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12/14/2001 Archived Entry: "Year-End Cookbook Round-Up, Part 1"

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My first cookbook was published in 1979. It was called “Cooking in a Small Kitchen.” I had already been a food writer for 10 years and writing a cookbook was simply something one had to do to be taken seriously in my profession. While I was writing it I was assistant food editor of Newsday. By the time it was published, I was the executive food editor of the New York Daily News. Neither of these positions helped sell my book. “Cooking in a Small Kitchen.” didn’t do well – to put it mildly. It went out of print in less time than it took to write it. This discouraged me from writing another book. To make myself feel better about my disheartening experience, I took the stance that there were already too many cookbooks in the world and it was silly, perhaps even immoral, to foist yet another cookbook on the public. How many recipes does a person need, after all?

Little did I know that in the next two decades more cookbooks would be published than in all of preceding human history. So what do I know?

My next two books, What To Cook When You Think There’s Nothing in the House To Eat and Soup Suppers were written largely for mercenary reasons. I wrote “What To Cook …” because an editor wanted me to write a book for her (flattering, no?) and I needed the money. My house in Connecticut was beginning to be a money pit. Along the same lines, I wrote “Soup Suppers” because I needed a new carport. I believe in both these books. I am, in fact, proud of them. I even still cook the recipes in them. But they were not from my heart, not really.

My heart produced Naples At Table. How is that? I grew up with Neapolitans. Until I was six years old, my family lived in a two-family house with a Neapolitan family “right off the boat” My father also grew up in a two-family house with an immigrant Neapolitan family, which meant that my grandparents lived with Neapolitans, and I loved their landlords, Jerry and Anna, like they were my uncle and aunt. Jerry seemed to be always either gardening vegetables in a small plot he had on the next block, or making wine in the basement. Anna was always in the kitchen, stirring a pot, making “gravy,” or putting up the vegetables that Jerry grew. I still like to joke that I must have been weaned on ziti with ragu.

My love of Neapolitan food and culture were further enhanced by visiting the city off and on since 1969. In addition, as a food writer, I thought the cuisine deserved respectful attention. La cucina napoletana had never been written about in the English language, and it is the foundation of Italian-American cooking, not to mention the Italian food that the world knows and loves the best. Most importantly, it was a cuisine – a true discrete cuisine and a great one -- that I really wanted to explore in the kitchen, research in books, and eat. It was one cookbook that had yet to be written.

At any rate, just when one would think that there are enough, even too many cookbooks in the world, we get a season like this. Not only have there been a vast number of new books this season, but most of them are a waste of paper. Good paper, too, as so many cookbooks are now printed on slick stock with color pictures. There’s nothing wrong with that, except the content.

If I never see another cookbook by a chef I will be very happy. I flip through these books and find very few recipes within the scope of even an accomplished home cook like myself. And when I do get into the kitchen to prepare that occasional, do-able recipe, I find it is so poorly translated into home-cook measurements and terms that it virtually doesn’t work without emergency intervention. I am considering disposing of all my chef and restaurant books to make room for more useful works.

There are exceptions. This season it would be Second Helpings from Union Square Cafe: 160 New Recipes from New York's Favorite Restaurant. As the title suggests, this is restaurateur Danny Meyer’s and chef Michael Romano’s second cookbook and the experience has been a learning one for them. The recipes are approachable because they have been selected from the restaurant’s repertoire with home cooks in mind. They are well-tested. I don’t, however, care for the silly, even ugly black and white photographs of diners doing supposedly amusing things at the restaurant. I know the authors consider them “whimsical,” but they add nothing to the book. And, while I am talking about the book’s design, it was certainly a waste of color to only put a rectangle of burgundy around the page numbers. If the publisher is going to the expense of having color on the page (and it is an added expense), why not put the recipe titles or something else in color, too?

The fashion for cookbooks full of so-called “healthy” food is blessedly fading, but one outstanding one has been published this year. It is my dear friend Rozanne Gold’s Healthy 1-2-3: The Ultimate Three-Ingredient Cookbook. Rozanne started a revolution in cooking a number of years ago when she wrote Recipes 1-2-3, the first in her series. It was a figurative slap in the face to the mode of the day then, when it seemed like every ingredient in the larder was being put into every recipe, especially by those chefs who were beginning to publish all those restaurant cookbooks. I remember well when Suzanne Hamlin, who was then reviewing books for the Daily News, wrote somewhat but not entirely facetiously of a very popular cookbook, “The recipes are great if you leave off the last seven ingredients in each one.” After Recipes 1-2-3, Rozanne wrote Recipes 1-2-3 Menu Cookbook, then Entertaining 1-2-3. She promises that Desserts 1-2-3, which we expect will be published this spring, is the last in the series. Healthy 1-2-3 is not a health cookbook, however. It is about being sensible, not restrictive. There are meat recipes, and dessert recipes, indulgent recipes when you consider the deep flavors that Rozanne rends from such a meager number of ingredients. The recipes aren’t always as easy as 1-2-3, but most of them are, and the few that take some doing to prepare are always worth the effort. The book is so beautiful, too, that it make a wonderful gift. Rozanne’s other 1-2-3 books have all received awards and honors. This one is bound to also.

Baking and dessert books are being published in great profusion the last few years. Is everyone besides me baking? Even though I don’t spend as much time on dessert as some – I’m more a cook than a baker – I have to confess that many of these books are so fine I am tempted myself. My choice from this season’s batch of baking books is The Baker’s Dozen Cookbook, which was written by a group of San Francisco Bay-area bakers – cookbook writers in their own right, professional bakers, baking teachers -- who informally get together to discuss their craft and share their separate expertise. It offers their collective baking wisdom along with the recipes.

Another dessert book I was thrilled with is Sweet Sicily by Victoria Granof. Besides more than 100 recipes for cookies, pastries, frozen and fruit desserts, etc., the book is full of charming stories, personality profiles, travel tidbits, and gorgeous pictures, both studio shots and journalistic shots. My only criticism is that the pictures lack captions. I would love to put the faces with the stories, but the editor (the famous Judith Reagan, no less) has made that impossible. I haven’t tested any of the recipes yet, but Victoria brought a few goodies to my radio studio and I thought her cannoli were superb. Just talking to her on the radio, and subsequently on the phone, I feel we can trust that the recipes work well.

To be continued tomorrow