“Close the door, it’s freezing”.
I tried to hold the door with my leg as I struggled to bring a large box into the house. It had been sitting there since before Christmas, but remarkably, seemed untouched by the vicious winter weather the entire eastern seaboard had experienced.
“What is it?”
“Holiday presents from M & J.” Our son rushed over to open the packages, one for each of the kids, several family presents and the treasure…a cookbook. Bread is Gold. Written by Massimo Bottura, the chef at the highly regarded Osteria Francescana in Modena, outside Milan. I have never had the good fortune to eat at his restaurant, but have seen him on the Netflix series Chefs Table, among other shows. I sat down and began leafing through it, totally absorbed in his story of a soup kitchen with a difference. Through the organization Food for Soul, Bottura and his team had each of twenty of the world’s best chefs cook for a week using only excess food donated by Expo 2015 in Milan. The book is filled with stories…how the chefs met, their cooking backgrounds and philosophies, the struggles they had (or in some cases, did not have) creating menus with the ingredients available to them. Over the next several days, I read the stories, perused the recipes, most of which I would not cook but which I found both interesting and instructive for a home cook.
I love reading cookbooks. It began with Julia Child, as it did for so many of my generation. I was in law school and needed a creative and practical escape from the pressures of school. A friend was studying to be a pastry chef at the time, and we would sometimes cook together, most often on the big, old, white Roper double-ovened stove we were lucky enough to have in our apartment. Those few years I made many of the recipes in Mastering the Art of French Cooking,gaining confidence over time but still reliant on the recipes. I had always loved food and cooking but working my way through terrines, pates, legs of lamb and navarins, fruit flans and, the ultimate test, roast chicken, deepened my understanding of the art of cooking and the joy it gave me and family and friends. After a meditative day of shopping and preparation, I would begin cooking while a group of friends gathered, drinking wine, music always playing. By the end of a long evening, we had eaten well, talked, laughed, danced, napped and basked in the warmth of friendship, and of course, the kitchen.
I began to cook in earnest, gathering cookbooks, usually working from recipes, but straying as I began to develop a feel for the ingredients and my own tastes and preferences. Marcella Hazan’s Classic Italian Cookingpresented new challenges, although I think I am naturally an Italian cook. Often good, sometimes a bit disastrous, like my first try at vitello tonnato, the heavy, homemade mayonnaise totally out of proportion to the thin scallops of veal. Strictly according to the recipe, or so I thought, but a disappointing mess. So I wandered farther from the recipes, beginning to see cookbooks and recipes as guides, cultural explorations, personal and family histories. Friends and family saw my enjoyment of cookbooks as a giving opportunity, and to this day, I receive cookbooks as gifts, adding to our growing collection, sometimes to be cooked from, often just to be read.
My growing liberation from recipes took a big step forward with Pino Luongo’s A Tuscan in the Kitchen. Pino Luongo was an influential Tuscan chef in New York in the 1980s and early 90s, or at least so it seemed to me, having several restaurants I frequented whenever I could, among them Il Cantinori in the Village and Le Madri in Chelsea. For reasons not known to me personally—I will leave that to the restaurant gossips–he was not able to sustain the level of success he had enjoyed in that time period. But the recipes in his book are simple, loosely written, each with a list of ingredients but no quantities. I had a feel for what the dishes taste like when made by the chef, I soon developed a better feel for quantities and proportions, which ingredients could or should be skipped, modified or substituted. Not only did this add to my confidence, knowledge of ingredients and touch, but it transformed the way I read cookbooks, based on the feel of the dishes, with adjustments for my tastes and limitations.
I began buying cookbooks by accomplished chefs whose complex recipes and techniques are not always suited for a home cook with a full time job, family and many other obligations, but are interesting, informative and beautiful to look at. Cookbooks often became travel souvenirs, such as Cooking in the Sydney Rocks Area, on a trip to Australia, Michael Smith’s Real Food, Real Good, on a trip to Prince Edward Island, the Big Sur Bakery Cookbook, after a stay in Big Sur, and books by Lorenza Di Medici, Michel Guerard and Roger Verge after trips to Italy and France, respectively, and many others.
As our family grew, and everyday meal preparation became the focus, the types of cookbooks we use changed as well, with an emphasis on variety, efficiency, and of course, health. Looking for a range of recipes which can be prepared with fewer ingredients and in less time but still pack flavor, we look to books such as Gwyneth Paltrow’s first book, It’s All Good (I know, I know, but great for everyday cooking ideas and for recipes for homemade sauces and dressings for use in other recipes), Kylie Kwong’s Simple Chinese Cooking, Peter Meehan’s Lucky Peach: 101 Easy Asian Recipesand Amy Kaneko’s Let’s Cook Japanese Food. As was the case with early attempts at French and Italian dishes, as I began to cook more Asian food, I kept fairly strictly to the recipes, as I learned the layers of flavor built with ingredients like fish sauce, ginger, lemongrass, coconut milk, hoisin and other sauces and herbs, but more recently have begun to free myself from those recipes as well, with mixed success, I must admit. I rarely bake—Michele is a skilled cook and an amazing baker—I am happy to enjoy what she so masterfully prepares.
Some cookbooks I just read or look at the pictures or both, others I might cook one favorite dish from but otherwise look elsewhere. Some have become real workhorses…I can always find ideas of something to cook no matter what the season or the ingredients available. Books by Melissa Clark, David Tanis, Alice Waters, Suzanne Goin, and, I hesitate to mention this in view of recent revelations, Mario Batali. And I still turn to Julia when I am in need of some basic refresh—only now it tends to be The Way to Cook, rather than Mastering the Art. Most often, however, I cook what appeals to me, from my own store of knowledge and, to the degree I have it, creativity, reading cookbooks for ideas and inspiration, but trying to understand the ingredients to build flavor and create harmony among the various dishes while allowing the food speak for itself.
Some of my current other favorite cookbooks to read—and cook from–include Montreal Cooks, a gift from my daughter who lives in Montreal, Nadia Arumugam’s Women Chefs of New York,Latin Grillingby Lourdes Castro, Alexandra Raij’s The Basque Book and Seven Firesby Francis Mallman, the great Argentine chef known for cooking everything over open wood fires (Michael Smith also cooks everything over wood fires at his PEI restaurant) and who is also featured in an episode of Chefs Table.
And that is not to mention books about food, chefs, restaurants, etc., which will be the subject of other posts.
