I dropped into the Librairie Gourmande while my girlfriend went off to the bathroom. I was looking for a cookbook, and I didn’t mind that the store’s wares were all in French. In fact, I kind of hoped that would be the case.

I had recently gotten it into my head that I will travel to France next year to participate in the quadrennial running of the legendary bicycle ride, Paris-Brest-Paris, and aside from training my legs and lungs for a 750 mile endurance ride, I also had to retrain my schoolboy French to the point where I could reasonably hold a conversation with only five hours of sleep in three days. I had a plan for taking classes, but I figured that deciphering a French cookbook could only help.

Specifically, I wanted a North African cookbook. The lazy heat of summer has put me in a mind for food slowly cooked over a low fire, and I wanted a book that could give me ideas for stewy tagines as well as brochettes that would be a welcome variation on the grill. What I wound up getting was Le Grande Livre de la Cuisine Marocaine (The Great Book of Moroccan Cuisine), a gorgeous, thick volume from Fatema Hal, chef-owner of Mansouria, famous for serving the best couscous in Paris.

Though, of course, herein lies one of the first flaws in my cunning plan.

It’s challenging enough to decipher one foreign language into your native tongue. It’s much more complicated to decipher a foreign book that is itself focusing on matters that are alien to both of you, and thus forces you to switch hit on translation duties. Tomates, Coriandre and menthe were easy. Miel, farine and poivre (honey, flour, pepper) I could remember from school and two decades of reading bistro menus. Ras el hanout and smen had me jumping for the glossary — a glossary that was, of course, written in French. This was going to take effort.

It’s also worth noting that I have an academic teenager’s vocabulary in French, which is fine for saying things like “My aunt’s pen is on the table.” but lacks the facility for certain culinary staples like mince, braise or whatever the English translation is for carre de mousseline. (which, on first blush, makes me think they mean a cooking instrument modeled after Mussolini’s head) Yet, rather than try to read the book in one hand, with a French-English dictionary in the other, I’ve been stubbornly trying to infer translation from context.

So, like, a common instruction would be to “Epluchez les oignons et coupez les tres finement. Epluchez et ecrasez l’ail. Lavez et hachez la coriandre.” Which, to me, on first pass is:

“{Do something-something to} the onions and (jibba-jabba) in very finely. (Do something-something again) and (blah-blah) the garlic. Wash and (smiggle-smaggle) the coriander.”

So what do I normally do to both onions and garlic in the beginning of a recipe? Peel? It’s got three letters in common with epluchez so, sure, why not? Peel the onions and I’ll assume that coupez is “cut” because that’s what one usually does to prep peeled onions. Hachez might be “chop” because it sounds like “hatchet”, and I’ll assume that ecrasez is “crush” because that’s what I’d want do to a clove of garlic that I’m adding to some sliced onions and chopped coriander that I’m prepping for a stew.

“Peel the onions and cut them very finely. Peel and crush the garlic. Wash and take a hatchet to the coriander.”

Ok, that works.

So, yeah, guesswork via context. It’s really not that different from reading, say, William Faulkner and trying to figure out whether his characters really are speaking English. There are, of course, certain French terms that don’t map 100% to English. For instance, it took me a few minutes to realize that cuil. a café meant a “teaspoon” and not a “coffee cup”, which was my first impression from seeing café . I was almost about to conclude that a coffee cup was the equivalent of a liquid measure cup before realizing that a cup of paprika would probably be overkill for a lamb tagine. I would’ve probably drawn the connection more quickly if the French drank tea instead of coffee (or, if you’re a Francophone, wishing that the English drank coffee instead of tea and therefore referred to their small measures as coffeespoons) but such is the charming challenge of translation. If anything it made it easier to infer that cuil. a soupe was probably a tablespoon even if it literally translated to a soup spoon.

Curiously, I haven’t seen any instruction to saute anything. One would think that it would be a commonplace instruction, but when the technique is used in the Le Grande Livre…Marocaine it’s a much more prosaic version like, “heat olive oil in a pan until hot, then add stuff and cook.” Maybe sauteing isn’t big in the Maghreb. Maybe it’s because sauté actually means something else besides, “heat a shallow pan and cook ingredients in light amount of oil, while tossing vigorously” and a French cookbook using the word sauté is as borderline ridiculous as an English cookbook saying, “Make your vegetables dance until done.” or “Brown your onions in your dancing pan until golden.”

Though, now that I think about it, every kitchen ought to have a dancing pan.

So, do I honestly think that this exercise will help me in my travels in France? Not really, unless the bill for my meal involves trading some hours in the kitchen. Still, reading through the book is to reacquaint my mind with operating in French, and that is genuinely helpful. Taking advantage of a gorgeous, informative cookbook that has not yet been translated to English is a bonus.

