutes, or until the oil separates from the masala. {One begins to appreciate all the moments that serve to concentrate flavors in these recipes. Here, when sweating the onions to start the stew, you go for a little color, unlike the practice with most French preparations; then you add a little garlic and again let things get a little colored. Finally, you add your precious garam masala—which, remember, has already been toasted—and tomatoes, ginger, turmeric, cumin, cayenne, and coriander, and let it all cook together again until the tomatoes cook off their juices and the oil separates from the spicy paste below.}

Remove and discard skin from the chicken thighs. Wash thighs and add to the masala. Stir well. Cook chicken thighs for 10 minutes, until the chicken looks cooked on the outside. Add sour cream and water and stir well. Increase the heat to medium-high. When curry starts to boil, reduce the heat to medium, cover, and cook for 15 minutes, stirring 2 or 3 times, until chicken is completely cooked. Poke the thighs with a knife. If the meat is still pink, cook for 5 more minutes. Remove and discard the cinnamon stick. Cool curry for at least half an hour. {Here’s another moment of flavor concentration—letting the curry cool before serving. We were in a rush the first night of the curry and served it hot, but then I ate it for lunch the next day and the spices had knit together with the meat in a much subtler way, and the cayenne’s impact went from a little harsh to a gentle, warming tingle. Do not be afraid to eat chunks straight out of the refrigerator.}

Transfer cooled chicken to a mixing bowl. Wearing latex gloves, peel chicken meat off the bones. Discard bones and stir chicken back into the curry. Just before serving, heat curry on medium heat until it starts to boil lightly. Stir in cilantro. {After cooking this recipe, I tried another chicken curry from the book. It used fewer spices that were kept whole and got most of its punch, instead, from a mint and cilantro chutney that was stirred into the stew shortly before serving. Though they share many ingredients, the difference was striking between this yellow curry’s full-bodied warmth and the other’s play between nutty toasted cumin and coriander, and the rounded grassiness of the chutney.}

To serve: Divide curry evenly among six bowls.

Wine: A Spanish Tempranillo with good fruit and balanced tannins is a great complement to this curry. {Vij has provided articulate wine notes for each dish, but just pawing through the book makes me thirsty for the crispest of lagers.}

It’s a banner year for big cookbooks: Later this month, Scribner will release a 75th-anniversary edition of The Joy of Cooking; the CIA has tuned up its basic training manual, The Professional Chef; and Bon Appétit has just published its eponymous cookbook, in honor of its 50th year (perhaps in part because Condé Nast sibling/rival Gourmet published its own 1,000-plus-recipe cookbook two years ago). These over-600-page books are intended to be encyclopedic in nature, and as any Wikipedia user knows, encyclopedias are almost always defined by their blind spots. That’s good for publishers: No matter how definitive a cookbook claims to be, there is always room for another.

Big cookbooks purport to teach the building blocks of cooking and tend to fall into two categories. The homemaking audience gets basic how-tos—books like The Joy of Cooking or The Fannie Farmer Cookbook, or even Mark Bittman’s How to Cook Everything. The Professional Chef—in many ways the descendant of Escoffier’s canonical Guide Culinaire its guidance to the more experienced home chef.

We’ve been learning the fundamentals for a long time now, but they need to be repackaged from time to time, making room for new tools (microwaves, silpats, maybe even kryovack machines), new flavors (or old ones from other places, like nuoc cham or garam masala), or even just new personalities (Bittman’s personal, slightly gruff authority). Big cooking volumes typically present a basic recipe that elaborates on a technique and then offers more filigreed variations on the theme. For the novice, it is a chance to learn methods for the first time; for the more experienced cook, these recipes serve as reminders of basic formulas and provide the groundwork for improvisation.

Leaving the basics behind

Bon Appétit’s world, as conjured up in its cookbook, is far more insouciant than that of the tried-and-tested formulas (to my surprise, I’m a contributor to The Bon Appétit Cookbook; one of the recipes I wrote for them a few years ago was included in the volume). The Bon Appétit Cookbook shows an impatience with the theme-and-variations approach, has only a handful of illustrated techniques, and dispenses with many basics: There is brown sugar ice cream but no vanilla ice cream; there is goat-cheese-arugula ravioli with tomato-pancetta butter but no recipe for pasta dough (the ravioli are made from wonton wrappers). Bon Appétit recipes come into this world fully embellished, gracing basic Franco-Italo-American techniques with twists that are either creative or unnecessary, depending on your perspective.

