Review by New York Times Review
WHY are British cookbooks, circa 2007, so much better than American ones? By "better" I don't mean that they are larger or more comprehensive, that you would necessarily give them to a new bride and groom, or that they are in possession of lustier photographs or crisper layouts or even bolder or more exacting recipes. What I mean is this: The best of the decade's British cookbooks - from writers including, but not limited to, Nigel Slater, Fergus Henderson and Simon Hopkinson - are smaller, more soulful and more idiosyncratic than their American counterparts. They're the products of a vision one is tempted to call novelistic. Drollery and lack of pretension, as in the novels of Waugh and Wodehouse, are prized. The emotional climate is pleasantly autumnal. These writers like to talk about the best things to eat when you're feeling a bit depressed or bewildered. None of them will have you depositing cilantro foam onto slices of Cryovaced gazelle meat or tell you to kick anything up a notch. Their books aren't meant to blow you away. They're meant to be genial rainy-day companions, albeit genial rainy-day companions whose authors like to eat large, and very well, perhaps after crashing on your couch to drink wine and watch an old movie. Here, for example, is Hopkinson talking about a favorite recipe for potato cakes (these writers love their potatoes): "They are at their best eaten on a Sunday afternoon, melting in front of the fire in their pool of butter. It should be winter, about 5 p.m., dark outside, and a Marx Brothers film has just finished on the television." These potatoes are world-class; so are the instructions for consuming them. My favorite among this set of Britons, Nigel Slater, doesn't have a new book this season. (Look for his backlist stalwarts, like "Appetite" and "The Kitchen Diaries.") But Fergus Henderson, the playfully dour king of offal dishes, the Sweeney Todd of the off-cut, has returned with a book called BEYOND NOSE TO TAIL: More Omnivorous Recipes for the Adventurous Cook (Bloomsbury, $35), written with Justin Piers Gellatly, his head baker and pastry chef. And American readers are finally getting their first look at Simon Hopkinson's Classic ROAST CHICKEN AND OTHER STORIES (Hyperion, $24.95), first published in England in 1994. Each of these volumes is nearly small enough to fit into your back pocket. Each feels like a keeper - Henderson's book for its awesome fearlessness, Hopkinson's for being among the most endearing and common-sensical kitchen primers ever composed. Let's begin with Henderson, the chef and proprietor of St. John, a London restaurant that is a mecca to serious eaters of offal. His ethos is a refutation of waste; he'll find an ingenious and profound use for almost anything in the kitchen. His restaurant is austere and so are his cookbooks - photographs of his sometimes grisly dishes are set against acres of white space. Turning the pages in "Beyond Nose to Tail," you may feel you're wandering in an abattoir-cum-art gallery. Damien Hirst will take your order now. Both of Henderson's books have a few semi-barbaric, kitchen-destroying recipes my wife and I have taken to calling Big Uglies - dishes that tend to involve using Bic razors to scrape bits of hair from animal parts not often seen in the kitchen. In his previous book, "The Whole Beast: Nose to Tail Eating," that meant, for us, a vertiginous pile of fried pig's tails. (They were grimly sublime.) Here it's a pressed pig's ear terrine and a pot-roast half pig's head he calls "a perfect romantic supper for two." Henderson continues, with a crooked grin: "What we are looking for is the half pig's head to lurk in the stock in a not dissimilar fashion to an alligator in a swamp." You will not be serving this during your mother-in-law's visit. Unless your mother-in-law is Tim Burton. The nice thing about "Beyond Nose to Tail" is that you can very profitably work its margins, even if you aren't up to a Big Ugly. Henderson's salad of beetroot, red onion, red cabbage, crème fraîche and chervil is a beautiful thing to behold, as are his recipes for "orbs of joy" (whole red onions cooked in chicken stock) and baked potatoes with garlic and duck fat. This book's chicken and ox tongue pie is elegant and straightforward (after you've soaked the tongue in brine for two weeks). About this pie, Henderson quite accurately writes: "For those of us who sometimes feel a little frail, here is a pie that will sort you out for sure." My wife and I have already cooked nearly a dozen of the recipes in "Beyond Nose to Tail," and none were disappointing. But two seem likely to stick with us for a very long time, and that's more than I can say about most recipes. One is for an appetite-prickling cocktail, a mixture of white wine and Campari over ice called a bicyclette - so named, Henderson writes, because in Italy "old men drink it and then wobble home on their bikes." The other is for something Henderson calls Trotter Gear: a gelatinous, Madeira-infused über-stock, made from pig's feet and studded with their meat, that he employs in various recipes, most expressively in a dish called Snail, Trotter, Sausage and Chickpeas. With a bicyclette in one hand and a talismanic jar of Trotter Gear in the other, you'll begin to feel as fearless in the kitchen as he does. Simon Hopkinson is the chef