Eater's Digest

For our two home cooks, well read is well fed.

by Justin Bauer and Char Vandermeer

Neal Santos

The first wrecked dessert was probably our fault. It was Nigella Lawson's grasshopper pie, intended to play the role of a birthday cake, and it wasn't until after we'd rescued the filling with an extra cup of whipped cream that we discovered the melted-marshmallow base needed another hour to absorb the crème de menthe and coagulate into a gel. The second dessert, the very next day, was a buttermilk chocolate cake — Craig Claiborne's, from the huge Essential New York Times Cookbook (Norton, Oct. 25) — that just collapsed like the Sixers in the third quarter. Not sure the three sticks of butter in the frosting saved it, but also not sure what we could have done differently.

These are the dangers of a new cookbook, especially at the beginning of a long winter, which this year, in our house, is a season that includes four birthdays, a graduation and a major holiday, each celebrated with a dinner or at least a cake, a couple of drinks or a bottle of wine, a circle of friends and family around a full table. But the benefits outweigh the dangers: A new sharp-cornered cookbook, bound and illustrated, united by a particular voice or a curatorial vision of a particular kind of cooking and eating, isn't easy to replace with a sheaf of Google-searched recipes or an impulse-buy smart phone app.

Cookbooks also stand up better to sticky crème de menthe stains than iPads.

According to Mark Bittman, there's a problem with the way Americans cook that's only tangentially related to melted marshmallow goo and three-stick-of-butter frosting. Fundamentally, it's that Americans don't cook. "I was in the press box while the American diet underwent huge changes," he writes in the introduction to his Food Matters Cookbook (Simon & Schuster, Sept. 21), "few of them for the better. Restaurants were booming and people were cooking less and less, while waistlines — and the health problems that accompany excess weight — were growing exponentially." His remedy is conscious consumption, understanding what you're eating; this begins with the way you cook, and the things you cook.

One would expect Nigella Lawson to be part of Bittman's problem. After all, her kitchen work comes in 20-minute installments on food TV, and she's cultivated a personal brand based as much on hostessing and homemaking (and cleavage) as on food. In her new book, Nigella Kitchen (Hyperion, Oct. 12), anecdotes preface each recipe, and full-page photos (ranging from wholesome to cheesecakey) abound. There's also the matter of the melted marshmallows for that grasshopper pie.

But if all that warmth looks frivolous next to the photo-free two-color austerity of Food Matters, Lawson shows a clear grasp on how to make things work (for instance, marinating in buttermilk, Southern-style, to improve a Milanese cutlet, though hardly revolutionary, is a little unorthodox, and an improvement on an egg wash), and impressive sensitivity to the realities of a home kitchen. These are the sorts of things a cookbook should do — help you tackle dishes you've got no idea how to start, and make you better at dishes you already think you do well.

This is a mark missed, on the basic end, by Janet Hornby's What to Cook and How to Cook It (Phaidon, Oct. 20). Hornby's aiming for absolute beginners — folks who need a recipe for a full English breakfast. The design is clean and striking, with each recipe accompanied by images of ingredients as well as step-by-step photos. But for all that clinical care, the pancakes were mediocre; a shepherd's pie (pictured opposite page, right) was bland; and birthday cinnamon buns failed, but not before depleting the kitchen of milk, yeast and the last of the season's farm-fresh eggs.

Like What to Cook, Pushpesh Pant's India Cookbook (Nov. 17) is published by Phaidon. Unlike Hornby, though, Pant sets out to provide an encyclopedic resource for an entire subcontinent's cuisines, an ambition his book wears on its spine (which, styled like a market-stall rice bag, shows the book's weight at 1.5 kilograms). Pant's collection is impressive, not only in its scope of recipes and flavors, but also in the 25-page history and the careful explanation of Indian regions and their varied approaches to "Indian" cuisine that start the book. Pant challenges the notion of a traditional Indian meal; he's permissive in tone, giving the home cook free license to mix and match from distinct regions across the massive subcontinent, creating polyglot, yet authentic, meals of fiery and distinct flavors. India reminds us that there's far more to Indian food than curries and kormas.

While it's a joy to cook with such variety and abandon, Pant still demands a certain degree of pre-existing knowledge. For example, the Shalgam ki Subzi (curried turnips) calls for four turnips, peeled, but neglects to say how to slice the dense root. And while we decided to trust the Bund Gosht (fennel-flavored lamb) recipe — and it's a good thing we did, as it was pretty spectacular — it would have been comforting to know that, indeed, 1 cup of yogurt and a half-cup of oil would provide adequate hydration for an hour and a half of stewing. Pant's encyclopedic compilation, with its muted newsprint paper, color-coded chapters and warmly lit photos, rewards a cook with some experience making Indian food, but throws up a steep learning curve for the beginner.

