Ottolenghi The cookbook

when the seasonal cookbook offerings include titles like "Fifty Shades of Kale" and an updated edition of "The Eat-a-Bug Cookbook," choice is not a problem. The yearly avalanche includes something for everyone. There are books from star chefs and famous restaurants, the latest go-rounds from tried-and-true food writers, the now customary exercises in vegetable-worship, armchair-tourist cookbooks and one book that defies description. That's Heston Blumenthal's HISTORIC HESTON (Bloomsbury, $200), the one with the recipe for "ragoo of pigs' ears." Blumenthal is the culinary wizard behind the Fat Duck in Bray, Berkshire, and, more relevant in this context, the Hinds Head, a converted 15th-century tavern just down the road that specializes in historic English dishes. Indulging his antiquarian interests, he has taken a wandering route through history's byways, from the Middle Ages to the Victorian period, and recreated his own versions of forgotten dishes like meat fruit (a pre-Hidor bit of trompe l'oeil), the medieval cheesecake known as a sambocade and an alcohol-soaked Victorian "tipsy cake." No one is going to cook from this book. Not many will be able to lift it. "Historic Heston" is a headfirst dive down the rabbit hole, with Blumenthal as the Mad Hatter, pleased to offer you, as it happens, his recipe for mockturtle soup. Years ago, when star chefs and great restaurants began turning out cookbooks, the approach tended to be educational and high-minded, with an emphasis on techniques and the secrets behind the cuisine. Now everything is personal. The chef wants to be your friend, to share his or her experiences. In DANIEL: My French Cuisine (Grand Central Life & Style, $60), Daniel Boulud, the celebrated owner of Daniel in Manhattan and its many offshoots, conducts a guided tour of his life and the parts of France he knows best, beginning with the farm near Lyon where he grew up. From there it's a giant leap to the fearsomely complex, drop-dead elegant dishes from Daniel that take up about half the book. Boulud goes a bit Heston in the second half. With essays by Bill Buford, the book records Boulud's painstaking efforts to recreate a Lyonnais classic like pork leg cooked in hay or a turbot soufflé decorated with zucchini and ovendried tomatoes in a slanted checkerboard pattern. Relief arrives in a chapter devoted to humble seasonal dishes from Lyon, Alsace, Normandy and Provence. John Besh also has an interesting life story to tell in JOHN BESH. Cooking From the Heart: My Favorite Lessons Learned Along the Way (Andrews McMeel, $40). A native of New Orleans, he served with the Marines in Operation Desert Storm, then studied at the Culinary Institute of America. After graduating, he trained at a game-oriented inn in the Black Forest, at a small French restaurant in Lacombe, La., and in restaurants in Avignon and St.-Remyde-Provence before making his mark back in Louisiana with a highly distinctive reinterpretation of its regional cooking. His restaurant August is consistently rated one of New Orleans's finest. Not many readers are going to take the plunge and try the wild boar's-head pâté, a signature dish at the Spielweg in Münstertal, Besh's first stop as an apprentice, but schupfnudeln (long potato dumplings from the Baden region), slow-cooked rabbit with creamy rosemary turnips and the stuffed pasta known as maultaschen are well within reach. There are a few too many usual-suspect recipes, but Besh makes an engaging guide, with a rich fund of anecdotes, for his somewhat eccentric personal journey. Star-restaurant cookbooks face the same challenge as cookbooks by star chefs. How do you faithfully represent the place without recipes that require a full kitchen brigade to execute? Michael Anthony, the executive chef and a partner at Gramercy Tavern, starts with an advantage in THE GRAMERCY TAVERN COOKBOOK (Clarkson Potter, $50), namely, the restaurant's style of cuisine: clean, contemporary and not too complicated. In an interview with New York Metro, Anthony explained that he wanted his mother in rural Ohio to be able to use the book. Mom can probably handle the recipe for chilled corn soup, bright and fresh with squeezings of lime and a touch of honey, or the one for pickled Swiss chard stems, a minimalist gem. Recipes are organized by season. Slowroasted pork shoulder with bacon broth and corn