To start with the basics, the Larousse Gastronomique, the reference that catalogues definitive techniques with an obsessive compulsiveness that seems vaguely uncharacteristic of the French (more Teutonic, really) dictates that a chicken should be roasted at 400F with the breast side initially down, then turned at the halfway point. Total roasting time would be roughly 20 minutes per pound. Basting is recommended but optional; as is trussing. It’s simple, gets the job done, but it leaves you a bird with chewy, but not crisp, skin and breast meat that is dangerously close to dry.

Now contrast this with Ming Tsai’s Roast Chicken with Sticky Rice Stuffing, from his Blue Ginger cookbook. Here, he has you prepare a rice and scallion stuffing, while roasting the chicken at 550 degrees breast up for 25 minutes. Then, he instructs you to lower the oven heat to 325 degrees, pull the bird out then stuff the steaming hot cavity. Granted he also recommends using rubber gloves as insulation. But still, most folks lack the heat tolerance of a food professional who’s spent hours around salamanders and industrial burners. For most of us mere mortals, the concept of stuffing a chicken fresh from a 550 degree oven doesn’t just evoke the words ‘arms reach’, so much as evoking welder’s masks and a blacksmith’s apron. Finally, he has you shield the stuffed chicken with foil, and roast it for another 45 minutes to an hour longer. It’s slower and marginally more complicated, but it does yield a juicy bird with good stuffing — which is what one would expect from a cookbook from a restaurant specializing in complicated food. If anything, it’s a decent reminder of why some of us like to pay others to manhandle a steaming 550 degree bird in our stead.

A little more reasonable is Mark Bittman’s approach in How To Cook Everything where you start with a searingly hot 500F oven, roast the bird breast side down for 20 minutes, baste with olive oil, then wait another 7 to 8 minutes, turn the breast side up then reduce the heat to 325 degrees and cook until juices run clear. It’s still reliant on having a reliable oven that can dump heat quickly enough; and more times than not, I’ve found that the heat sends the olive oil past its smoke point, and I’d have to split my time with turning the bird and soothing a disturbed smoke detector.

For these recipes, the logic behind starting off with a high temperature and then turning the bird while reducing the cooking temperature is to ensure thorough, even cooking of the white and dark meat. Since the portions cook at different times, keeping the oven at a straight 400 will typically result in overdone, cardboard white meat or underdone, bacteria-ridden dark meat. Starting the chicken breast side down will expose more of the thighs to heat first and starting at a high temperature gives them a bit of a head start. Turning the bird then allows you to finish cooking the breasts, while lowering the heat affords a certain margin for error. The main drawback for this method, though, is that you can’t get a good, crispy skin at temperatures below 400 degrees.

The finish-on-a-high-note approach is forwarded in The Cook’s Illustrated Best Recipe book, which recommends roasting at 375 degrees for 30 minutes, then searing it with a 25 minute sprint at 450 degrees. The Cooks twist is that, rather than stick to the conventional breast-down-breast-up rotation method, they adopt a three turn technique, roasting the chicken with one wing side up for 15 minutes, then rotating the other wing side up, and finishing with the bird breast up. They also argue against basting, saying that it’s a relatively superfluous technique that just leads to greasy and unappealing skin.

Anthony Bourdain, in his Les Halles Cookbook, uses a similar temperature progression to the Cooks folks - 375F for 30 min., 450 for 25. Yet, he diverges from others in that he omits turning the bird. You just stuff the chicken with half an onion, a lemon and a couple of sprigs of rosemary and thyme, and cook breast side up then baste halfway. Though, frankly, given Cooks’ advice, even the basting part can be skipped and you can avoid opening the oven for the entire length of the cooking time. Just wander off for 30 minutes, enjoy a glass of wine, come back, turn the heat up a bit, then finish the bottle. Sounds rather civilized, doesn’t it? I assume that he doesn’t prescribe turning the bird because nobody cares if the back is a little underdone. Besides, that’s more flavor for the stock, and if you’re not the kind of person who picks at the back then no harm, no foul, right? Right…

So, what sorts of sweeping generalizations does one draw from these various approaches? The Larousse - straightforward but a little too much so. Celebrity chefs like Ming Tsai? Complicated and highly-engineered. Mark Bittman? Not big on crispy skin, but big on making sure that you’re not feeding your kids salmonella. Cook’s Illustrated? Good skin, but keep the oven mitts handy. Anthony Bourdain? Good skin, good juice, and the bacteria that doesn’t kill you will make you stronger; which is not surprising for a cookbook which also has a recipe for steak tartare.

Sure, this sort of post doesn’t apply to vegetarian or Asian cookery, but the idea is that if you master and understand one or two common recipes, you can use that as a reference point to assess other cookbooks that you might buy in the future. Judge the text not as a customer but as a peer, feel free to argue with it and disagree if need be. Then you can actually decide on whether its a good book or not, rather than relying on secondary but basically non-essential qualities like whether it has pretty photos or a nice binding.

