Tartine bread

WHAT confusing times these are. And I'm talking just about new cookbook offerings. Fall's usual glut of chef-y titles, primed for the giving, are notably absent. The food we're being offered is much simpler, much faster and removed from the realm of fantasy - unless we're talking about "Modernist Cuisine: The Art and Science of Cooking," the Microsoft executive turned cooking whiz Nathan Myhrvold's $625 tome on 21st-century techniques (which you can preorder in advance of its March 2011 publication). The one big restaurant book is from a chef in Denmark who plucks his ingredients from rocks, beaches, logs, even cracks in the sidewalk. In short, we're looking closer to home. When the going gets iffy, the iffy get baking. This season there are excellent books on offer for those warming up for a cookie swap, trying to perfect the baguette or looking to commit murder by butter (four sticks should do it). Speaking of untimely death, THE GOURMET COOKIE BOOK (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, $18) features one recipe for every year Gourmet magazine was in business, making for 69 gems in this beautifully designed keepsake. The recipes are grouped by decade, from the ration-era pluck of the 1940s (honey refrigerator cookies and Scotch oat crunchies), when the magazine was published out of a penthouse in the Plaza Hotel, to the twisted classics of the oughts (cranberry turtle bars and glittering lemon sandwich cookies). The wistful headnotes offer historical insight into our past tastes and aspirations. In 1953, we're informed, "the recipe list for the October issue included wild duck, young partridge with grapes, poached marrow, couscous, neck of lamb Grecque, feijoada, goose liver pies and petites bouchées." Why, I wonder, am I drawn to the sweets of the 1940s through the 1960s - pretty brownbutter cookies, brandy snaps and Moravian whjte Christmas cookies? Perhaps each generation finds comfort in its grandmother's repertoire. Alice Medrich has moved the ball of dough forward with CHEWY GOOEY CRISPY CRUNCHY MELT-IN-YOUR-MOUTH COOKIES (Artisan, paper, $25.95), rethinking everything she baked, rebooting classics and modernizing techniques. You can almost picture the flour-covered spreadsheets and flow charts. Many recipes, from bittersweet decadence cookies to salted peanut toffee cookies, offer the competitive baker creative "upgrades": you can ratchet up the decadence by folding in candied orange peel and increasing the amount of nuts, or transform salted peanut toffee cookies with white chocolate or Thai curry cashews. Medrich's interest in bringing new or unusual ingredients into play - spelt flour in a buttery sablé, cacao nibs in rugelach, cardamom caramel in a palmier - stimulates thought while triggering favorable gut reactions. And the wheat-averse will rejoice at her gluten-free adaptations, including one for caramel cheesecake bars. Above all, Medrich is determined to make us better bakers. In her first chapter, called the "User's Guide," she insists (among other things) that we check our oven temperatures, spoon flour into a measuring cup rather than scoop and follow her recipe instructions to the letter. With her constant nudging, you'll never overmix or beat chilled egg whites again. And your cookies will be the better for it. They might look like another pair of fresh-faced Brooklynites (retro tie and mustache? check), but Matt Lewis and Renato Poliafito, the owners of the Baked sweet shops in Brooklyn and Charleston, are media-savvy butter fiends. Their second book, BAKED EXPLORATIONS: Classic American Desserts Reinvented (Stewart, Tabori & Chang, $29.95), promises twists on classic and kitschy recipes. Although its twee typographical styling will look dated in about 10 minutes, the text will make it seem entirely rational to want to bake chocolate whoopie pies, Boston cream pie cake, Almond Joy tart or monkey bubble bread. I was thrilled to discover that Lewis, who shares my obsession with Biscoffs, Delta Air Lines' take on the traditional Dutch speculaas cookie, spent a long time tryng to recreate them. They're better than an upgrade. And those whoopie pies? Four sticks of buttery fun. Oh to be young, decadent and baked in Brooklyn. Chad Robertson is young and cool, but of the West Coast variety: a scruffy-cute