bread, a winter recipe, feels just about right as the weather turns. There are many more like it. The abiding mystery is this: Why did it take nearly 20 years for one of the city's most beloved restaurants to put all this down on paper? Yotam Ottolenghi and Sami Tamimi, the chefs and owners of the cult London restaurant Ottolenghi, also manage to translate their style in ottolenghi: The Cookbook (Ten Speed Press, $35). This cookbook, their first, arrives belatedly from Britain, its way prepared by the runaway success of their second and third books, "Plenty" and "Jerusalem." Like Anthony, the authors hold a winning card with their cuisine, which emphasizes simplicity, freshness and seasonality, although rooted in different soil, that of the Middle East. The authors dazzle. This is a cookbook with no slack, just page after page of recipes with the kind of nifty twist that elevates humble ingredients - lots of fruits, grains and nuts - without feeling forced. There's a wonderful inevitability to dishes like cauliflower and cumin fritters with lime yogurt or the arugula and horseradish sauce the authors use to dress beef or their oxtail stew with pumpkin and cinnamon. The list goes on and on. Home cooks who want to branch out geographically are in luck. Japan, Thailand and Spain come into focus in unexpected ways in three highly attractive books that seamlessly blend pleasure and instruction. You can read them with profit, then cook adventurously. The few steps to a stove have always been the cheapest and fastest form of travel. POK POK: Food and Stories From the Streets, Homes, and Roadside Restaurants of Thailand (Ten Speed Press, $35), by Andy Ricker with J. J. Goode, comes to the rescue of untold thousands of diners in love with Thai flavors but bored by what Ricker, the founder of the Pok Pok restaurants in Portland, Ore., and New York, calls the "pick-aprotein rainbow curries" and "sweet piles of phat thai" on the limited, highly standardized menus at so many Thai restaurants in the United States. As a tutorial on Thai cuisine and its principal regional styles, "Pok Pok" can't be beat. Ricker is enthusiastic, prodigiously well informed and full of colorful stories from his many trips to Thailand. Nearly every page brings a revelation. Loop meuang, the dark-brown minced pork salad served in northern Thailand, bears no resemblance to the mound of sweetish minced pork from central Thailand served in most American Thai restaurants. When he first encountered it, Ricker says, he didn't even recognize it as Thai. "It was fragrant, pungent, bitter - and wonderful," he writes. "There was no obvious sweetness, except from the crunchy bits of fried garlic and shallots scattered on top. There was definitely no lime or coconut milk." And here it is. The only snag in "Pok Pok" is ingredients. Many can be found, but many can't, or at least not easily. There are more than enough makable dishes, however. Some are disarmingly simple, like grilled corn with salty coconut cream. Others, like Burmese-style pork-belly curry, require many steps but deliver a whopping payoff. Jeff Koehler does justice to another regionally complex country in SPAIN: Recipes and Traditions From the Verdant Hills of the Basque Country to the Coastal Waters of Andalucía (Chronicle Books, $40). The author, a food writer who has lived in Spain for many years, focuses on roots cooking, the simple, flavorful dishes that warm Spanish hearts. Koehler is an expert guide, providing highly informative headnotes to each recipe, often explaining regional variations in the same recipe and suggesting some clever tips. In his recipe for clams with oloroso sherry, for example, he suggests substituting dry white wine with a little brandy if sherry isn't at hand. These pages abound in seductively rustic dishes like pork baked in a salt crust and served with fruit compote, chestnut purée or a blue cheese sauce. Japanese cuisine can seem chilly and aloof, an endless catalog of refinement. Tadashi Ono and Harris Salat explode that stereotype in Japanese soul cooking: Ramen, Tonkatsu, Tempura, and More From the Streets and Kitchens of Tokyo and Beyond (Ten Speed Press, $27.50). Spaghetti? Sure. Ketchup? You bet. Mayo on the side? Just try to make it Kewpie brand. Ono and Salat serve up dollops of fascinating food history, and some very good recipes, as they explore the vernacular