It is not a cookbook for purists, who might be undone by Cumberland sauce made with cranberries; cornbread made with blue corn and spread with black olive butter; egg salad sandwiches with bacon and olives; and cheesecake in 14 varieties, from Dutch chocolate mint to crab and wild mushroom. In this way, the book catches snippets of every popular food trend that has crossed the country in the past 25 years (and though it is a 50th-anniversary cookbook, it’s really focused on the past three decades, the time in which Bon Appétit has been based in Los Angeles). Even when classic flavors are featured, formulas are tweaked to make them less labor intensive—béarnaise sauce for steak is recast in The Bon Appétit Cookbook as a compound butter flavored with tarragon and shallots.

Bon Appétit recipes come into this world fully embellished, gracing basic Franco-Italo-American techniques with twists that are either creative or unnecessary.

The Bon Appétit Cookbook occupies a niche similar to the one filled by The New Basics Cookbook, the big-volume book published by the Silver Palate team Julee Rosso and Sheila Lukins in 1989. They also dipped into the cosmopolitan flavors and restaurant trends, while keeping the techniques, and the gestalt, resoundingly cheery American. (This is a difference between the Bon Appétit and Gourmet cookbooks; the latter presents relatively pristine recipes for foreign standards, listing them by their original names, like palak paneer, pan bagnat, and pho). I’m usually drawn to books with a more rigorous approach than Bon Appétit’s global pastiche, but there is a certain appeal to this mode of thinking about food, unencumbered as it is with cultural context. With a Bon Appétit recipe, a cook can seem creative without actually having to tinker around with recipes.

Dessert dilettantism

Dessert is a particularly welcome place for such dilettantism, and it is something at which Bon Appétit excels. In its own way, Bon Appétit has contributed to the preservation of the big, homey cake. While cakes at restaurants have been deconstructed and divided into so many individual portions (molten lava cakes still chief among them), home cooks still demand birthday cakes, Christmas cakes, and Passover cakes, so Bon Appétit the magazine is laden with them: Over the years, it has collected recipes from wonderful bakers like Dorie Greenspan, Cindy Mushet, David Lebovitz, and Emily Luchetti. Whimsy is a virtue in baking, and though I am not so very interested in the 14 varieties of cheesecake, I am perfectly fine with chocolate layer cakes sprinkled with peppermint candies or gingerbread layer cake slathered with cream cheese frosting.

Because The Bon Appétit Cookbook dispenses with a lot of basic information, it’s not particularly helpful to beginning cooks. Oddly enough, this is also a problem for advanced cooks, who might want to improvise from more stripped-down formulas. But that leaves the great middle—people who like to cook and want to work some new flavors into their lineup, but aren’t too rigorous about, for example, making their own coconut milk or cooking odd bits like sweetbreads and kidneys. With its multiple contributors and hybridized recipes, The Bon Appétit Cookbook may read in some ways like a Junior League cookbook writ large (with uncharacteristically well-tested recipes). But disregard the sillier combos, like kiwi and Asian pear salsa served with lamb chops, and it’s a nice collection for the restless but not so very rigorous home cook.

Deconstructing a recipe

Here’s my annotated blow-by-blow breakdown of a typical recipe from The Bon Appétit Cookbook:

Pepita-Crusted Lamb with Pomegranate Cream

[This seems like a very typically Bon Appétit recipe—notice the two exotic elements: pepitas and pomegranate. Typically one sees pomegranate paired with walnuts in a nod to the Persian tradition (and, by diffusion, the cooking of the eastern Mediterranean). Pepitas read more Mexican, and the dry-roasted rack of lamb, of course, is a pretty European treatment.]

6 servings

1/2 cup unsalted shelled pumpkin seeds (pepitas) toasted
2 tablespoons all purpose flour
3/4 cup fresh white breadcrumbs made from crustless French bread
2 tablespoons chopped fresh cilantro
1 1/2 teaspoons salt
2 tablespoons whole milk
1 large egg
2 2 1/4- to 2 1/3-pound racks of lamb, well trimmed

4 cups unsweetened bottled pomegranate juice
1/2 cup sour cream

2 tablespoons olive oil

Preheat oven to 400°F. Finely grind pumpkin seeds and flour in processor [be careful not to over-process into a paste!]; transfer to large bowl. Mix in breadcrumbs, cilantro, and salt. Beat milk and egg in medium bowl to blend. [Note that despite the funky ingredients list, the technique is quite classic, using egg as a glue for the crust, and even working fresh breadcrumbs into the coating for cling.] Sprinkle lamb with pepper. [They forgot the pepper in the ingredients list.] Brush rounded side of lamb with egg mixture; press breadcrumb mixture over egg mixture on lamb to coat.

