Paper Palate

So, let’s say that you want to learn how to cook. Up until this point, cooking has been a mystical, impermeable process — a magical chemistry that happens on your parent’s stove or behind a restaurant swing door. Or perhaps you already know how to cook, but still view it as a dreadful, time-consuming chore.

Central to many a cook’s library is that one cookbook that started us off; that first volume that was an ideal balance of utility, accessibility and inspiration that got us hooked and lifted the veil of cooking. This book is our foundation, but like us, it tends to vary; as it reflects our own styles, diets and learning methods.

In this series of posts, I will cover works that can appeal to the beginning home cook. I will start off with the canonical reference encyclopedias, branch from there into the full-color, quick and easy books aimed at visual learners and the timid, and then look at works that take a more analytical approach. Each appeals to a specific type of cook, and has its own virtues and challenges. Most folks, though, go for the first category.

Books Covered: The Joy of Cooking, How To Cook Everything, and Vegetarian Cooking for Everyone

What do you get when you buy any of these books? Breadth mostly. You get 800+ pages of recipes covering the collected wisdom of man’s experiments with applying heat to stuff and putting it in their mouths. You get a reference text whose recipes you may outgrow, but to whom you’ll return to look up, say, the proper temperature of oil for french fries. You will get some essays and primers on basic technique and theory, but if you want detailed food science, you’d have to look elsewhere. You will get some handy illustrations showing how chickens are trussed or how mangoes are cubed, but if you want something with step-by-step visuals or inspirational plating examples, then you will, again, have to look elsewhere.

First up is the venerable The Joy of Cooking. This is as close to the American canon as you can get. A great number of American households roast chickens, bake pies and simmer soups according to the outlines described by the Rombauers and their ghost writers. The index alone is 53 pages long and encompasses the classics (apple pie, meatloaf) as well as the slightly obscure (sweetbreads, durian fruit). Suffice to say that if you want an all-inclusive reference book that has the proper oven temperature for a baked alaska, or recipes for roast grouse, then you will find what you need in The Joy of Cooking.

The recipes themselves are a suitable start for the neophyte cook — not discouragingly long, but also not so short that it skimps on flavor in favor of ease. They are preceded by sections describing technique and theory that eases the beginner cook into their task, giving you an overall picture that should, ideally, keep you from cooking by rote memorization.

However, keep in mind, that this density of recipes sacrifices a certain user-friendliness. Over time, the recipes have been revised and updated by enough ghost writers that, while they are concise and approachable, the prose is dry and reads more like a textbook. This is distilled collective wisdom, as opposed to individual. If you prefer a cookbook that has a stronger personality and sense of self, then you’ll have to look elsewhere. By elsewhere, I mean How To Cook Everything.

How To Cook Everything is written by Mark Bittman, a food writer for the New York Times, whose column, The Minimalist, has long held a focus on quick, simple recipes that can be completed with a minimum of fuss. It’s all written in a clear, lucid style that encourages and coaches the home cook. If you’re the kind of person who engages more with personality than with data — someone who prefers to gather their news from blogs rather than newsprint — then you would get more mileage out of How To Cook Everything

Another significant difference in Bittman’s work is that he makes more frequent use of master recipes, where techniques are often accompanied by variations. As an example, you’ll only find one recipe for sauteed chicken breasts but it will be followed up with twelve suggestions for how to vary the sauce. You’ll also find several sidebars that suggest dish pairings, serving suggestions and suitable reuse of leftovers. While both Joy and How To Cook Everything give you a sense for improvisation, the latter goes an extra mile with a bevy of ideas like 8 Simple Sauces for Cold Poached Salmon or Ten Ingredients You Can Add to Any Vegetable Soup.

The one drawback to his minimalist, modular approach to cooking is that the recipes by themselves do come off as somewhat plain and bland. The focus here is on simple instructions that sacrifice depth of flavor for accessibility. So you have to improvise; if only to jazz up dishes as you master them. Yet, as a starting point, How To Cook Everything is quite suitable. Even after you’ve graduated to more robust, challenging fare, the references and suggestions in this book will make it a frequent pull in your library.

Alternatively, if you are vegetarian or vegan you could do well to consider Deborah Madison’s Vegetarian Cooking for Everyone. Even non-vegetarians have found this volume handy, especially college students, folks who live on tight budgets that might preclude meat purchases, and anyone else looking for more balance in their diet. It’s comprehensive, deep and inspirational, and is equally suitable as both foundational text and as a supplement to either of the volumes mentioned previously.

It is also, potentially, the most educational of reference books to cooks already familiar with American staples. Deeper coverage is given to subjects that are generally glossed over in more conventional reference books. Grains like millet and amaranth or vegetables like chard or parsnips are treated with uncommon thoroughness. The neophyte produce shopper, faking their way by squeezing random heaps of cabbage and squash, will also appreciate guidance on how to pick and store one’s vegetables; data that is also generally skimmed in Joy and How To Cook Everything.

One should note that recipes in VCfE do range in complexity, and some of the gratins and souffles might intimidate the beginner. A lot of vegetarians will also recommend the Moosewood series of cookbooks as an easier alternative. While the Moosewood books are certainly great, and have also launched the kitchens of several happy vegetarians, they are, at their core, great recipe collections, and don’t impart as much general information. There are a couple of Moosewood books that have a shallower learning curve than VCfE, and I will cover those in a later post, but I’ve found VCfE to be a more useful work overall; providing a cook with more background information in addition to dependable recipes.