I was on a road trip, the genesis for which was a friend’s layoff. He was granted a surplus of free time and decided that he wanted to drive from Boston to New Orleans. I offered to drive down with him, and thought of it as an opportunity to drop in on friends in Raleigh, Atlanta and Tuscaloosa. Then he picked up a new gig, and backed out of the trip. But I thought that I’d go anyway, cut out the New Orleans segment and just use it as an excuse to spend more time with those friends who had, for various reasons, moved to the South. I looked forward to seeing them, but I also anticipated what the South might have to offer. Warmth, history and, of course, barbecue.

My first stop, though, was my older sister’s apartment in Brooklyn. As I told her about my plans and my itinerary, I followed her to her bookshelf, massive and creaking with cookbooks that she’d picked up in her years in New York. She fished out Smokestack Lightning and said, “Here. If you’re going to hunt for barbecue, then take it. Give it back to me whenever you’re done. Tell me stories afterwards.”

As a quick summary, Smokestack Lightning is an account of a summer spent exploring America’s barbecue belt, as Elie and his photographer friend, Frank Stewart, traveled from Memphis to San Antonio to Chicago to Kansas City, indulging in the rich tapestry of slow cooked American meat on offer in roadhouses, corner shacks and festival competitions. While it delves into the regional characteristics of barbecue, and spills more than a little ink on What It All Means, its highlights are in the closeup capsules of the several dozen joints visited and their idiosyncratic owners and pitmasters. It is a series of portraits collected as survey, a journalist’s mosaic of folks with a passion for smoke and sauce, and who believe that “the ability to distinguish a brisket from a butt is no less basic to a civilized existence than are lounge chairs and chilled beer.”

It was those capsules that I had found most valuable, and when I’d get hungry on that road trip, I’d pull over, grab the book, flip to the directory in the back, and used mapping software on my laptop to figure out the route to my next meal. That was how I set a course for Lexington, NC and Lexington Barbecue, with an annotated tip to ask for a sandwich with “outside meat.”

Not that you should consider this to be a guidebook in the vein of Roadfood or a Zagat’s. It is a record of a summer spent meeting, eating and meandering, and while ribs and snouts show up frequently in the text, they are background to the rambling, unguided wandering of the author as he chases one rumor after another about which restaurant has the best sauce or the sweetest meat.

It is an invariably common fact that, despite the existence of mapping software, GPS and Google Earth, we will invariably get lost if we take the path less traveled. It’s part of a road trip experience, and the measure of a traveler is not whether they can avoid losing their way but, once the way is lost, how they go about regaining it. In my particular case, I got lost in Lexington in less than fifteen minutes, and had difficulty getting my bearings in a suburban town where houses tended to blur together and the only thing distinguishing various residents were the toys that lingered in their yard. Then I caught a whiff of smoked meat, drifting heavy in the summer breeze, and I turned my car upwind.

Earlier in the trip, when I was in Tuscaloosa and driving around with my friend Hyson, I mentioned that I wanted to check out the local barbecue and I had read that this place called Dreamland was pretty good. But, Hyson, who had recently spent her last four years at the University of North Carolina at Wilmington shook her head and said, “Dreamland ain’t barbecue. That’s a rib place.” Before I would’ve been confused by that comment, but instead I just chuckled, remembering the book’s geography lessons — the east is pork, the west is beef, Tennesee and the Carolinas are about pulled pork, everywhere else accepts ribs; and every region has its particular sauce.

I found Lexington Barbecue eventually, and the sandwiches with the outside meat, charred and crispy with their prolonged exposure to flames and seasonings, were exactly what the book had promised. It was the closest that I had come to the lechons of my youth, where suckling pigs are roasted over an open pit for fiestas and gatherings. Filipinos are less fixated on smoke and more interested in a crispy skin and juicy meat; but the idea was the same and the pleasure was equally savory.

There are recipes in the book, but they’re almost all restaurant scale preparations of the “dig a pit, cook a whole hog” variety. In case you’re curious about vegetarian recipes, it’s worth pointing out that the recipe for barbecued cabbage calls for coring a head of cabbage and filling it with beef bouillon cubes and a stick of butter. There are a few entries that can be made at home, but they’re more the exception than the rule. The sauce recipes yield in gallons. The comment “serves 24″ is more common than you might expect. These are less instructions for the home cook and more testaments to style and craft. Which is fine. This is the sort of book that you can’t just read at home. It tempts you with the open road and the promise of good food, fine memories and heady adventure just around the corner and a little further upwind.

I’ve since ceased looking for innuendo in those statements.

