My Portugal Recipes and stories

ANOTHER YEAR, ANOTHER MOUNTAIN of cookbooks. But as always, they can be divided into two piles: for actual, and for aspirational, forays into the kitchen. Here are some of the best of both. Cal Peternell, long the chef at Chez Panisse in Berkeley, started writing TWELVE RECIPES (Morrow/HarperCollins, $26.99) for his son, who was leaving home for the first time. Peternell confesses that he had been too casual, assuming that learning to cook could be "effortlessly communicated and instinctively absorbed." To remedy that situation, earnest lessons began. "A crash course in cooking for yourself and others also goes by another name: It's called dinner." The result is the best beginner's cookbook of the year, if not the decade. In addition to being warm, funny and smart, "Twelve Recipes" will actually teach you to cook. If you already have an understanding of the basics, there are plenty of cookbooks out there, but if you've never chopped an onion, the going will be rough. Peternell begins, seemingly inauspiciously, with toast, but by the chapter's end you'll understand how he can nudge anyone, from novice to expert, to want to be a better cook, a better host, a better shopper, even a better person. The dishes get steadily more robust, and Peternell never loses sight of the goal. Chickens will be roasted, pasta will be boiled, beans will be soaked and dinner will be made. His wit and intelligence are apparent throughout: "Adding a chopped hard-boiled egg to salsa verde for the first time is a little epiphany, one of those moments when you can feel it all coming together with an almost audible crack. Be ready for it." The other strategy for teaching people to cook is to teach them to cook lots of things. In Mark Bittman's HOW TO COOK EVERYTHING FAST (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, $35), as the title suggests, the New York Times food writer and columnist takes up the old idea that we would cook more if our culinary efforts didn't take so long. Irma Rombauer (of "Joy of Cooking" fame) published her version, "Streamlined Cooking," in 1939, and many of the add-a-can-of-soup recipes we're only just shaking off trace their roots back to her. Bittman sees no need to sacrifice quality for speed, and of course he's right. His book is clear, concise and designed for maximum efficiency. While learning to cook from recipes is inherently flawed, there seems to be no other way to learn to bake. It's unforgiving and scientific - and what it yields is, for most of us, just as surprising as a chemistry experiment. Which is not to say that all baking is complicated. Dorie Greenspan, in BAKING CHEZ MOI (Rux Martin/Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, $40), presents a collection of recipes that, as she explains, "have nothing to do with fancy techniques and even fancier frills. .. . They're plain and homey." And her apple pielettes are precisely that. Greenspan's instructions are both approachable and adaptable: "If you have little pie pans, you can use them for this recipe (you might get fewer than a dozen), but my pan of choice here is a muffin tin." Those looking for a dessert that's almost impossible to flub will want to add her pistachio and berry gratins to their repertoire. Keep going through the olive-oil-and-wine cookies and the cakes (simple and fancy), learn to make your lemon madeleines rise into the little bump Greenspan terms "the holy grail of madeleine bakers," and you'll have taken a tremendous step forward. Perhaps you want to cook lots of things, but only from one place? Margarita Carrillo Arronte adds to Phaidon's list of comprehensive national cookbooks ("The Silver Spoon" being the indispensable Italian one), with MEXICO (Phaidon, $49.95). Just over 700 pages long, jammed full of recipes, each accredited to its particular region, it's a work of staggering breadth, but it's also a pleasure to read, with recipes ranging far from enchiladas suizas. Maybe too far: Pachuquilla-style ant eggs calls for six cups of fresh ant eggs. I'm still hoping that "ant egg" is a metaphor for something. Mark and Talia Kurlansky's INTERNATIONAL NIGHT (Bloomsbury, $29) began as a family game, reminiscent of something Wes Anderson's Tenenbaums would recall when thinking about their halcyon days, before all the trouble started. Once a week, Kurlansky and his daughter, Talia, would spin a globe and wherever her finger landed became Friday night's dinner. Talia would introduce each meal with various hints, and her mom was tasked with guessing the country. The Kurlanskys appear to be a family of overachievers, a suspicion only heightened when you hit passages like this: "I already knew a few Moroccan dishes, especially since I had studied cooking in neighboring Tunisia. But when I learned that for the first time in history there was a cooking school in Morocco, I decided that Talia and I had to go there." The Kurlanskys' recipes vary in difficulty, and every night is accompanied by a Kurlanskyopedia entry, if you will, about the place. I don't think I'll ever make the soup called oyster zousui, but I liked reading about the Japanese distrust of that raw mollusk, and it was nice to find, between the same covers, good recipes for Afghan chick-pea meatballs, Sauerbraten and Mongolian hot pot. Overachieving at home can come in a few flavors. The dishes in Marcus Samuelsson's MARCUS OFF DUTY (Rux Martin/Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, $35) range from kid-friendly fish sticks to suckling pig, and while at first the recipes seem somewhat chef-ed up (six tablespoons of white miso in the egg wash for the fish sticks?) the techniques aren't anything that would stretch the