who founded the London restaurant Bibendum. His "Roast Chicken and Other Stories," written with Lindsey Bareham, was recently hailed by a panel of chefs, food writers and consumers in the British magazine Waitrose Food Illustrated, who voted it (and let's not mince words here) "the most useful cookbook of all time." It's a designation I'm not tempted to quarrel with. I'd like to sleep with this book under my pillow. The first thing that strikes you about "Roast Chicken" is what an interesting and friendly prose writer Hopkinson can be. His introduction is a no-nonsense manifesto about eating that's worth quoting at length: "Good cooking, in the final analysis, depends on two things: common sense and good taste. ... We are all drawn to the smell of fish and chips, fried onions, roast beef, christmas lunch, pizza, fresh coffee, toast and bacon, and other sensory delights. Conversely, to my mind there is nothing that heralds the bland 'vegetable terrine,' the 'cold lobster mousse with star anise and vanilla,' or the 'little stew of seven different fish' that has been 'scented' with Jura wine and 'spiked' with tarragon. I feel uncomfortable with this sort of food and don't believe it to be, how shall we say, genuine." He continues: "It is also a question of sympathy between the cook and the cooked-for; is there a worryingly large proportion of people, I wonder, who cook to impress rather than to please?... The food should not dominate the proceedings. Rather, it should enhance and enliven the occasion. There is nothing more tedious than an evening spent discussing every dish eaten in minute detail." Hopkinson is all about pleasing - he will not do fandangos at an ingredient's expense. His book is an A to V (anchovies to veal) tour of his favorite things to consume, with a bright essay and several recipes supplied for each. He's an admirer of the classics, hugging the shore of their influence, and he makes impassioned arguments for them. His small chapter on leeks - "the softy of the onion family" - includes beautiful and low-key recipes for leeks vinaigrette, a leek tart, leeks with cream and mint, and a vichyssoise. Just as smart and essential are his chapters on everything from cod, brains, liver and steak to endive, parsley, onions and eggplant. Imagine an entire book with four to five simple and extraordinary ways to prepare most of the foods you come in contact with on a regular basis, and you'll have imagined this nearly flawless book. I suspect you could cook from this volume, and this volume alone, for several years without boredom or mishap. By the end, you'll have picked up a great deal of the knowledge and understanding that are as important in the kitchen, Hopkinson argues, as the best ingredients: "Whereas an ignorant or uncaring chef can ruin the finest free-range chicken, a sympathetic and enthusiastic cook can work wonders, even with an old boiling fowl." One American food writer whose works stands up to the best the British have to offer is John Thorne, whose books, especially "Outlaw Cook" and "Pot on the Fire," have meant a lot to me over time. He's an essayist and a thinker more than a generator of recipes - but he's surely a cranky and hyper-literate exemplar of what he urges everyone who cares about food to be: a "single-kitchen artist-monk." Thorne's new essay and recipe collection is mouth WIDE OPEN: A Cook and His Appetite (North Point, $26), written with his wife, Matt Lewis Thorne, in which he delivers his thoughts on everything from bagna caôda and its variations to casseroles, fried eggs and rice bowl dishes. I enjoyed every page, but I haven't yet cooked widely in it (as I have with every other book mentioned here). Thorne, to his credit, wouldn't be bothered by this. He's vaguely opposed to recipes anyway. "There are countless cookbooks from which I have never made a single dish," he writes, "but for which I have the highest regard and which I would recommend unreservedly to anyone." Which is exactly how I feel about "Mouth Wide Open." If you don't know Thorne's writing, it's time to start catching up. THE ART OF SIMPLE FOOD: Notes, Lessons and Recipes From a Delicious Revolution (Clarkson Potter, $35), by Alice Waters along with Patricia Curtan, Kelsie Kerr and Fritz Streiff, is undoubtedly this year's signal American cookbook. It's a departure of sorts, her first major book not to include the words "Chez Panisse" in its title, and it feels like a solo album despite the co-writers listed on the title page. (She has, however, clung to the signature Patricia Curtan illustrations that filled her earlier books.) "The Art of Simple Food" is intended to be Waters's master class, the most straightforward utterance of her principles and a comprehensive touchstone cookbook - a "Joy of Cooking" or "Gourmet Cookbook." In most regards it functions, often beautifully, as all three. So why does it feel like a stand-up double rather than a home run? Well, for starters, the book's organization will make you scratch your head. Waters divides the volume into two parts, the first called "Starting From Scratch: Lessons and Foundation Recipes." Here you'll find sections with titles like "Omelets and Soufflés," "Into the Oven" and "Over the Coals." But flip to the book's second half - called "At the Table: Recipes for Cooking Every Day" - and the recipes start all over again, with less