surfer dad with a serious bread obsession. His earnest and lovely TARTINE BREAD (Chronicle Books, $40) shares secrets of the naturally fermented kind. A co-owner of the beloved Tartine Bakery in San Francisco's Mission District (I've almost missed flights standing in line for croque monsieur and bread pudding), Robertson shares a recipe for basic country bread that's worth attempting. And his 37 pages of detailed instructions and clear photographs are proof he really wants you to succeed. (Further, urn, proof: he gave his recipe to two novice bakers, and includes their notes.) Robertson's basic method incorporates some elements of the wildly popular no-knead method - you bake the dough in a cast-iron casserole to create a mini-oven - except that you have to take much more care than noknead's dump-and-stir approach. To be honest (and it kind of kills me to say this), the no-knead method works better for my impatient East Coast life, but Robertson did increase my understanding of the mysteries of bread, without taxing my brain like Peter Reinhart's books can. There are plenty of variations: pizza dough, walnut bread and the seductive brioche lardon, which incorporates bacon, hazelnuts, thyme and orange zest. Especially great is the chapter on what to do with days-old bread. The recipes for panade (don't ask, just try), eggplant involtini and meatball sandwiches will keep you from finishing the loaf, no matter what method you used to bake it. René Redzepi, of Noma in Copenhagen, is officially the best chef in the world - this year at least. (He won that honor at the 2010 S. Pellegrino World's 50 Best Restaurants awards, displacing Ferran Adrià of Spain's El Bulli.) Redzepi's 12-table restaurant celebrates Scandinavian ingredients with a dedication to seasonally and locale that would make most cooks flee for the equator come March. Musk ox, bulrushes, sea buckthorn, spruce shoots - they're all on the dinner menu, and they're exquisite in Redzepi's hands, turned into artful creations like sweetbreads and seaweed with bleak roe and seashore herbs, or pork belly and pork scratchings with ramson leaves, shoots, stems and flowers. So why would you want to buy a book you'll never be able to cook from? Because NOMA: Time and Place in Nordic Cuisine (Phaidon, $49.95) is a beautiful portrait of an important moment in food, with exquisite photographs by Ditte Isager, and because it will inspire you to slow down and look down and around. Is that wood sorrel growing in the sidewalk? Is that fruit tree that stains my driveway a mulberry? You might not be able to reproduce a dessert of over-ripe pears and mall oil, skyr and wild chervil, but you can use the recipe as a template to make your own backyard dessert. (If all else fails, Redzepi's chocolate-covered potato crisps with anise and fennel seeds are divine.) Just don't eat alone. Hidden on the book's last page is the warning: "Exercise caution when foraging for ingredients. Any foraged ingredients should be eaten only if an expert has deemed them safe to eat." Rozanne Gold won't have you looking under rocks for dinner. The author of the "1-2-3" series wants your meal to be as effortless as possible. And yet she has more in common with René Redzepi than with Rachael Ray, favoring fresh produce and sophisticated flavors in dishes that just happen to be doable in as little as five minutes. Her RADICALLY SIMPLE: Brilliant Flavors With Breathtaking Ease (Rodale, $35) is perfectly titled. A flavorful lunch of smoked trout on frisée with warm bacon-maple vinaigrette was on the table in 15 minutes. A pretty impressive dinner of onion soup with apple and thyme, pork loin with a tomato cream sauce spiked with gin and sage, and bay-smoked potatoes was ready in about an hour, though I pretended it took longer. (The dessert pages, howeverdidn't inspire dog-earing.) The usual complaint with quick-and-pretty cookbooks is that a small number of ingredients rarely add up to a great meal. But Gold's global palate and talent for distilling a dish's essentials put her in a minimal(ist) league of her own. For those who truly need their meals to be quick, easy and capable of pleasing the pint-size Sam Sifton at the table, TIME FOR DINNER: Strategies, Inspiration and Recipes for Family Meals Every Night of the Week (Chronicle, $24.95) is