Closer to home (that is, about two hours from this Pennsport kitchen), The Essential New York Times Cookbook uses a slightly longer spoon to stir a rather smaller pot. Amanda Hesser, who compiled the book, solicited suggestions from Times readers, drew recipes herself from the full breadth of the newspaper's archives, painstakingly field-tested and updated them, and shaped them into a collection that's as much a history of American cooking as it is a recipe resource. As a result, Hesser's book weighs in slightly ahead of Pant's, and covers decades and styles in the way Pant covers regions. There are dabblings in regional and national cuisines (apparently Craig Claiborne had a Nordic phase, all dill and herring); there are modern reinterpretations of classics, like Molly O'Neill's Fettuccine with Preserved Lemon and Roasted Garlic; and there are originals, like the recipe for Saratoga Potatoes, potato chips, from 1904, which so thoroughly trumped our standard technique with their "fairy-like thinness" that there's no going back.

Neal Santos

Even against the overwhelming abundance of the New York Times — which, after all, is a compilation of many contributors' work — there are other, narrower cookbooks far better at specifics. Dorie Greenspan's gougeres (pictured, right), for instance, are perfect, and her freshened-up French recipes in Around My French Table (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, Oct. 8) stand out, even if the book is marred by cutesiness and a foregrounding of personality that rivals Lawson's (and occasionally gets condescending, as with her explanation of Dijon mustard).

And there's Simon Hopkinson's humane good cheer and non-doctrinaire pleasure in The Vegetarian Option (Stewart Tabori & Chang, April 1). Rather than issuing numbered edicts — the way Bittman opens The Food Matters Cookbook — the former Bibendum chef and Roast Chicken and Other Stories writer, clearly no vegetarian himself, takes a gentle stance. "I will reach the age of 55 this year," he writes, "and cannot really see my culinary lifestyle drastically altering any time soon. I am absolutely not going to enter into the world of moral judgment here. I just love all foods." This sort of common sense shows in Hopkinson's recipes, which are largely simple classics in straightforward British style — a light cream of fennel soup; a chard gratin that uses the ribs of the vegetable set alongside a sauté using the leaves — none of which rely on the substitutions that so often doom veggie dishes to become pale, self-righteous imitations of dishes they aren't.

The meatballs, the marinara and the gnocchi that come out of Frank Falcinelli and Frank Castronovo's Frankies Spuntino Kitchen Companion and Cooking Manual (Artisan, June 14) should also be singled out. Falcinelli and Castronovo run a restaurant that updates the classic Italian-American red-gravy joint, and the Naugahyde-covered, gilt-edged book that comes out of their partnership with co-author Peter Meehan shows off what they've learned from their grandmothers (the potatoes for the gnocchi need to be boiled until you see crystals when you break them apart) and from careers spent making things that work in professional kitchens (Hellman's mayonnaise in the Caesar dressing). But as functional and correct as their instructions are, Meehan's clear hand in helping the cooks tell their stories makes the Kitchen Companion better than its couple-dozen actual recipes.

Neal Santos

The Southern Foodways Alliance Community Cookbook (University of Georgia, Oct. 1), with its retro spiral binding and primitive two-color production, provides at least as rich a backstory as Meehan. The book adopts the form and method of a church-benefit or fire-station cookbook, and winds up compiling specialties and short stories from across the South. The home-kitchen recipes are just as likely as the ringers (like Donald Link or Emeril Lagasse) to hit the cover off the ball. Take, for instance, Dr. Cappy Ricks' Chicken and Dumplings. Although the next time we make them, we're going to toss in a couple stalks of celery and a few mushrooms, the pillowy dumplings and rich stock were precisely what the doctor ordered for an ailing, cold-ridden cook. And when What to Cook 's cinnamon buns failed? A quick batch of two-ingredient angel biscuits from this cookbook eased the pain.

While Greenspan, Lawson, Hopkinson, the Franks and the Southern Foodways Alliance each excel, The Essential New York Times Cookbook is, as its name promises, essential. Hesser's diligence taps all the elements that distinguish each of these other successful books. Her headnotes show a guiding personality corralling the enormous archival project the cookbook represents. The recipes, although occasionally dusty and dated, are painstakingly field-tested. And with its breadth of contributors and the richness and depth of American culinary history on display, Hesser's book honors the importance of space and place.

That kind of detail and comprehensiveness becomes enormously valuable, whether you're charging through nearly 60 recipes in seven weeks (we did some field testing ourselves) or trying something new for a holiday meal. Bittman's pessimism about the state of food and eating might be correct, when cooking is as often entertainment or ideology (the only plausible excuse for his gumbo's grim olive oil roux) as nourishment. But a good recipe, or a good collection of them, can provide more than just nutrition: They begin celebrations in the kitchen, and provide tokens of affection off a stained and battered range, or with a cup of coffee after a meal.

Of course, it helps to have friends good enough to forgive the occasional fallen cake.

(editorial@citypaper.net)