meta-talk and theory surrounding them. It's this second section readers will use most often, but the book's organization means that some recipes - for salads, say, or eggs or fish - are grouped in not one but two parts of the book. You're constantly flipping around and folding down page corners to find what you're looking for. It's stressful and, as Waters writes here, "a dinner that has left me stressed after cooking it is not a dinner I want to serve to my family and friends." "Made in Italy," by Giorgio Locatelli with Sheila Keating. Top, "Artichoke to Za'atar," by Greg Malouf and Lucy Malouf. Second, the book's tone is cool - it's a Hillary Clinton of a cookbook, brilliant but unflappable and thus slightly unapproachable. It makes you feel vaguely unworthy, and may inspire you to rebel and stuff a few pounds of junk food into your shopping cart. (In his book, Hopkinson observes that "there is nothing to beat the gorgeous sickliness of a Mars bar" - a lovely sentence it's nearly impossible to imagine Waters uttering.) There aren't many personal stories in Waters's book, or anecdotes that nail down her observations. But there's a lot of genially bland writing that sounds like seventh-grade science class. A section on beans begins: "Beans belong to a huge botanical family that includes all the flowering plants whose fertilized flowers form pods, or shells, with seeds inside." And here's the first sentence of a section on sautéing: "Sauté ing is an exciting cooking experience." "Made in Italy," by Giorgio Locatelli with Sheila Keating. Top, "Artichoke to Za'atar," by Greg Malouf and Lucy Malouf. It didn't help that the first recipe I cooked from "The Art of Simple Food" - it was for carnitas - didn't really work. It was my fault as much as Waters's, but better directions would have prevented me from wandering astray. She has you cut a pound and a half of boneless pork shoulder into cubes, cover them with water to which some salt and lime juice has been added, and let the liquid boil off. Once the liquid is gone, she writes, you turn down the heat in the pan and gently fry the pieces of meat in their own fat. But once my liquid was gone, I had a dry pan full of semi-boiled meat (even though I had left some fat on the pieces) that needed a good deal of additional oil to crisp up into anything that resembled carnitas. The recipe would have been more helpful if it had instructed me, right up top, to leave a greater amount of wobbly fat, when possible, on the cubes. The other recipes my wife and I cooked from "The Art of Simple Food" were straightforward, intuitive and very good. Waters's other Chez Panisse cookbooks are consulted at least weekly in my house, and it was good to see some favorites reappear here. I suspect that this is a book we'll grow into, and use with increasing regularity. I also suspect that because this book doesn't have French in its title, it will attract readers who have none of her other books on their shelves. This can only be good for humanity. Some other very good cookbooks you should know about this season: THE SEVENTH DAUGHTER: My Culinary Journey From Beijing to San Francisco (Ten Speed, $35), by Cecilia Chiang with Lisa Weiss. Chiang's groundbreaking San Francisco restaurant, the Mandarin, dedicated to northern Chinese regional cooking, has now closed. But here, in a book that's part memoir and part recipe collection, she shares her favorite recipes (Chongqing spicy dry-shredded beef, pot stickers, tea eggs) alongside great stories - like the time members of Jefferson Airplane left her a couple of joints as a tip. MADE IN ITALY: Food & Stories (Ecco/HarperCollins, $60), by Giorgio Locatelli with Sheila Keating. This is a big, artful, slablike bruiser of a cookbook, one that leans heavily on its author's sex appeal - Locatelli's curly brown hair and unshaven mug fill the book's outsize back cover. Locatelli is a northern Italian chef who trained in France and now cooks in London at Locanda Locatelli. His book is a dense love poem to his favorite dishes, one that finds its soul and its center of gravity in loving and detailed chapters on essentials like risotto and pasta. If I have a complaint, it's that the book is text-heavy: does anyone need, at this point, another disquisition on the history of ingredients like salt? If you want a sense of Locatelli's brio and generosity, though, just know this: He was the man in charge of the decadent displays of food in Peter Greenaway's film "The Cook, the Thief, His Wife and Her Lover." CRESCENT CITY COOKING: Unforgettable Recipes From Susan Spicer's New Orleans (Knopf, $35), by Susan Spicer with Paula Disbrowe. Spicer is the owner of two New Orleans restaurants, Bayona and Herbsaint, and she's been a revered cook for more than two decades - it's hard to believe this is her first cookbook. It was worth the wait. Her signature dishes are here, like seared duck breasts with pepper jelly glaze and her extraordinary bayou "chicken wings" - aka frogs' legs - with fines herbes butter. Worth the price of admission alone is the fetching recipe for salmon paired with choucroute and gewürztraminer sauce; the Alsatian flavors of the sauerkraut and the wine are, alongside the fish, a pleasant surprise. VEGANOMICON: The Ultimate Vegan Cookbook (Marlowe & Company, $27.50), by Isa Chandra Moskowitz and Terry Hope Romero. Moskowitz is a tattooed 