occupant of a home kitchen, and they're more straightforward than the ingredient list might imply. This playful, funky book, written with Roy Finamore, is full of photos of smiling people and insightful sticky-note-esque asides. Far from the noisy, rambunctious family life touted in "Marcus Off Duty" is the staid still life with flower petals and eggs that makes up SUNDAY SUPPERS (Clarkson Potter, $32.50), derived from Karen Mordechai's Brooklyn-based food blog. Strange missteps abound - if you want beans in your chili, that's O.K. with me, just don't say it's "Tex- as style." In a section called "Camping," Mordechai tells us that "we built a fire near our friend's cabin in Oregon. . . . close enough to a kitchen to walk a few items over" - which explains the presence of cast-iron skillets and pictures of people in nice wool overcoats. But I did come away from the book with a recipe for tea-and-ginger-cured sea bass to layer on homemade bagels. And the desire to put confetti inside clear balloons and float them around my next party. The book also makes me want to have a party. Another food blogger with very good clothes, perfect light and enviable settings has made the move to hardcovers: Malin Elmlid has traveled the world bartering bread, and what she found is displayed in the photographs and recipes in THE BREAD EXCHANGE (Chronicle, $35). If you bake bread at all seriously, it's difficult to adapt entirely to another person's technique, but I wouldn't be surprised to find Elmlid's readers popping a teaspoon of edible charcoal powder into their dough - because the black loaves she creates are stunning. Elmlid also records the dinners she eats along the way, and gives us fetching meanders through Warsaw (buttermilk soup with horseradish mashed potatoes), Stockholm (crayfish), Bavaria (elderberry compote) and California (vegan banana bread). The gorgeous photographs in APPLES OF UNCOMMON CHARACTER (Bloomsbury, $35), by Rowan Jacobsen, have no beautiful people and no intriguing locales. They have only one thing: apples. Every variety is accompanied by notes on its origin, appearance, flavor, texture, season, use and region. Lest this sound underwhelming, consider Jacobsen's description of the Orleans Reinette, with flavors of "rum punch, heavy on the lime and nutmeg." And that's only the beginning: "Its coarse white flesh is hard and crunchy, just juicy enough to get the job done. The skin, quite chewy and persistent, sticks around interminably. Peel it." All this, plus recipes! (My favorites are grilled apples with smoked trout, fennel and lemon zest; and the duck and apple risotto with bacon, sage and forest mushrooms.) Apples are perhaps the world's friendliest food - a far cry from the next installment in Jennifer McLagan's project to write books about things that scare people. Now the author of "Bones," "Fat" and "Odd Bits" has taken on what she calls the "world's most dangerous flavor," BITTER (Ten Speed, $29.99). It's the one that separates the children from the adults, more than metaphorically: Infants, whose taste buds are all there and functioning, find bitter overwhelming. And since the flavor is a built-in warning that what we're eating might be poisonous, babies will spit out bitter foods. Learning to appreciate bitter comes with sophistication (and deadened taste buds - which, if you think about it, calls into question the implied brag of "acquired tastes"). McLagan's book strikes the perfect balance between essayistic exploration, lush photography and recipes. Come spring, I'll be frying her dandelion potato rösti in duck fat, and you can be sure I'll never again omit a sachet of crushed coriander seeds when I steam mussels in beer. One of the most influential bars in America has come out with a book of cocktails. David Kaplan, Nick Fauchald and Alex Day's DEATH & CO. (Ten Speed, $40), from the bar of the same name, is just as brilliant as the place itself. Sections on "Ice" and "The Death & Co. lexicon" (the family meal is "a staff-wide shot taken nightly around 11:30 p.m. . . . Also known as 'time to feed the kids'") will appeal to cocktail aficionados. The recipes are well organized and will appeal to everyone. Not to be skipped is the section on evaluating cocktails: Making daiquiris Nos. 1,2 and 3 (too sweet, too tart, just right) is an education in the difference a quarter of an ounce can make. If you're such a serious drinks person that you bought the Death & Co. book the day it came out, get back down to the store and pick up Dave Arnold's liquid intelligence (Norton, $35). This is cocktail science. Every drink comes with a breakdown; the strawberry bandito, for instance, is a "4 3/5-ounce (140 ml.) drink at 17.1 percent alcohol by volume, 9.0 grams/100 ml. sugar, 0.96 percent acid." Fantastic experiments with red-hot pokers and nitrogen abound, and if you've ever wanted your grapefruit juice to be clear, this is the book for you. I'm reasonably sure that when the mastermind behind the Booker & Dax cocktail bar writes "Why clarify? Why breathe?" he's poking a little fun at himself, but I wouldn't fay any money on it. Of course, every season comes with a bevy of new art books attached to chefs. They are, without exception, beautiful, and the food is exceptional too - and yet they still blur together. Another restaurant, another chef, some more food polished to the nth degree. But some of them do stand out. The photos of record albums, paintings and even fish in Massimo Bottura's never TRUST A SKINNY ITALIAN CHEF (Phaidon, $59.95) demonstrate that food has indeed morphed into an element of high culture. The recipes are preceded by essays, always with a wink ("Guineau Fowl, Not Roasted"). Only the bravest will