dishes that constitute Japanese diner food. These are the popular fusion dishes - most dating from the late 19th century, many from the postwar period - that soothe the Japanese soul the way cheeseburgers and fries cheer Americans. With zest and an irrepressible you-can-do-it attitude, the authors explain and write the scripts for gyoza dumplings, curries, tonkatsu, the floured and deep-fried dishes known as kara-age, tempuras, soba, udon and other humble Japanese fare. The ramen chapter is especially rich, but toward the end, some really odd creations await, including hamburg (a ground beef, pork and panko-crumb patty covered in a ketchup-based sauce) and mentaiko spaghetti, a 1960s-vintage pasta tossed with spicy marinated pollock roe. Mollie Katzen leads the vegetarian pack with the HEART OF THE PLATE: Vegetarian Recipes for a New Generation (Rux Martin/Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, $34.99). It's been more than 30 years since her scribbled notes and recipes evolved into the groundbreaking "Moosewood Cookbook," and she's done a lot of cooking and thinking in the meantime, paring down, eliminating fat and developing a style she describes as "sharper, livelier, spicier, lighter and more relaxed than it used to be." About half the recipes in the book are vegan, without the pain. Some can go either way, like farfalle pasta and rapini in a creamy walnut sauce that becomes vegan when soy milk is substituted for cow's milk. Salads - bright, colorful and vibrant - are particularly well done. Many can do service as a main course, like her grilled bread and kale salad with red onions, walnuts and figs. Unreconstructed meat eaters will want to give a big bro hug to John Currence for pickles, pigs and whiskey: Recipes From My Three Favorite Food Groups (and Then Some) (Andrews McMeel, $40), a culinary rebel yell in a new key. Currence, the chef and owner of City Grocery in Oxford, Miss., does a lot of hootin', hollerin' and carryin' on. A lot of cussin' too, not something you normally find in a cookbook. Tune out the noise, ignore the idiotic music recommendations for each dish ("Cock the Hammer," by Cypress Hill, for ham stock), and you still have a book full to bursting with imaginative New Southern recipes. Or maybe New New Southern, in the case of Kentucky soycollard kimchi or rosemary-pickled lamb hearts. Currence really works the territory. Steen's cane syrup, a Louisiana classic, brings an earthy sweetness to pork belly braised in ham stock. Bourbon-braised pork cheeks was a dish just waiting to happen, and the recommended side dish - creamy garlic-Parmesan grits - is typical of Currence's approach. Pick a Southern staple and take it on a foreign trip, or make it even more Southern. We have him to thank for a double-Bubba treat: okra and green onion hush puppies, accompanied by Ministry's "Jesus Built My Hotrod." Finally, two confidence-builders. Some cookbooks challenge. Others perform the neat trick of convincing even beginners that it's possible to make guest-worthy food in a small, ill-equipped kitchen, the french kitchen cookbook: Recipes and Lessons From Paris and Provence (Morrow/ HarperCoiiins, $35) comes directly from the cooking classes Patricia Wells gives at her homes in Paris and Provence, so the lineup includes plenty of uncomplicated dishes that have been tested within an inch of their lives. Most require only a handful of ingredients and a few simple techniques. Even hesitant amateurs can turn out seared duck breast with figs and black currant sauce or tomato tatins made with store-bought puff pastry. Lidia Mattichio Bastianich and her daughter, Tanya Bastianich Manuali, do the same thing with Italian food in LIDIA'S COMMONSENSE ITALIAN COOKING (Knopf, $35), based on the public television series of the same name. The cowardly cook might start with the surefire chicken breasts, sliced thin and sautéed and simmered in a pan with olives, red onion, and orange juice flecked with orange zest. It doesn't get any easier than this, or tastier. The authors don't include song recommendations. May I suggest "Acquerello Napoletano," by Claudio Villa? ? online: Still hungry for culinary inspiration? For a quick look at 25 more cookbooks, visit nytimes.com/books. william grimes, a former restaurant criticfor The Times, is the author, most recently, of "Appetite City: A Culinary History of New York."