Nonetheless, I can’t disagree with them. It’s an inevitable function of our geography. As a general introduction, the Philippines is an Asian archipelago that was a Spanish colony for 300 years before America won it in the same game of marbles that brought in Guam and Puerto Rico. Prior to this, the islands were a crossroads for Chinese and Muslim merchants traversing the Indian Ocean and the South China Sea. As a result, Filipino cuisine is a fascinating form of early fusion where Chinese noodle dishes might share a table with leche flan custard. Imagine a Spanish chef, who’s been honing his technique in the kitchens of Acapulco and Veracruz, and is then re-located to Manila, and has to adapt to Oriental ingredients, and you can probably understand why our adobo deviates from the Mexican sauce of chiles and vinegar and, instead, uses soy sauce, pepper and vinegar. What people nowadays refer to as fusion cuisine, is something we’ve been practicing for centuries.

(and, if you’re curious, the American legacy in Filipino cookery is manifest in a thousand and one creative uses for Spam, tinned vienna sausages, and bottled ketchup. What we learned of American cooking, we learned from GIs and sailors, but you won’t find much mention of that in any of the cookbooks that will follow)

Given that Filipinos form the second largest segment of Asian Americans, one would think that our cuisine would enjoy a higher profile in the States than it does, but while most Americans have grown accustomed to pad thai and sushi, it’s somewhat telling that, to many, the most famous Filipino dish is a Fear Factor classic. If anything, most Filipino cuisine has suffered from a certain rustic simplicity, and has only recently dressed itself well enough to be accessible to outsiders. Indeed, a cursory glance through some classic Filipino cookbooks, like Nora Daza’s 1974 volume, Galing Galing, (the book is roughly equivalent in stature to the Betty Crocker Essentials), reveals a suite of recipes that are either reliant on very specific, highly perishable tropical fruits, or on very specific, very unfamiliar cuts of meat. You could probably find ampalaya (bitter melon) or pig knuckle at a Chinatown grocer, but you might get blank stares with requests for calamansi or leaf lard.

Filipino cuisine became more accessible with the publication of Reynaldo Alejandro’s Philippine Cooking, which took several of our dishes and adapted them to a Western market. Staple Filipino fishes like lapu-lapu and bangus became grouper and milkfish. It became okay to use pepperoni as a substitute for chorizo (which still strikes me as weird, personally), and the saltiest of Filipino seasonings, patis and bagoong became optional garnishes. Some will complain that Reynaldo’s book is showing its age and his list of sources is hopelessly outdated. It’s thus worth noting that an updated version seems to have been published recently, but I haven’t seen it and can’t comment.

In addition there’s also Gerry Gelle’s Filipino Cuisine, which translated regional context in Filipino cookery, so that you could contrast the curries of the Muslim south with the roasted meat dishes of the Northern highland tribes. Gelle’s recipes are also supposed to be slightly more adventurous than their predecessors, possibly accommodating an increased adventurousness in the American palate, but I can’t really comment as I’ve only paged through this book at a store and never actually made the commitment towards actual ownership.

Still, at its base, the Filipino palate does have a tendency towards sour flavors, and Westerners don’t do sour very often. Driven by a need to keep food palatable in a tropical climate, we cook several dishes in quantities of vinegar that would give most folks pause; measured in the proportion of cups and not tablespoons. While any veteran barbecue saucier could tell you that vinegar properly simmered can be a divine base for a sauce, it’s still an unfamiliar concept to most home chefs, and something that seems downright odd when compared to the sweet and spicy flavors of Thai and Vietnamese cooking.

Yet, it’s that uniqueness that makes Filipino food so intriguing, as it is so very much like and unlike the cultures that have surrounded and shaped it. Perhaps the key to our success would be to reinvent ourselves as the Asian answer to American barbecue (have some lechon before you doubt me on that) or perhaps find the missing link that makes us attractive to Latino diners who are probably still weirded out by all of the soy sauce in their estofado. Until then, I’d welcome you to pick either the Gelle or Alejandro book and try out this precursor to East-West fusion cuisine.

As far as the women go … well, combine Oriental grace with Latin curves and Malay cheekbones and what’s not to love?

Yet, strangely enough, I’ve rarely ever followed a recipe from the book. Part of this is due to the format of the Larousse. It aims at conveying an intense density of information, and so the recipes are extremely concise; frequently no more than one paragraph detailing major steps. You get the lay of the land, but the book leaves it to you to figure the rest out on your own. The Larousse also tends towards the old school in its ingredient selection and prep recommendations. There are no accomodations for a busy professional life here, and in the Larousse world, everyone has ready access to foie gras and shaved truffles.

Now, possibly egged on by Phaidon’s publication of the Silver Spoon, Random House has just released a condensed boxed set, The Larousse Gastronomique Recipe Collection . I’ve had the occasion to peruse one recently, and I can’t say if I’d want to get the book quite yet. While the new format lends itself to longer form recipes that provide more detail and guidance, addressing its predecessor’s shortcomings on space, I kind of miss the nerdy minutiae that one can find in the regular volume. I’m also not too keen on the widened culinary scope. I’d trust the Larousse for defining a proper recipe for Sole Meuniere, but I wouldn’t be quite so confident with their Jambalaya. Finally, while the harried, non-food professional part of me celebrates the editors attempts to streamline their recipes, the food geek part wants to point out that the appeal of the old Larousse was that it was a reminder of a previous age that we might sometimes revisit on a leisurely, indulgent weekend; and it would be nice to have a reference that highlights that.