here to help. Written by Pilar Guzmán, Jenny Rosenstrach and Alanna Stang - editors at Cookie, the glossy parenting magazine from Condé Nast that folded the same day as Gourmet - the workbook offers solutions for parents who want to make good food that won't set off a highchair revolt. It's not all maple-glazed plank salmon with coconut rice. There are recipes for homemade chicken fingers, and one chapter gives you permission to consider a sandwich dinner, especially if it involves prosciutto and fried eggs. I gave a copy to a busy mom who loves to cook. She liked it less for the recipes ("interesting enough for adults, too") than for the smart up-front sections and the organizing help - essentials for pantry, fridge and freezer, and suggestions for things you can make on Sunday to incorporate into dishes all week. She was already a fan of Cookie's "So You Have . . ." feature, an ingredient-to-table flow chart. (So you have a rotisserie chicken. If you also have a box of chicken broth, you can make tortilla soup. If you have bacon, you can make a country-club chicken salad, and so on.) The lack of preciousness was a plus. So were all the pictures, since, my friend said, "you usually have half a minute to think about what to cook at 6:30 while your kid is crying and it's really already too late to start cooking dinner, but you feel bad that you're serving pasta with butter the fifth day in a row." She shouldn't worry. As the editors write, "If there's food on the table and everyone is eating it, call it dinner." Now say grace. The community cookbook and its broader sibling, the regional recipe book, feel especially right today, as Americans celebrate and explore their home cuisine. If you think West Coast cooking is all fish tacos and plates of figs, THE SUNSET COOKBOOK (Oxmoor House, $34.95) will be a delightful introduction to what's coming out of the kitchens of California, Colorado, Oregon, Arizona and thereabouts. (Luckily there are no photos of the outdoor cooking spaces regularly featured in monthly issues of Sunset - envy dulls the appetite.) The magazine's food editor, Margo True, pulled more than 1,000 recipes from the 110-year-old publication, setting a delicious table of Western cuisine, both modern and historical. Yes, there are date shakes, guacamole, cioppino, San Francisco-style burritos and California rolls, all retested and brought up to date. But recent contributions, especially from home cooks, have an appealing combination of brightness, lightness and ingenuity, as well as a casual flair for including fresh produce and exploring Mexican, Asian and hippie cuisines. Try the hazelnut hummus; melon and shrimp salad with ginger, kaffir lime leaves and Vietnamese fish sauce; guajillo-tamarind turkey with roasted poblano gravy; grilled rib-eye steaks with miso butter and sweet onions; or broccoli rabe roasted with radicchio and lemon slices. Sunset's recipes are often more original and honest than what's coming out of the East Coast food magazines, and they aren't difficult in the least. Meanwhile, in Brooklyn a new cuisine has been born. During the last decade, scrappy chefs, either unable to afford Manhattan rents or tired of the whole high-metabolism restaurant scene, have found cheap spaces in off-the-radar neighborhoods and set about cooking the food ihey love. (Of course, now their tables are filled with Manhattanites.) THE NEW BROOKLYN COOKBOOK: Recipes and Stories From 31 Restaurants That Put Brooklyn on the Culinary Map (Morrow/HarperCollins, $40), by Melissa and Brendan Vughan, collects dishes from a select bunch of pioneers who will be familiar to readers of New York magazine, and introduces a few of the borough's artisans (brewers, cheesemakers, chocolatiers, rooftop farmers). It's a cool scrapbook of an exciting time in New York food, with the restaurants presented in chronological order, from one of the first, Al Di Là in Park Slope, where they're still lining up for pasta, to the Vanderbilt, opened last year in Prospect Heights by the former chef of another favorite, Saul, in Boerum Hill. The recipes are restaurant-y (they assume you're willing to make your own pasta and have boar bacon on hand), but they're Brooklyn restaurant-y, so they're not that hard. And with recipes like Buttermilk Channel's duck meat loaf