Dear Marjorie,
You’ve put your finger exactly on what can be irritating about fancy books by fancy chefs. My problem is that I’m not a confident enough cook to let my simmering irritation boil up briskly enough to overpower my insecurity. Lurking beneath the surface, as I frowned and turned away from some of Portale’s proposed creations, was the thought that since, basically, I know how to read, I should be able to follow a recipe. I’m also quite proficient at other cooking-related tasks: shopping, measuring, stirring, tasting. I mean, it’s not as if anyone’s asking us to build and operate a viable solar-powered automobile, and then drive it across the former Soviet Union without using a map.
But books like Portale’s can run roughshod over people like me (and you, too, it seems), people who need extra encouragement to muster the courage to sauté gray fish skin until it turns crispy brown. (What a nice picture there is of crispy fish skin in the Colicchio book, as you say.) I didn’t mind Portale’s pretentiousness so much–OK, he loves his food and thinks it’s as sublime as opera, or whatever–but I did feel hampered by his inability to stoop down to my level and empathize with my amateurish little problems.
I think you’re right: Colicchio was best at that. I was so grateful at the way he walks you through basics like sautéing, braising, and roasting, anticipating your fears and your dorky questions even before you experience or ask them. I loved his little explanatory asides in the margins. (E.g.,”The easiest way to peel a fava bean is to tear off one tip of the casing, then pinch on the other end gently until the bean slides out”–who would have known?) And I liked his attitude, his breezy, friendly writing style and his sense that he–a highly paid professional chef–is somehow in this together with you, the peon reader who lives on Ring Dings and Lean Cuisine but dreams of raising herself out of mire and onto a more sublime cooking plane. I’ll tell you how I fared with some of his recipes tomorrow.
What cookbooks do I like? I have a wide range of them and find that some I use a lot. Among these are two of the Silver Palate cookbooks, staples of my New York youth, when we were forever having brunches with coffee cake and scrambled eggs and lox and bagels, and two cookbooks from my favorite dessert shops: Kathleen’s Bake Shop in Southampton, from when I was covering Long Island, and the Little Pie Company, which is down the street from the New York Times office in Manhattan. My friend Connie and I used to buy little sour-cream apple pies from them sometimes, go up to the 11th floor cafeteria, and split them for lunch. I cook Chinese food with a Ken Hom cookbook, and Italian with Marcella Hazan, and I have Vongerichten and Bittman’s earlier book, which has a great recipe for warm, gooey chocolate pudding cakes that are not hard to make at all. But lots of recipes I just cut out of newspapers and magazines, and then lose. What about you? And can you recommend something that works nearly every time, and that provides a good grounding that helps you understand more elaborate concoctions in other books?
Meanwhile, we haven’t much discussed Simple to Spectacular, a book that marries the restaurant-level perfection of celeb chef Jean-Georges Vongerichten and the more down-to-earth approach of Mark Bittman, his co-author. The premise is that each recipe starts down at its most basic level and then can be elaborated on and made more exciting in later incarnations. But you get to pick which level you want. (It’s like those crossword puzzles with two sets of clues to choose from, the easy clues and the hard clues.) “Almost all recipes proceed from the basics,” Bittman writes in the introduction. “Once a home cook or a chef becomes comfortable with a given recipe, taking it another step is not difficult.” He also points out that most cookbooks tend to lump the easy recipes with the hard ones, so you don’t know what degree of difficulty you get to factor in when awarding yourself a final score for the dish.
This book, too, has gentle explanations for things you wanted to know but might have been too witless to ask. It also has something else that I appreciated very much: estimates of the time it takes to make each dish, including whether the dish can be left alone for part of that, leaving you free to read People’s “Most Intriguing People of the Year” issue at the kitchen table. I’ve always had trouble with mashed potatoes, but the recipes here (starting with plain old mashed potatoes and spinning them out into ones with cheese, or with cucumber and sour cream, or with mustard and shallots, or with truffle sauce) were easy and good. There were lots of helpful tips–the authors provide a nifty little “key to success” box with each new topic–and I appreciated it when they didn’t come down hard and demand that the potatoes be whipped into submission. Smooth or chunky, they said: your choice. I made the mashed potatoes with mustard and crunchy shallots (Page 124) and screwed up at two points. I didn’t get shallots; I got scallions. (They’re not called scallions in England, but “salad onions,” so I get them confused with shallots for reasons that have to do with a poor grasp of the differences between foreign oniony vegetables that begin with “s.”) Then, I didn’t have smooth Dijon mustard, but chunky pommery-style mustard, and I added too much. But the potatoes were still unbelievably good, and the recommended levels of butter and milk turned out just right, and next time I make them–and there will be a next time–I’ll just go easy on the mustard.
I also made oven-roasted zucchini (Page 127) but fatally left it in the oven too long, so that it turned bitter and made me feel kind of queasy when I ate it. And I made chicken with vinegar (Page 414), which was great, even though I made it late at night and had to let it sit in the fridge for the whole next day before we could bring ourselves to eat it.
I’d love to hear how you fared (and whether you’ve gotten your kids to help you eat any of these things). And I’m especially interested in your Vongerichten misstep so that I don’t feel like I’m the only person who will have to spend my twilight years in the rest home for the culinary-challenged.
All best to you,
Sarah
