{"id":2500,"date":"2012-11-18T20:35:28","date_gmt":"2012-11-19T01:35:28","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/?p=2500"},"modified":"2012-11-18T20:35:28","modified_gmt":"2012-11-19T01:35:28","slug":"my-new-cookbook-recommendations","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/2012\/11\/18\/my-new-cookbook-recommendations\/","title":{"rendered":"My new cookbook recommendations."},"content":{"rendered":"

I’m headed off on vacation this week, so I’ll take this opportunity to wish everyone a happy, safe, and overindulgent Thanksgiving. And I’d like to thank you for your readership, both here and over at my day job.<\/p>\n

I’m often asked to recommend a cookbook for readers \u2013 maybe for a novice, maybe as a wedding gift for someone, maybe for someone changing his\/her diet \u2013 but I haven’t done an omnibus cookbook post in two years. With a few really strong new ones entering my collection this year, it seemed like a good time to revisit the subject.<\/p>\n

Just for background, I’m mostly a self-taught home cook. I’ve never taken a cooking class. When I was in grad school, I was free every day around 2 or 3 pm, while my wife, a preschool teacher at the time, would get home at 5:30 and be exhausted, assuming she hadn’t caught one virus or another from the kids, so I took over the cooking. At first, I was pretty awful at it, both in terms of the end product and in my capacity to injure myself through fire or blade. I must have really enjoyed the process, though, because as opposed to my usual habit of giving up on anything I wasn’t good at the first time, I decided to figure out how not to suck at cooking.<\/p>\n

My two main sources of early cooking instruction were Alton Brown’s Good Eats<\/a>\"\"<\/i> TV series and the 1997 edition of the classic American cookbook Joy of Cooking<\/i>. With Good Eats<\/i> airing in repeats on the Food Network and the Cooking Channel, you can just set up your DVR to record them rather than buying the overpriced DVD sets, but the companion books, starting with Good Eats: The Early Years<\/a>\"\"<\/i>, are worth owning for the revised (usually re-tested) recipes and the commentary on each episode. Brown’s techniques always revolve around sound science and increased efficiency, whether it’s a faster way of doing something or a way to reuse an existing kitchen tool for a new purpose. He’s goofy \u2013 belching yeast sock-puppets are just never not funny \u2013 but always educational. And of all of his recipes that I’ve tried (more than I can count), only one, the squash dumplings, didn’t work for me, and that was fixed in the companion book.<\/p>\n

Joy of Cooking<\/a>\"\"<\/i> is always my first recommendation for people who are either just learning to cook or who are looking for one cookbook to rule them all. There are many editions available and there are some wide variations from one to the next, but the ’97 version has served me extremely well for its tremendous breadth of recipes \u2013 that’s still my go-to book even for Italian classics like pesto Genovese or shrimp scampi \u2013 and for the clear, logical recipes. For this edition, the publisher hired food writers to rewrite most of the recipes in the book, losing the folksy prose that charmed readers of earlier editions, but ensuring that the recipes were easy to follow and worked properly. Each recipe in Joy<\/i> lists the ingredients in bold face at the point in the recipe where they’re used, rather than listing them all at the top. If you don’t succumb to the temptation to skip your mise en place \u2013 prepping and measuring ingredients before you start any cooking \u2013 this makes it much easier to follow the recipes and reduces the odds that you’ll skip an ingredient.<\/p>\n

If you’re interested in preserving fruits or vegetables, I have used Joy of Cooking: All About Canning & Preserving<\/a>\"\"<\/i> for nearly a decade. It’s out of print but amazon has used copies for $4 and up at that link.<\/p>\n

The new essential cookbook that I recommend to readers of any experience level is Ruhlman’s Twenty: 20 Techniques, 100 Recipes, A Cook’s Manifesto<\/a>\"\"<\/i>, a book I own myself and have given away as a gift. Its recipes require a slightly higher skill level than Joy<\/i>, but Ruhlman’s twenty section essays \u2013 on basic techniques like poaching, braising, and frying, or core ingredients like onions, eggs, and salt \u2013 build up your knowledge on each subejct from the ground up. It’s the kind of book that might intimidate a rookie but, if you try some of the recipes, will leave you impressed with your own capabilities. I reviewed Ruhlman’s Twenty<\/i> in full<\/a> last November.<\/p>\n

(I should say I’m a firm believer in the adage that if you can read, you can cook. Cooking is not an innate skill that some of us have and some of us lack. It takes attention, it takes patience, it helps if you understand some basic math and science, but at its heart, cooking is about following instructions. Follow those, and you’ll produce something worth eating.)<\/p>\n

Ruhlman’s earlier book, Ratio: The Simple Codes Behind the Craft of Everyday Cooking<\/a>\"\"<\/i>, is another must-have but is for intermediate home cooks and above because it makes assumptions about the reader’s experience and comfort level with certain techniques or foods. The book’s recipes are largely presented as ratios that can be scaled up to produce the desired quantity. If you want to make biscuits, you need 3 parts flour to 1 part fat to 2 parts liquid. The specifics are largely up to you, and there are brief discussions of your options, but again, Ruhlman is largely assuming you know how a biscuit or a Hollandaise or p\u00e2te \u00e0 choux<\/i> and is describing each recipe in terms of its foundation.<\/p>\n

For anyone looking to eat more vegetables, whether or not you’re a vegetarian, I now have two strong recommendations. One is Yotam Ottolenghi’s Plenty<\/a>\"\"<\/i>, which I reviewed in September<\/a>. Ottolenghi isn’t a vegetarian but every recipe in this book is, with vegetables always the star ingredients, often augmented by butter and\/or cheese, but mostly prepared in ways that evoke the essential flavors of the central vegetable. Cutting and browning endives in butter and a little sugar before coating them with cheese and bread crumbs and baking them helps bring out some of this chicory relative’s sugars while taming its strong bitter flavors to a point where the cheese (gruyere or talleggio) can at least compete for your attention. I’ve also found his mixed sauteed mushroom recipe, with soft goat cheese used in lieu of sour cream, to be a great hearty sauce over fresh whole-wheat papparedelle for a warm winter main course.<\/p>\n

The other vegetable-centric cookbook is Nigel Slater’s Tender<\/a>\"\"<\/i>, easily the most beautifully shot cookbook in my collection. Slater is a very famous food writer in England who has just a small cult following here, but Tender<\/i> deserves a much wider audience for its focus on vegetables from seed to table. His gardening advice hasn’t helped me much because you can’t get a much wider gap between soil types than England and Arizona, but his dishes, many of which do contain meat but still accentuate the vegetables, are subtle showstoppers, turning some very ordinary veg \u2013 the more mundane and kid-unfriendly the plant, the more Slater seems to adore it \u2013 into warm, glowing, gorgeous dishes. Tender<\/i> is the book that got me to buy and cook an actual pumpkin (not from a can), a process that, with about a tablespoon of added brown sugar led to this:<\/p>\n

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Warm pumpkin scone with pecan butter twitter.com\/keithlaw\/statu\u2026<\/a><\/p>\n

— keithlaw (@keithlaw) November 3, 2012<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n