But, then, that’s just based on first impressions. I might be wrong, and a later review will reveal that it is indeed a useful reference that perhaps (miraculously) suggests a coq au vin recipe that can actually be completed in less than a whole day, but still leaves space for the classic preparation and the glories that accompanies it. For now, I’ll stick with the regular reference and its pithy recipes, flawed as they maybe but nonetheless still entertaining to read on a Sunday morning.

Over the weekend, I had gone down to New York City to visit relatives, and had a chance to catch Michael Hoffmann’s Eden as part of the Tribeca Film Festival. The film centers on the trials and travails of Gregor, a rotund German chef who, while plucking the feathers from a duck, introduces himself to us by explaining his lifelong love for the earthy pleasures of food.

It’s one of those moments that could’ve easily been accomplished with flashback and perhaps a montage of kitchen prep scenes as Gregor readies himself for another night of business. But it’s focused on a duck, and is occasionally interrupted by Gregor sweet-talking his produce like a suitor proposing a date.

I shall stuff you with all kinds of good things. Cloves, cinammon, anise, juniper berries. And then we shall roast you in a hot oven so that your skin becomes crisp and beautiful. Oh you will be so beautiful, my sweet.

Or something like that. Then the film moves on, and you don’t see the duck again. Eden is littered with such scenes; gorgeous moments of sensual food prep that have little or nothing to do with the plot, and simply exist just to hook and tease you. It’s the shower scene for foodies. Gratuitous Gastronomy, if you will; the kind of thing that would probably show up on Cinemax if the execs at the channel realized there was a market for food porn. Not the least of reinforcements for this concept is the fact that Gregor is a chef with a gift for making aphrodisiac dinners.

The conceit that food is an instrument of emotion is a familiar one in cinema. Like Water for Chocolate featured a woman who channeled her emotions into dishes that inexplicably evoked both lust and sorrow. Big Night was all about the indelible link between love and flavor. To this lineage, one would add Eden and its hapless hero, who can inspire love and emotion from all of his diners, but cannot win love for himself.

Instead, Gregor watches waitresses as a purely voyeuristic exercise; knowing in his heart that his heavy-set physique will never win their affections. Nonetheless, he manages to strike up a friendship with a young waitress, Eden, and her disabled daughter. It is through this relationship that his cooking becomes a device that both enriches and complicates Eden’s life.

As a romance and a comedy, the film is like its chef — earnest and well-meaning yet clumsy and self-conscious; excelling only in the moments where food is the center of attention. The dynamic between Gregor, Eden and her family feels forced and sometimes unintentionally creepy. The resolution of the film is a hilariously contrived deus ex machina, but in between all of the mediocre plot points is an endearing comprehension of the primal wonders of the kitchen and the irresistable draw it has to those of us who’ve been fortunate enough to sample its sublime wonders. Hopefully its exposure on the film festival circuit will get it a distributor and you can keep an eye out for it in your local arthouse.

And when I say awesome, I mean ‘modern’ awesome. Which, by the way, doesn’t necessarily mean ‘good’. In current times, ‘awesome’ is all about shamelessness, unabashed passion, and a willingness to look a little foolish. It’s zombie pirates and Geoffrey Rush saying “ARRRR!”. It’s Vin Diesel running across a planet of hot lava. It’s Samuel Jackson and snakes on a plane. It’s Anthony Bourdain opening his book with a passage like:

Anyone who says “cooking is in the blood” when talking about professionals is talking out of their ass. Eating well is in the blood. An appreciation of the glories of the table, of good ingredients well prepared, is in the blood. The enjoyment of a long lunch — at table with good friends, tearing into the good stuff made with love and pride — that, arguably is in the blood, or at least in your cultural heritage. But you’ve got that already, right? Otherwise you wouldn’t be here. You wouldn’t have forked over thirty-five bucks to some publishing conglomerate for this book. Would you?

Well? Would you?

If you consider it, there are more than a few parallels to Anthony Bourdain and Samuel Jackson. Neither of them are particularly great talents in their field, but both have built a career of cultivated bad-assery. Jackson may have been consigned to semi-obscurity if not for Pulp Fiction, and now, he can’t even play a calm, zen Jedi Master without a legion of fanboys wishing he’d say, “pass me my lightsaber, you know, the one that says Bad M—F— on it.” Similarly, while Bourdain tries to coach readers into attempting a cassoulet by depicting it as a mild, friendly multi-day project, such passages aren’t nearly as interesting as when he leads off his roast chicken recipe by describing how your roast chicken probably sucks.

