Cookbooks aren’t really about cooking, and haven’t been since the advent of color photography and food stylists. They’re mostly lifestyle catalogs, aspirational instruction manuals for lives we’d like to live. Prose used to have to do the heavy lifting in this regard. No more. Now images implore us to cook, and it can take a toll on the reading.
This is true even if the prose is excellent, as in the case of AT ELIZABETH DAVID’S TABLE: Classic Recipes and Timeless Kitchen Wisdom (Ecco/HarperCollins, $37.50). A collection of dozens and dozens of David’s simple, beautiful and bullet-proof recipes, tied together with a few essays and top-notes, it was compiled by Jill Norman and photographed by David Loftus.
Anyone who has spent time thumbing through the thin, smudged pages of a paperback edition of one of David’s books, looking for instruction and finding joy, will be shocked by the result. Absent are the spare pages gone yellow with age, the words ticking by beneath covers showing only a watercolor image, solid advice from this sensible, writerly woman, who died in 1992 at the age of 78.
Gone is the experience of reading a description of a dish and then creating it yourself, with no physical model, no expectation that it must look like this or that: her marvelous pork in milk, for instance, or shoulder of lamb. Here instead is the food rendered in blooming center-focus color, the images as soft at the edges as a dream, instantly recognizable to all those who have seen Loftus’s photographs before, in Jamie Oliver’s cookbooks.
It is weird, and disconcerting, for those who know the source material. The feeling is similar to the one that can arise when lush movies are made from favorite books. But for those who have never heard of David, who have never experienced the joy of her chicken baked with green pepper and cinnamon butter? This title serves as a good introduction — to be followed by trips to the used-book store for the originals, best consumed with an omelet and a glass of wine.
Oliver’s influence can be found up and down the cookbook piles this season. Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall, the puckish seasonal-cooking advocate and champion of British food television, has turned directly toward Oliver’s aesthetic in his RIVER COTTAGE EVERY DAY (Ten Speed Press, $32.50). With marvelous (Loftus-like!) photographs by Simon Wheeler, and a layout that owes something to 2008’s “Jamie at Home,” this book is more reader-friendly and useful than some of Fearnley-Whittingstall’s past River Cottage offerings, and the food is ace. Start with the chicken and mushroom casserole with cider for dinner, or a celery root Waldorf salad for lunch. There aren’t many days that can’t be served by the rest.
A reissue of Richard Olney’s 1970 classic, THE FRENCH MENU COOKBOOK (Ten Speed Press, paper, $22), is emphatically not for everyday use, as its Dickensian subtitle may attest: “The Food and Wine of France — Season by Delicious Season — in Beautifully Composed Menus for American Dining and Entertaining by an American Living in Paris and Provence.” But there are some excellent recipes in here all the same, for poached eggs and beef stew, stuffed artichoke bottoms and roast saddle of lamb, saffron rice with tomatoes, a pure and simple sauce ivoire. From the simple (peaches in red wine!) to the complex business of stuffing calves’ ears for service with béarnaise sauce, this is a project book, best for cooks seeking intermediate badges or ju=nior-pilot wings.
More accessible for the new cook and the exhausted, overworked experienced one alike is FRENCH CLASSICS MADE EASY (Workman, paper, $16.95), by Richard Grausman. Also a reissue, from a 1988 original, it combines smart advice for streamlined versions of timeless French dishes with a simple, reader-friendly and Workman-specific layout and type style that will be familiar to anyone who has cooked from the Silver Palate cookbooks. Here’s a top-notch blanquette de veau darkened (to the good!) with morels, as well as fine instruction on making a truffled roast chicken, fast soufflés, all the great French egg-yolk sauces, an onion tart and crêpes suzette. For those interested in, if slightly intimidated by, the intricacies of French cuisine, this book will be a balm.
Jonathan Waxman’s ITALIAN, MY WAY (Simon & Schuster, $32), seeks to do something similar for Italian cuisine. The book is slightly slap-dash, with recipes that can at times seem padded (two pages on arugula salad with olive oil and shaved Parmesan!) and black-and-white printing that does no justice to the legendary Christopher Hirsheimer’s photographs. But if you can overlook the filler (recipes for peas with pancetta and mint, or smashed new potatoes) and the steep price tag, Waxman does have some excellent ideas for pork ribs, chicken and a seven-hour braise of lamb. And the instruction on how to make his salsa verde is worth a peek.
Sam Sifton is the restaurant critic for The Times.
via nytimes.com