Boil pomegranate juice in heavy medium saucepan until syrupy and reduced to 3/4 cup, about 25 minutes. [When I first saw this instruction, I wondered why go through this step rather than use pomegranate molasses, which is essentially boiled-down pomegranate juice, but pomegranate molasses varies a good bit from brand to brand, and using fresh juice keeps a fresh-fruit aspect to the sauce. Besides, people like to feel like they’re cooking—you wouldn’t want to just pour molasses from the bottle and mix it with sour cream for a sauce; conceptually, that would make the sauce a dip.] Transfer syrup to small bowl; cool. Whisk in sour cream. Season pomegranate cream to taste with salt.

Meanwhile, heat oil in heavy large skillet over high heat [high heat only if you’ve got a well-tuned gas range—my mercurial electric range would scorch on high]. Add lamb and cook until brown, about 3 minutes per side. Transfer lamb to rimmed baking sheet. Bake until thermometer inserted into center of meat registers 130°F to 135°F for medium-rare, about 20 minutes. [Stop at 120°F for rarer chops—the only way to go, as far as I’m concerned. Let the meat rest here for about 5 minutes, and the temperature will climb to about 125°F. No matter what temperature you choose, let the meat rest to preserve juiciness.] Cut lamb between bones into individual chops. Divide among 6 plates. Spoon pomegranate cream over.

++

As a recipe, this is fairly straightforward, using the restaurant technique of searing the meat on the stovetop before delivering it to the oven for a cook in the dry heat. You’ll want to be careful of the seeds and the breadcrumbs in the crust—they want very badly to singe. Don’t be afraid to lower the heat a touch on the stovetop. As for taste? I had a particularly assertive piece of lamb, so the gentle flavor of the pepitas was a little lost in the crust. Their flavor is more distinct in a traditional Mexican pipian (in this cookbook, try the Chicken in Green Pumpkin Seed Sauce); on the other hand, the crust was pleasantly crisp and worked nicely with the lamb. Lamb and pomegranate are natural partners, as evidenced by centuries of Persian-inspired cooking, but this sauce reads as pretty American: gooey, rich, sweet, and tart all at once, almost like a sour-sweet caramel. Used sparingly, it’s a fun counterpart to the lamb, but no one would want a big spoonful of the stuff.

Perhaps the most fascinating thing about Mario Batali is the double life he leads quite publicly. It’s something that Bill Buford sketched memorably in his book Heat: Batali is a populist, with his TV shows and his plastic clogs and his rock ‘n’ roll, but also a proud member of the cognoscenti—the know-it-all who’s unable to hold back esoteric literary-historical references, who unlike other Food Network hosts is skilled enough to maintain his flagship restaurant, Babbo, as a top-drawer New York restaurant with three-star reviews and $500 wines on the menu. Outwardly he is all alpha male, but he’s savvy enough to embrace the feminine side of cuisine, too, saying, as Buford quoted him: “People should think there are grandmothers in the back [of Babbo] preparing their dinner.”

Batali has published several cookbooks, ranging from complex recipes taken from his restaurant menus (The Babbo Cookbook) to straightforward home-style preparations (Molto Italiano: 327 Simple Italian Recipes to Cook at Home). In his most recent cookbook, however, Batali turns to the boys’ club. Mario Tailgates NASCAR Style is a slim little book, published not by major New York publishers, like his other books, but by Sporting News Books, whose title list is heavy on commemoratives and stat books, including The Pride of Chicago: The White Sox’s 2005 Championship Season and Saturday Shrines: College Football’s Most Hallowed Grounds.

As the title suggests, it’s a guide to cooking while hanging out at NASCAR’s massive speedways. It’s been a rapid seller, with 125,000 copies currently in print (clearly the NASCAR fan base, and its dads in particular, are a powerful demographic—just ask the current presidential administration). While the match-up might seem like just an extremely shrewd marketing alliance, Batali insists, in the book and in associated interviews, that he really is a longtime NASCAR aficionado. He’s not, in other words, some effete interloper, the likes of the Sacha Baron Cohen character in Talladega Nights, and there are plenty of photos of Batali hanging at the tracks to prove the point. “One of my favorite tracks,” Batali writes, showing off his speedway savvy, “is Dover, a.k.a. the Monster Mile. Its concrete surface and seriously banked turns make for some incredible racing—and Dover is in Delaware, which is crab country.” I suppose that’s how you have to write when you’re tying a cookbook in to NASCAR.