That’s roast chicken, numbnuts! And if you can’t properly roast a damn chicken then you are one helpless, hopeless sorry-ass bivalve in an apron. Take that apron off, wrap it around your neck and hang yourself. You do not deserve to wear the proud garment of generations of hardworking, dedicated cooks. Turn in those clogs, too.

Indeed, in perusing the Les Halles cookbook, I find the recipes to be competent, but, at heart, they aren’t any more or less interesting than say, Patricia Wells’ Bistro Cooking classic (if anything, with the exception of the offal recipes, Bourdain’s selections are pretty pedestrian and he readily admits that in the opening chapters). What really sets the book apart are the rants. There’s a great treatise on why it pays to have a regular butcher, greengrocer and fishmonger. There are encouragements to sample every part of a pig; on the simple pleasures of making your own demi-glace; and why you should stop worrying and learn to love the kidney. Interspersed throughout this is a lot of love for food, a sternness for doing things with all of one’s heart, and unmitigated contempt for people who would make a stew with boneless meat.

And, of course, there are a few recipes in there too. My favorite so far has been the seven hour leg of lamb, which involves placing a garlic studded leg on a bed of mirepoix and white wine in a dutch oven, then sealing it with dough (”It doesn’t have to be fancy. Use it like caulking material.”) and bake it at 200 degrees for an afternoon. The result is buttery soft lamb sauced in rendered bone marrow, and it’s utterly divine.

The pictures are decent, though, in keeping with Bourdain’s no-nonsense personality, their presence is far from substantial. Interestingly, the book is bound with relatively heavy paper that seems built to take more than a few spills and spatters. It’s a book that’s designed to live in the kitchen and not the coffee table.

Certainly, Bourdain’s public persona is a shtick that mainly appeals to a certain demographic of young, urban, mostly childless cooks who can afford adventure and crave novelty. Many of his offhand remarks seem specifically aimed at these foodies but even for those who can’t, for various reasons, indulge in his rhapsodies for choucroute and tripe, his pieces on cooking and entertaining are certainly worth reading, generally indulgent and always fun. In other words: awesome.

For folks who need to know the science behind feast and flavor, there is a growing category of books that approach cooking with an empirical mind, eschewing gastronomic purple prose for precise descriptions of what separates the ideal dish from the mediocre. In many cases, these books presume a certain amount of foundational knowledge from the reader, and might be a little too challenging for the beginner. However, if you’re the sort of novice who’s tried to cook and faced one culinary disappointment after another, then these books might be helpful because, unlike the large reference texts or the pretty picture books, the food science books are most likely to tell you where you’re going wrong.

You won’t get the sheer volume of recipes that you would from Joy and you might find the paucity of pictures a little intimidating, but mastering any of these volumes should give you enough background knowledge, that in due time, you won’t need recipes. You can just improvise freely and carve your own path.

Books covered: The New Best Recipe, Cookwise and I’m Just Here For The Food.

Chris Kimball and his collective staff at Cook’s Illustrated magazine and its associated show, America’s Test Kitchen, have a fine reputation as diligent cooks who, through endless experimentation, will give you a recipe for “the best” pork chop or a “perfect” plate of sichuan noodles. Their recipes are often preceded with an essay that outlines their approach, how they tried one idea and rejected it because it made the dish too unbalanced or unpleasant; and these introductory pieces are normally longer than the recipe itself. To say that their process is exhaustive is an understatement, and one wonders what it must be like to be a taster at the Cook’s Illustrated offices, sampling one chocolate chip cookie after another. It must be like Hell. A Hell full of chocolate, that is.

Regardless, this empirical approach is the cornerstone of The New Best Recipe. Every entry in this book is preceded with an essay that describes various approaches that have tried to define a certain dish and how many of these attempts had been found wanting. For the novice led astray, this section may be more useful than the recipes themselves, since you might recognize many of your sins and thereby learn how to correct them. In general though, the essays are also useful because reading them gives you an understanding of the process as a whole, which is really where you want to be mentally when you’re ready to cook. You shouldn’t be following a recipe on autopilot, reading and performing Step One before even letting your eyes go down to Step Two. That way confusion lies. Read the whole piece — understand the entire story, the beginning and the end, and that will help you keep your place. You don’t have to memorize it, but at least have an idea of what you want and how you’ll get it. Make a plan, don’t just follow one.

When going through the New Best Recipe, it’s also important to keep in mind that the authors are defining “perfect” and “best” by their own biases. Some of us like garlic, salt or butter more than others. Their interpretations of ethnic dishes (like biryani) sacrifice authenticity for accessibility. Remember that their “best” might not necessarily be your favorite, but their approach is valuable. Pick this book up for the recipes, keep it for the testing process.