stand at the cutting board with this book, but I might have the courage to make the striking dish of black katsuboushi broth and cod cooked on charcoal until the fish's skin is also black. Ed Anderson's pictures in Charles Phan and Janny Hu's THE SLANTED DOOR (Ten Speed, $40) are so good they make you hungry. Luckily, the recipes from Phan's much loved San Francisco restaurant are right next to them. The crispy rice cakes gave me a new reason to dust off the ebelskiver pan (they were eaten as fast as they could be made), and I'm glad to have the recipe for the filibuster cocktail. Phan's dishes are remarkably translatable to home cooking. Of roasted lobster with butter-herb dressing, he notes: "Lobster is actually quite easy to prepare, and if you have all the ingredients sliced and diced ahead of time, it needs just 15 to 20 minutes in the oven before you serve it to guests. I'm pretty sure they'll be wowed." Fans of Gabrielle Hamilton seem to have waited as long for PRUNE (Random House, $45) as they do for a seat at brunch. The book is a journey inside the restaurant, constructed as if it were the notebook a new hire would have to master. But those kitchen binders tend to be full of jargon and short on instruction, so at times the construct feels forced. (What good are directions like "Save wishbones for birthdays"?) The style can feel a little relentless, what with directions like "Shower with parsley, freshly chopped, at pass." (The pass in my house is the table, after all.) But what Hamilton has done, and done well, is invite us in. And if you want to learn the kitchen logic of Prune, it's here. Do we need a recipe for egg on a roll, N.Y.C. deli style? Actually, much of the country does, and Hamilton's admonition not to "gourmet-up this item with homemade rolls or rolls from Whole Foods" is spot on. Sometimes, though, the instructions feel out of place. I'm very happy to have the recipe for mackerel escabeche, sliced sweet capicola, buttered rye crackers and celery leaves, but I don't need the final instruction to "reuse marinade, but pay attention to viability and date. ... Do not send this down the drain. It clogs the grease trap. Discard into the dirty fat drum in the garbage area, please." From London, Daniel Doherty has sent us DUCK AND WAFFLE (Mitchell Beazley, $34.99), full of bold recipes from this 24-hour restaurant. The book moves through the whole day, starting with breakfast (hangover pizza: "This is so wrong, my wife would kill me. But anyway, the cure begins____" ) and ending with late-night snacks (the tricky but delicious bacon jam steamed buns). The house breads, which can be cooked like naan on a grill pan, are excellent. There's a rough and tumble charm throughout, coupled with flashes of brilliance: You can bet I've been soaking an oyster shell in Noilly Prat to make "sea spray" vermouth as invented by Richard Woods. Just as you can bet that I'll return to the all-purpose pickling liquid in George Mendes and Genevieve Ko's MY PORTUGAL (Stewart, Tabori & Chang, $35). Mendes's crispy pigs' ears with ramps and cumin yogurt were just as good with scallions, and every time I want to taste Portugal, I'll make his pork belly with clams and pickles. Whenever I can't think of anything to do with a vegetable, I'll return just as quickly to Yotam Ottolenghi's PLENTY MORE (Ten Speed, $35), for his wide-ranging selections and for simple, clever techniques like smoking beets in a tent of aluminum foil in a wok. The blue ribbon chef cookbook of the year, without a doubt, is Sean Brock's HERITAGE (Artisan, $40). Just when we thought Southern food had been done until it was as limp as the green beans at the crummiest soul food restaurant, Brock has pushed and elevated the cuisine. Even the simplest cornbread is brought to new heights. Sometimes a cookbook changes the way you think about food you thought you understood, and this is one of those books. Grits, around here, will be pre-soaked from now on. I'll make roux with cornmeal and bacon fat for Brock's tomato gravy as often as I can, and the same goes for his ramp- and crab-stuffed hush puppies. It takes months to make his fermented hot sauce, but I have faith that it'll be worth the wait. ON THE WEB Still in need of inspiration? Consult our annotated list of 20 cookbooks at nytimes.com/books. MAX WATMAN'S most recent book is "Harvest: Field Notes From a Far-Flung Pursuit of Real Food."

In addition to collecting recipes for greatest hits from Mendes's highly regarded restaurant, Aldea, this cookbook gives readers greater insight into Mendes's personal journey as a chef, as well as a deeper appreciation for Portuguese culture and cooking. Mendes begins humbly with a handful of recipes for salt cod, a staple of the cuisine, and gradually increases the complexity of the dishes before moving on to the next chapter. This approach, coupled with essays on the people, places, and experiences that have influenced him, pulls the reader in and encourages experimentation. Even though readers may not have the talent, budget, or palate for Aldea's famous saffron rice with seared shrimp and foie gras, they can certainly prepare the simple garlic seared shrimp if they want to get a taste of Portugal. There are recipes for formidable dishes such as terrine of baby goat and sea urchin toasts with shiso and lime, but there are just as many for hearty, rustic fare: an omelet with linguica and chorizo, a white button mushroom stew redolent with smoky paprika and red chile flakes. Packed with crisp, toothsome images of the dishes and postcard-worthy shots of Portugal, Mendes's collection is an inspired, loving tribute to the country. (Oct.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.