It must be hard to keep the Manhattan cultural elite and the Middle American fan happy at the same time (even if there is some bit of overlap between categories). Mario Tailgates is an effective exercise in compartmentalized marketing. From the back-of-the-book blurb, you will not learn the names of Babbo or Esca or Del Posto—too New Yorky, I suppose—but you will hear about his TV shows Molto Mario and Iron Chef America. Nor can you buy Mario Tailgates on the Babbo website, where his other books are offered for sale. In his cover photo, he has even switched his trademark orange plastic clogs from Italian-made Calzuros, which appeared on the back of his Molto Italiano cookbook, to what look suspiciously like Crocs.

Mario Tailgates has a jokey, guy-talk vibe that firmly plants itself in a narrow but persistent category: the boys’-club cookbook. I always think I’ve seen the last of gendered cookbooks, but they keep popping up. Boys’-club cookbooks have been around since at least the middle of the last century—emerging from the game and fish and backcountry cookbooks that helped outdoorsmen cook when there were no women to help out. There are the old pipe-smoking-bachelor books, heavy on the cocktails, published by the likes of Esquire and Playboy, which contrast with the more mainstream-macho barbecue and hunting books, like Ted and Shemane Nugent’s immortal Kill It & Grill It: A Guide to Preparing and Cooking Wild Game and Fish. More recently, Anthony Bourdain larded his book of straightforward French-bistro recipes with his own tough-guy patois.

NASCAR, with its speed and bravado, adds another layer of masculinity—and absurdity—to the manly cookbook. But in some ways, this hypercommercial world is the perfect retreat for Batali: No one would mistake this cookbook for his more earnest fare. It is clearly a boondoggle, but one that appeals at the same time to Batali’s anti-snob tendencies.

Boy’s-club cookbooks usually delight in taking the piss out of prim or fancy cooking. The portions are enormous, there is no shame in using canned ingredients, and virile ingredients—booze, garlic, meat, and, most of all, chiles—are almost always invoked. Batali’s never been a hyper-refined chef, anyway, but for tailgating he axes the flowering chives and jellyfish that you find in The Babbo Cookbook, in favor of canned green chiles, pepper jack cheese, and liquid smoke. Batali gestures to global food with a few recipes—pork braciolona, a Cuban-style mojo, chicken satay—but in general the selections are pretty mainstream.

They’re also typically not written for everyday cooking; they are for occasions when cooking is a real performance, and Mario’s is no different, tailgating being a rather more celebratory event than your typical Wednesday night dinner. “Say it’s the weekend of the big race. And say, hypothetically, it’s also the weekend of your wedding anniversary. Hmmm. One solution to this conundrum is not to say anything and hope your wife forgets. Another, more likely, solution is to do something really special, like making this exceptional roast.”

Clearly, Batali’s not shy about hamming it up; his performance includes overworked speedway metaphors, jokes about the scarcity of fish and green vegetables at a NASCAR tailgate, even a very safe limp-dick joke: “Nothing is more humiliating than watching your flame sputter out just as the steak hits the grill. (And no one makes a little blue pill to solve this particular problem.)” (Given the broadly macho tone, it’s odd that the cocktail section of the book is rather tempered; guessing by the car sponsors, I’d say that NASCAR fans just prefer beer.)

Not surprisingly, given its novelty feel, Mario Tailgates isn’t a comprehensive guide to grilling. (Without a fancy stove-equipped RV, almost everything has to be grilled or prepared ahead when tailgating.) But for what it’s worth, the recipes I tried out were tasty, in an Applebee’s-only-better way. There was a giant breakfast concoction that was a mix between chilaquiles and a frittata; seriously good wings served with creamy dipping sauce, which was embarrassingly tasty considering it was made from little more than mayo and white vinegar; and a clever method for cooking pizzas on the grill. Next time I have too much money on hand, I might try roasting a prime rib among the coals, too.

Of course, Batali doesn’t seem comfortable being solely a man of the people: He can’t resist a few highbrow references—a whiff of Melville here, a dash of Buñuel there—perhaps just to reassure any elegant New York clients who stumble across the book that he hasn’t been entirely lost to the screaming engines of the Pocono Raceway. Perhaps he’ll make his next cookbook just for them —a Mario Cooks with Italian Grandmothers, or Mario Brunches, Sunday New York Times Crossword Puzzle Style.