It’s tempting to say that Alton Brown is the telegenic equivalent of Chris Kimball, and that Good Eats is what America’s Test Kitchen would be without the pedantry. And that sort of simile would be wrong, though not because ATK and the New Best Recipe aren’t pedantic (because, well, they kind of are) and not because Good Eats isn’t too charming for its own good (it sometimes is) but because both of these programs are so different in their approach that they might as well be in separate categories. America’s Test Kitchen is a conventional cooking show, that focuses on a specific dish and derives an ideal preparation. Good Eats is a science show that happens to be about food, and giving you a recipe or two is almost incidental. New Best Recipe will teach you how to make a great roast chicken, Alton Brown’s I’m Just Here for the Food will give you a general lecture about roasting and will give you a roast chicken recipe as an example of roasting technique.

As a compendium of knowledge, I’m Just Here for the Food is a lot less structured than others, and its information is broken up in short, easy to digest bits. There’s a lot of clear space and large illustrations to make the book accessible to casual readers; and Brown’s snappy prose helps make time in the kitchen feel like a domestic adventure rather than a boring process. Like his show, he gets deep into the science of how food is transformed in cooking. You get molecular transformations and air convection diagrams, but it’s delivered with a deft mad scientist wit that keeps it from feeling like a rehash of a 10th grade chemistry text (and if you’re interested in that sort of thing, there’s some Harold McGee that we can recommend …)

While this approach certainly has its strengths in enticing the novice into the kitchen, it does come at a cost of breadth. Where most cookbooks can provide you with hundreds, if not thousands of recipes, I’m Just Here for the Food doesn’t even get past 100. The volume is rather slim, and even if paired with Alton Brown’s baking book, I’m Just Here for More Food , the knowledge imparted is basic enough that it can be easily outgrown. It’s not the sort of book that one would return to once they’ve gotten comfortable with the basic techniques of boiling, roasting, sauteing or braising. Still, as a place to start you can do far, far worse.

Shirley Corriher’s Cookwise lands somewhere between New Best Recipe and I’m Just Here for the Food. Actually, long-time viewers of Good Eats will recall a matronly guest chemist who is occasionally summoned, like Scotty on Star Trek, to provide intensely geeky descriptions of why the dilithium crystals in the warp drive chamber aren’t working, or why you shouldn’t add oil to your pasta water. That’s Shirley Corriher, and she’s been schooling the illustrious host more or less since the first season.

Like Alton Brown’s book, in Corriher’s Cookwise recipes play a secondary role to the essays and lectures that form the bulk of the book’s content. You get exhaustive treatises on flour and how gluten determines its behavior as dough. You get to learn about the chemistry of sauces and figure out what separates the smooth and rich from the thin and chunky. Then, you get recipes that are accompanied with charts that describe the purpose of each step in the sequence. What do you accomplish by sweating onions at this stage? Why is she telling you to roast at this temperature? Where New Best Recipe is focused and I’m Just Here … is accessible, Cookwise is erudite.

In all honesty, though, you’ll probably get more utility out of Cookwise as a secondary as opposed to introductory text. The essays and instructions have a general focus that covers a lot of beginner material, but you won’t really appreciate a lot of Corriher’s wisdom if you haven’t cooked and made enough mistakes to realize that what she writes is, indeed, wisdom as opposed to instruction. The indepth description of the roles of eggs and butter in sauces might go over the heads of novices, and the recipes themselves make no compromises for the timid. You are instructed to whisk your bernaise vigorously and constantly until it’s done. There is no mention of using a food processor as a shortcut because, presumably, food processors are for the weak.

In summary, if you’re interested in specific recipes, go with The New Best Recipe. If you’re in search of more basic, general knowledge, then pick up Alton Brown’s book. If you’re already familiar with the basics, or don’t mind a steeper learning curve, then go with Cookwise. Each of these should help you build the confidence to improvise your own recipes so that, ultimately, you can feel comfortable whipping up dishes without having to consult a book. I suppose that runs contrary to our interests on this blog, but for you as a cook, that’s always a noble goal, and one that I’d certainly support.

Welcome to Part 2 of a three-part series covering books aimed at beginner cooks. In the previous installment, I wrote about the large, all-encompassing volumes that have been the standby reference sources for the majority of American kitchens. These works were exhaustively comprehensive, but could be overwhelming in their scope. Their dense, text-heavy format with light illustrations can also be daunting for those of us who prefer visual examples.

I actually had a surprisingly difficult time narrowing the field in this category, as it isn’t one that I followed when I learned how to cook. Is it all about the 30-minute meal? How important are photos? What about balance between techniques and recipes? Every beginner has a style that speaks well to them, and what’s instructive for one is useless for another. It’s also relatively tough because the quick-and-easy beginner category is the most crowded segment in this field. Anyone can slap together some glossy photos and mediocre three-step recipes and pass off the lack of quality by saying that it’s a book for beginners. After all, recipes that have deep complex flavors are hard work. If you’re just a beginner, stick to the simple stuff. Who cares if it’s a little bland? Yeah. Right.