34-year-old Brooklynite with punk spirit and an old soul; spending time with her cheerfully politicized book feels like hanging out with Grace Paley. She and her cooking partner, Terry Hope Romero, are as crude and funny when kibbitzing as they are subtle and intuitive when putting together vegan dishes that are full of non-soggy adult tastes - they throw a lot of capers and Dijon and spices and vinegar and shallots around. Don't look here for bowls of vegan mush. Do look for an excellent roasted fennel and hazelnut salad, bok choy cooked with crispy shallots and sesame seeds, hot and sour soup with wood ears and napa cabbage and a porcini-wild rice soup they say is "perfect for serving your yuppie friends." MEDIEVAL CUISINE OF THE ISLAMIC WORLD: A Concise History With 174 Recipes (University of California, $24.95), by Lilia Zaouali, translated by M. B. DeBevoise. "There are more cookbooks in Arabic from before 1400 than in the rest of the world's languages put together," Zaouali writes in this fascinating selection of recipes taken from ancient cookbooks (which also includes 31 contemporary recipes "that evoke the flavors of the Middle Ages"). There are amazements on nearly every page. Consider the recipe for Fish Drowned in Grape Juice, which begins: "Take a large live fish. Put it in black grape juice in a vessel deep enough for it to be completely immersed. It will thrash about and swallow the juice until its body is filled with it." ARTICHOKE TO ZA'ATAR: Modern Middle Eastern Food (University of California, $29.95), by Greg Malouf and Lucy Malouf. Greg Malouf is an Australian chef who has an easy mastery of Middle Eastern ingredients, from coriander to yogurt to mint. His recipe for Southern fried chicken with Eastern spices, to give just one example, brilliantly reanimates an old favorite. Some readers may have trouble consuming this artery-clogger (and others here) after reading Malouf's astonishingly low-key confession in the introduction: "A word about health: my own past has been littered with angioplasty, bypass operations and even a heart transplant." Finally, James Peterson distills a lifetime of thinking about food in COOKING (Ten Speed, $40). The book's instructions include invaluable frame-by-frame photographs. Then there is FISH FOREVER: The Definitive Guide to Understanding, Selecting, and Preparing Healthy, Delicious, and Environmentally Sustainable Seafood (Wiley, $34.95), by Paul Johnson, a former chef who founded and owns the legendary Monterey Fish Market, which supplies chefs like Alice Waters, Thomas Keller and Alain Ducasse. What Johnson doesn't know about fish is, frankly, not worth knowing. ON THE WEB: 25 MORE COOKBOOKS. Still in need of culinary - or gift-giving - inspiration? Consult our annotated list of 25 new cookbooks at nytimes.com/books. Dwight Garner is senior editor at the Book Review.
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [October 27, 2009]
Review by Booklist Review
This long-awaited volume sums up what Alice Waters learned as she rose from feeding the Berkeley counterculture to the very pinnacle of American cookery. Much more than a mere collection of recipes, this book takes the reader through Waters' cooking's first principles: ingredients, techniques, and menu planning. She identifies four essential sauces for basic flavoring, favoring garlicky aioli over plain mayonnaise. Her pizza dough calls for rye flour. Soups, salads, and pastas form the backbone for much of Waters' cuisine, and recipes range from classics such as linguini with clams to an intensely spicy cauliflower soup. Slow-cooked stews, perfect for cold nights, include beef, chicken, and pork versions. For Waters, simple has many meanings. She includes her own version of bouillabaisse, calling for upward of two-dozen ingredients and some serious preparation time and skill. Waters' influence and her vast following will create significant demand for this very well-conceived and -executed cookbook.--Knoblauch, Mark Copyright 2007 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
The delicious dishes described in the latest cookbook from Chez Panisse founder Waters, such as a four-ingredient Soda Bread and Cauliflower Salad with Olives and Capers, are simple indeed, though the book's structure is complex, if intuitive. After a useful discussion of ingredients and equipment come chapters on techniques, such as making broth and soup. Each of these includes three or four recipes that rely on the technique described, which can lead to repetition (still preferable to a lack of guidance): a chapter on roasting contains two pages of instructions on roasting a chicken (including a hint to salt it a day in advance for juicy results), followed by a recipe for Roast Chicken that is simply an abbreviated version of those two pages. The final third of the book divides many more recipes traditionally into salads, pasta and so forth. Waters taps an almost endless supply of ideas for appealing and fresh yet low-stress dishes: Zucchini Ragout with Bacon and Tomato, Onion Custard Pie, Chocolate Crackle Cookies with almonds and a little brandy. Whether explaining why salting food properly is key or describing the steps to creating the ideal Grilled Cheese Sandwich, she continues to prove herself one of our best modern-day food writers. (Oct.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
