Times Like These

Food writer Amanda Hesser on the Essential New York Times Cookbook.

by Carolyn Wyman

When Amanda Hesser solicited reader help in picking the best recipes ever published by The New York Times for her new cookbook, Marion Burros' Purple Plum Torte was the landslide winner, with 185 more votes than the second-place pancake by David Eyre. It's probably the last recipe in which Hesser would have chosen to make a mistake. But mistake there is.

"The plum torte recipe was published multiple times, but when I went to put it in the book, I decided to use the original version, forgetting that it had a mistake that was later corrected: It calls for 1 tablespoon instead of 1 teaspoon of cinnamon," the Times columnist admitted the other day.

Still, this is small potatoes in light of Hesser's big achievement: culling the best 1,000-plus recipes from the tens of thousands the Times has published since the 1850s, and making them accessible to 21st-century cooks in her new Essential New York Times Cookbook (Norton, $40). In fact, some early reviews suggest Essential deserves a place beside kitchen bibles The Joy of Cooking and How to Cook Everything, as well as its Craig Claiborne-dominated predecessor, The New York Times Cookbook.

How does Hesser think Essential measures up? "This is less a how-to and more a collection of all the recipes you need to know," she says. "It includes all the major movements and trends, and every major chef's signature recipes, as well as classics."

She says she also hopes the book will be used "to have a culinary adventure." It certainly was that for Hesser. Testing stew recipes from the '50s spiced only with parsley was "a low moment." By contrast, wonderful-but-passé recipes for tiramisu, black bean soup and bowl punches led her to question a food culture that "becomes very enthusiastic about something, then tosses it aside."

During the six years she worked on the book, Hesser had twins and took a buyout from the Times to start food52.com, a food contest website (and book, this June) where entries are tested by both Hesser and readers — in part, Hesser says, to beat the problem of Internet recipe trustworthiness.

Still, Hesser acknowledged, "There are also plenty of bad recipes in books" — not to mention one good one with too much cinnamon.

(cwyman@citypaper.net)

Amanda Hesser, Thu., Dec. 9, 7:30 p.m., $15, with Madhur Jaffrey and Judith Jones, Free Library, Central Branch, 1901 Vine St., 215-567-4341, freelibrary.org.