Overall, though, you should try your best to acquire books that will grow with you. Cookbooks that hawk simple-minded, quick recipes that treat their readers like timid infants will hobble your confidence in the kitchen and you will never enjoy cooking if you rely on books that remind you of how much you suck at it. You should own a book that respects you and understands you, which leads you through the basics, but also offers greater challenges later on.

Books Covered: Julia Child The Way to Cook, James Peterson’s Essentials of Cooking, Madhur Jaffrey Step-By-Step Cooking

The grand dame of American cooking, Julia Child has probably done more to bring gourmet cooking into the American home than any other food writer living or dead. While her first cookbook, Mastering the Art of French Cooking, gets the most frequent name-check as Child’s best work, it is still a book focused on classic French recipes that predate our modern accelerated lifestyles. The recipes can be long, dense and rather labor intensive. Her second book, The Way to Cook eases the neophyte in with accompanying photos that illustrate various steps in her techniques, while also featuring a more streamlined recipe format.

In How To Cook Everything, I mentioned the virtues of having a single master recipe that is accompanied by multiple variations. This encourages improvisation, by giving beginners a few easy variables that they can tweak or change according to their preference. The master recipe format was pioneered by Julia Child, and The Way To Cook showcases this technique to an excellent degree - giving you a base recipe that is then followed by multiple dishes that build upon that foundation.

Contrast this to James Peterson’s Essentials of Cooking. Peterson is mostly known as a classically trained chef/proprietor who wrote a fantastic book on sauces and sauce making with an emphasis on understanding technique over blindly following recipes. The approach is replicated in his Essentials book where he leads the beginner through various staple techniques (glazing vegetables, braising meats, etc.) with a lot of accompanying photos. You get step by step snapshots that show you how onions look when they’re being sauteed and how chickens are trussed for roasting. What you don’t get, though, are ingredient lists and measurements. You’re told how to make risotto, but not how much broth you should keep on hand for adding to the rice. Most quantity amounts are in the vague territory of “some mushrooms”, “a little bit of vermouth” and “a few potatoes”. His instructions for grilling shrimp are, almost literally, “Sprinkle shrimp with salt and grill them until they’re pink. Serve hot.”

And, I mean, yeah, grilling shrimp is kind of simple, but it’s not haiku territory.

If you neurotically obsess over how much is in “a dash” then this isn’t your book. If you come from a household where dinner prep was measured in handfuls then this should be familiar territory. It does seem like it demands a fair bit of experimentation, but all cooking is so. Even the canonical recipes that you find in The Joy of Cookng are seasoned for someone else’s taste buds, and you will still find yourself tweaking those recipes to suit your particular predilections. Eliminating ingredient measurements forces you to pay attention to the role that every ingredient plays in your dish; and ultimately helps you troubleshoot problems in your cooking.

It is, of course, not for every beginner, but if you don’t mind a little risk and ambiguity, then it’s well worth a look, especially for the excellent and copious photography.

These two books will cover most of what you might look for in Western cooking technique. If you’re looking further afield and are curious about Asian cooking, then you could take a look at Madhur Jaffrey’s Step-By-Step Cooking. Her recipes are predominantly South and Southeast Asian in focus, with a large number of Indian, Thai and Vietnamese recipes. Common Japanese dishes such as tonkatsu and miso soup appear, but you’d have to look elsewhere for, say, okonomiyaki or sushi rice. The photos tend towards inspirational rather instructional, but they’re still frequent and useful.

The recipes themselves are clear and concise and make for great scanning. They range from quick dishes that can be prepared in half an hour to longer preparations that require some advance planning. I’ve owned this book for three years, and I still haven’t attempted her biryani recipe, which involves a dozen spices, three different infused liquids and a sequence of steps that looks like it should be loaded into Microsoft Project. On the other hand, I make her shrimp with asparagus dish on a near monthly frequency, and it’s an excellent template for any stir-fry.

The book is a little light on background knowledge. You get a handy step-by-step photo guide towards rolling and frying spring rolls but subjects like building a proper curry and what might separate, say, a Thai and Indian style curry gets pretty short shift. Still, as a survey of South East Asian cuisine, Step-By-Step Cooking is a decent introduction. The illustrated guides help de-mystify tasks like making your own curry paste or deep-frying tempura, and there are helpful ingredient glossaries to assist you with shopping.

In general, you’ll notice that I’ve opted for books that try to make it easier for the reader by providing a ton of visual cues and examples. Those of you looking for quick, 30 minute recipes, probably won’t be well served by these works. They all have simple recipes, but it’s not their focus. The larger references, Bittman’s How To Cook Everything in particular, make more of an effort to provide you with fast, streamlined recipes and would be a better source if you’re continuously strapped for time. These books ease you into the basics, but can ramp up in giving you more complex fare; and so you’ll still find them useful even after you’ve mastered their basic lessons.

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.