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12/15/2001 Archived Entry: "Year-End Cookbook Round-Up, Part 2"

All the books highlighted in the following Diary item can be purchased through Amazon by clicking on the highlighted title, which will connect you to the book’s Amazon page. If you order books in this way you are supporting this website. As I hope you have noticed, there is no advertising on The Food Maven. The site is partially and only minimally supported by Amazon book sales. So, if you see, something you want, please buy it here. Remember, Amazon discounts books so well – most are 30% less than in bookstores – that even with shipping you pay less.

I love books on foreign cuisines, even when I have no intention of ever cooking anything from them. The best of them are windows into cultures, and they inform me enough about the ingredients and cooking that when I go to a restaurant that prepares that cuisine I am at least somewhat educated about it. You might, however, actually find me in the kitchen with Madhur Jaffrey’s Step-By-Step Cooking: Over 150 Dishes from India and the Far East Including Thailand, Indonesia, and Maylasyia. I love Madhur (she is my friend) and everything she does, including her movies. She is quite the film star as well as food star. I have cooked from most of her many books and her recipes are always precisely written and turn out delicious. In this one, however, she goes further: the techniques are illustrated with photographs and the recipes are so simple you want to start including them in your everyday meals. All you need is a few Asian ingredients in your larder to do it.

I love scholarly books, books that take food beyond cooking and eating. That’s exactly what Van Gogh’s Table by Alexandra Leaf and Fred Leeman does. It is a gorgeous book, too. If you are looking for a great gift book for someone who is interested in food, but not necessarily a cook (but also those who do cook), this would be it. It reproduces many Van Gogh works, as well as the paintings and drawings of his fellow post-Impressionists. It evokes a French way of life, the life of an artist and his milieu, not to mention offering many recipes from the country inn where he spent his final days.

So-called “definitive” books are popular among publishers and the public these days. (Note the unseemly success of Mark Bittman’s “How To Cook Everything.” I keep joking with him that I am going to write the sequel, “How To Cook Everything Else.”) You can’t get more definitive than One Potato Two Potato by Roy Finamore and Molly Stevens. I can’t imagine needing another book on potato cookery. It has more than 300 recipes of an international scope. I baked the chocolate potato cake and it worked perfectly, which is what I would expect from these two authors. Molly Stevens is a journeyman food writer (or is it journeywoman?). Roy Finamore is a highly regarded cookbook editor. Among his authors is Martha Stewart. This is his first cookbook as a writer, although I hear from Carole Walter, my personal baking guru and another of his authors, that he is a superb baker and cook. He is apparently one of the few editors in the business who actually test some of the recipes in the books he publishes.

Speaking of definitive, Amazing Soy by Dana Jacobi is it on that subject. Dana’s friends, among whom I number, like to think of her as “The Queen of Soy.” This is her second book on the subject, and she writes about it from the point of view that everyone should include a little soy in their diet, not just vegetarians or Asian cooks, and that it can be easy and delicious. I have eaten many of the dishes in Amazing Soy and I guarantee you that none of them taste like health food. This is mostly mainstream food made with some soy standing in for other protein sources. It would, incidentally, be a particularly good book for those who keep kosher, as it offers many pareve recipes.

Somehow, I never have enough Italian books. And apparently the American public has an insatiable appetite for Italian food and food books, too. Indeed, Italy has so many different regional foodways that the subject has hardly been exhausted yet. As many Italian cookbooks as there are in print, Italian Holiday Cooking by Michele Scicolone is the book for which many of us have been waiting. It chronicles traditional Italian recipes that might be forever lost to posterity if someone, namely Michele, hadn’t come along and worked them out on paper after having cooked them with the moms or grandmas who still makes them. I’m talking about old-time recipes that may not even be made in Italy anymore, but that have been perpetuated by Italian-Americans who keep up the traditions of generations ago. There are also contemporary recipes from Italy that are new traditions among families. Michele is one of the most reliable cookbook writers in America today. Her recipes are always clearly and concisely written and they always turn out delicious.

All that said, if I could buy only one cookbook this season, it would be The Best American Recipes 2001-2002 edited by Fran McCullough, who is a legendary cookbook editor (and also happens to be the mother of my webmaster, Ben McCullough). This is the third in the Best American Recipes series, and I know that they have all been very thoroughly researched. Everything written about food and cooking – books, newspaper and magazine stories, internet matter … everything – is perused by Fran. She then gleans from all this overwhelming amount of material the most useful and delicious recipes she can find. As an avid home cook herself, she tests all the recipes at home, rejects as many as she includes, maybe more, and knows exactly which recipes will most likely appeal to the rest of us. They are, for the most part, simple recipes and you will surely end up including many of them in your regular repertoire. I am very proud to say that all three editions of the book have included one or more of my recipes from this website.