with creamed spinach, onion ring and duck jus, or beef sauerbraten (marinated for four days) with red cabbage and pretzel dumplings from Prime Meats in Carroll Gardens, you'll be inspired to go the distance. I did a skillet chicken cook-off, trying recipes from two favorites, Marlow & Sons and Vinegar Hill House. They were both so good I may never take the L or F train again. Brooklyn is having a serious fried chicken and Southern-food moment, which the food writer Josh Ozersky recently labeled "lardcore." Maybe these city hams should get a copy of the SOUTHERN FOODWAYS ALLIANCE COMMUNITY COOKBOOK (University of Georgia, $24.95), edited by Sara Roahen and John T. Edge. The folks at the S.F.A., which works to preserve the region's foodways, called on their friends - chefs, historians, civil rights activists and ham curers, to name a few - to help assemble a modern community cookbook. And what friends they have. The noted Alabama chef Frank Stitt contributes a hearty collard green and white bean gratin. Donald Link, one of the culinary heroes of post-Katrina New Orleans, shares his recipe for boudin blanc. John Currence sent in pimento cheese hush puppies from Oxford, Miss. And Matt and Ted Lee, of Charleston, S.C., by way of New York, contributed boiled peanut and sorghum swirl ice cream. The chapter titles pay homage to crucial Southern food groups and preoccupations: "Gravy," "Garden Goods," "Roots," "Greens," "Rice," "Grist," "Yardbird," "Pig," "The Hook," "The Hunt," "Put Up" and "Cane." The classics - dirty rice, country captain, pickled okra, fried squirrel with gravy, as well as biscuits, biscuits and more biscuits - are here, all with a personal stamp. (Martha Foose makes her chess pie with sweet tea.) The only thing that could make this book more Southern would be a complimentary bottle of bourbon. PUNCH: The Delights (and Dangers) of the Flowing Bowl (Perigee, $23.95), by the cocktail historian David Wondrich - author of "Imbibe!" - should come with a bottle each of VSOP cognac, bourbon and Jamaican-style rum, topped with three bottles of Champagne. That's what goes into a Chatham artillery punch, which is to be served in a horse bucket with an "oleo-saccharum" made from the peel of 12 lemons and two cups of sugar to which is added a pint of lemon juice. I'm sharing this recipe because it could be the key to your holiday party success, the best example of why punch is such an enduring happy-maker: you can get a lot of people not a little drunk with a single bowl. Plus, most punches have fascinating back stories - at least they do when Wondrich is in charge. In fact, for him it's almost all back story. This is a book for the serious cocktail aficionado, with Wondrich bending ears as much as he bends elbows. The first 100 pages are pure history, with a run-through on ingredients, tools and the "four pillars of punch." Each recipe is three parts history and one part original formula, with a dash of suggested procedure and notes. James Ashley's potion, served at the London Coffee-House and Punch-House in the 1700s, was favored by Hogarth. And James Boswell stopped in one night, Wondrich reports, for "three threepenny bowls" of the Seville orange "sherbett" mixed with brandy, rum and batavia arrack "in between bouts with six-penny whore

Chad Robertson (co-owner, with his wife, Elisabeth Prueitt, of San Francisco's Tartine, Bar Tartine) brings his master Tartine Bread technique to those who may not have the chance to try the famed Bay Area loaves hot out of the oven. This "baker's guidebook" is divided into four parts: Basic Country Bread; Semolina and Whole-Wheat Breads; Baguettes and Enriched Breads; and Day-Old Bread. Robertson's basic recipe is explained in depth with numbered steps, and consists of making a natural leaven and baking in a cast-iron cooker. The author's passionate tone and tales of baking apprenticeships, along with top-notch step-by-step photos, elevate the title from mere manual to enjoyable read. The later sections include variations on the basic recipe; bread-to-use recipes for sandwiches; bruschetta; and salads and entrees made with croutons and breadcrumbs. The sophisticated and clean design, exceptional photos, and padded cover give the book a luxurious feel. (Nov.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.