Available for the first time in a U.S. edition, this book includes 140 recipes from Ottlenghi's four popular Mediterranean-inspired London restaurants. (The authors also co-wrote Jerusalem; Tamimi is a partner and head chef at Ottolenghi.) Both from Jerusalem, the authors share the philosophy that "unfussiness and simplicity in food preparation are... the only way to maintain the freshness of a dish. Each individual ingredient has a clear voice." A detailed list of the book's core ingredients includes garlic, lemon, mint, tahini, orange blossom water, rose water, and feta cheese. An extensive chapter on vegetables, legumes and grains covers fresh fruit and vegetables (figs with young pecorino and honey), and has a section devoted to the "mighty eggplant." Highlights include Ottolenghi's famous grilled broccoli with chile and garlic, along with couscous with oven-dried tomatoes, and dried apricots and butternut squash. Meat and fish are separated into sections: lamb, beef, and pork dishes with recipes like lamb chops with walnut, fig, and goat cheese salad;, beef and lamb meatballs baked in tahini; and roast pork belly with two relishes. Standout dishes like harissa-marinated chicken with red grapefruit salad and seared duck breasts with blood orange and star anise are found in the poultry section. And fish and shellfish are showcased in recipes for panfried sea bass on pita with labneh, tomato, and preserved lemon, and for buttered prawns with tomato, olives, and arak. Also appearing are Ottolenghi's beloved baked goods: breads, cakes, cookies, and tarts. This vibrant and bold collection lives up to the authors promise that "cooking can be enjoyable, simple, and fulfilling, yet look and taste amazing." (Mar.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

Our food impulse We wanted to start this book with the quip, "If you don't like lemon or garlic ... skip to the last page." This might not be the funniest of jokes, but, considering lemon and garlic's prevalence in our recipes, it is as good a place as any to start looking for a portrait of our food. Regional descriptions just don't seem to work; there are too many influences and our food histories are long and diverse. True, we both come from a very particular part of the world--Israel/Palestine--with a unique culinary tradition. We adore the foods of our childhood: oranges from Jericho, used only to make the sweetest fresh juice; crunchy little cucumbers, full of the soil's flavors; heavy pomegranates tumbling from trees that can no longer support their weight; figs, walnuts, wild herbs.... The list is endless. We both ate a lot of street food--literally, what the name suggests. Vendors selling their produce on pavements were not restricted to "farmers' markets." There was nothing embarrassing or uncouth about eating on the way to somewhere. Sami remembers frequently sitting bored in front of his dinner plate, having downed a few grilled ears of corn and a couple of busbusa (coconut and semolina) cakes bought at street stalls while out with friends. However, what makes lemon and garlic such a great metaphor for our cooking is the boldness, the zest, the strong, sometimes controversial flavors of our childhood. The flavors and colors that shout at you, that grip you, that make everything else taste bland, pale, ordinary, and insipid. Cakes drenched with rose-water-scented sugar syrup; piles of raw green almonds on ice in the market; punchy tea in a small glass with handfuls of mint and sugar; the intense smell of charred mutton cooked on an open fire; a little shop selling twenty types of crumbly sheep and goat's milk cheeses, kept fresh in water; apricot season, when there is enough of the fruit lying around each tree to gorge yourself, the jam pot, and the neighborhood birds. These are the sources of our impulse. It is this profusion of overwhelming sensations that inspires our desire to stun with our food, to make you say "wow!" even if you're not the expressive type. The colors, the textures, and finally the flavors that are unapologetically striking. ------------------------------------------------------------------- Sweet potato galettes \ makes 4 Spicy, sweet, and punchy, baked fresh and served warm, this is the sort of starter that can precede almost anything. The generous sour cream base and the lightness of the puff pastry carry the sweet potato easily without the risk of a carb overdose. Serve with a plain green salad. 3 sweet potatoes, about 12 oz / 350 g each 9 oz / 250 g puff pastry or ½ recipe Rough puff pastry page 280 1 free-range egg, lightly beaten 6½ tbsp / 100 ml sour cream 3½ tbsp / 100 g aged goat cheese 2 tbsp pumpkin seeds 1 medium-hot chile, finely chopped 1 tbsp olive oil 1 clove garlic, crushed 2 tsp chopped flat-leaf parsley coarse sea salt and freshly ground black pepper 1 Preheat the oven to 400°F / 200°C. Bake the sweet potatoes in their skins for 35 to 45 minutes, until they soften up but are still slightly raw in the center (check by inserting a small knife). Leave until cool enough to handle, then peel and cut into slices 1⁄8 inch / 3 mm thick. 2 While the sweet potatoes are in the oven, roll out the puff pastry to about 1⁄16 inch / 2 mm thick on a lightly floured work surface. Cut out four 2¾ by 5½-inch / 7 by 14-cm rectangles and prick them all over with a fork. Line a small baking sheet with parchment paper, place the pastry rectangles on it, well spaced apart, and leave to rest in the fridge for at least half an hour. 3 Remove the pastry from the fridge and brush lightly with the beaten egg. Using an icing spatula, spread a thin layer of sour cream on the pastries, leaving a ¼-inch / 5-mm border all round. Arrange the potato slices on the pastry, slightly overlapping, keeping the border clear. Season with salt and pepper, crumble the goat cheese on top, and sprinkle with the pumpkin seeds and chile. Bake for 20 to 25 minutes, until the pastry is cooked through. Check underneath; it should be golden brown. 4 While the galettes are cooking, stir together the olive oil, garlic, parsley, and a pinch of salt. As soon as the pastries come out of the oven, brush them with this mixture. Serve warm or at room temperature. Excerpted from Ottolenghi: The Cookbook by Yotam Ottolenghi, Sami Tamimi All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.