Don’t know what to get your favourite cook for Christmas? Another cookbook never goes amiss because a cook never has too many books.
We all use the internet for recipes, techniques and inspiration for our cooking and our baking. I’m a big fan. The internet is also amazing for finding communities of bakers and cooks interested in your specialist subject.
There are times though that only a book will do. Even for cooking. Perhaps especially for cooking and baking. Bookmarks, browsing, page flipping, looking at pictures. And actually using them for cooking. With care, a beginner could use most of these cookbooks. Except for the Guy Savoy cookbook and the Tartine book – approach those with caution as I explain below.
No links here but all are easily found on your favourite book buying platform.
Le Cordon Bleu Complete Cooking Techniques
An amazing book that ups your game. If you have MasterChef envy or just you want to know how to skim the fat from your meat stock without letting it cool – this is the book for you. Full of tricks of the trade – it will show you an easy way to make your egg whites stronger (thus your souffle will never fall). It starts with a great section on equipment for your kitchen – with illustrations. And finishes with a glossary of terms from ‘al dente’ to ‘zest’. I get this book out when I feel like I’m getting the taste right but my presentation or finish needs help.
The Taste of Country Cooking
Edna Lewis, the genius behind this book, was the descendant of freed slaves and grew up in Freetown, Virginia. She moved to New York City as a young woman and became a famous chef. Her book is a hymn to country cooking, an inspiration to eat in season, to make your own food and to support local producers and farmers.
The book is arranged in seasonal menus with a good index at the back to find recipes. It starts with ‘ An Early Spring Dinner After Sheep Shearing’ (sheep shearing is not required) and ends with ‘A Dinner of Chicken and Dumplings and Warm Gingerbread’. I take this book down off the shelf to inspire me when I’m bored with my current cooking routine.
The New Basics Cookbook from the Silver Palate.
The Silver Palate claims to be the first gourmet take out food store in Manhattan. Not sure if that’s true but it appeared in the early 80s, followed by a couple of cookbooks and finally this one. I have them all and use them regularly. The pages are falling out of this one – I have thought about making it a looseleaf book but it’s just too much work to hole punch all the pages. It’s not a comprehensive cookbook but it’s full of fun and interesting recipes and fun twists on classics. Published long before gluten free, lactose intolerant and vegans became things – it’s a book for feasting not calorie counting. Joyful cooking.
Essentials of Italian Cooking
The Slow Food movement was founded by an Italian who was profoundly distressed by the slow disappearance of Italian regional cuisine (in Italy) and the attempt to open an McDonalds near the Spanish Steps in Rome. If Italian cuisine was being homogenised across Italy you can imagine what happened to Italian cuisine elsewhere in the world.
Marcella Hazan was a one woman rescue party for Italian food. Early in our relationship the Davinator said to me ‘I don’t like Italian food’. I said, ‘that’s fine’ and proceeded to start feeding him Marcella’s classic dishes. Without telling him they were Italian.
The book is fun reading if only for Marcella’s food snobbery as a counterbalance to my childhood spent eating SpaghettiOs. Her disdain for mass produced pasta, heavy handed use of garlic and Kraft grated parmesan (remember the bright green container?) is entertaining even if I disregard some of her absolute prohibitions. I also think (at least in the UK) it’s easier to get quality ingredients than when she wrote her books.
The book is a celebration of the regional cuisine of Italy; any complicated technique is well explained and illustrated. There is a fab section on basics that covers not only sauces and ingredients but stocks and cooking techniques for things as diverse as beans and anchovies. From crostini to zuppa including a fabulous section on Italian desserts – dive right in.
Guy Savoy – Simple French Recipes for the Home Cook
Guy Savoy is a famous French chef with a Michelin 3 star restaurant in Paris, another in Las Vegas and a chain of bistros. Guy’s in Paris is my favourite restaurant in the world. But the big money in cooking is not in the ultra fancy restaurants but in the cooking shows, the cookbooks and the chain of more reasonably priced restaurants. This book was one of Guy’s efforts expand his footprint.
This cookbook is not for the faint hearted. I call it ‘3 lies for the price of 1’. It’s not simple, it’s not really for ‘home cooks’ and I’m not sure it has recipes. It has lists of ingredients and an overview of cooking methods; but they make leaps of process that are a serious challenge to any but an expert cook. It took me 3 attempts to achieve the macaroni and cheese recipe. I have had to revert to other reference materials (see Cordon Bleu above and Julia Child below) to master recipes.
But once I had worked out the mac & cheese – it is absolutely amazing. As are the other recipes in the book. Worth the effort of practice for the impact. Take a deep breath and plunge in.
Artisan Sourdough Made Simple
This has slowly become my go to book for sourdough recipes. It makes a lot of sense and the recipes work. I found a sourdough sandwich bread recipe that the Davinator loves and an amazing brioche recipe. It’s a contest to see if I can make brioche rolls faster than the Davinator can eat them.
If you’re dipping your toes into sourdough – this is your book.
Tartine Bread
The Tartine mob may deserve credit for the artisan bread craze in San Francisco. The book describes their amazing journey and has lots of detailed descriptions of how to make sourdough bread. It’s beautifully written and has good photographs but it reminds of that joke about asking for directions in Ireland. A couple is lost. They stop and ask a farmer for directions to Ballymaloe. The farmer thinks for a few minutes, asks a couple of clarifying questions and says ‘Well, if I was trying to get to Ballymaloe, I wouldn’t be starting here’.
If you’re starting out as a sourdough baker – I wouldn’t start with Tartine. I do use it and it looks good on my shelf. But recommended not for beginners.
King Arthur Flour Whole Grain Baking
I use this book more than any other baking book I own, including the sourdough ones. The King Arthur team set out to making whole grain baked goods taste good. And they succeeded. There may be recipes in this book that don’t suit your taste buds (I realised I don’t like things made with cornmeal) but all the recipes work and they taste good. It’s an American book and they use both quantity and imperial weight (pounds and ounces). My sister Rachael bought this for me some years ago – it’s a perennial favourite and produces crowd pleasing bread, cookies, muffins and damn fine brownies.
The Art of French Cooking (Volume One) Julia Child
Julia Child changed cooking in America. There’s a lovely movie ‘Julie & Julia’ about a woman who decides to cook all 524 recipes in the The Art of French Cooking in a year and blogs about them that covers Julia’s story. We should all be so fortunate with our cooking blogs. This cookbook made me a much better cook. It’s hard to describe how in a paragraph.
Julia Child had an abundance of common sense about food and conveys difficult concepts in simple language. ‘Don’t crowd the mushrooms’ is a classic. If you are sautéing mushrooms and you put too many in the pan, you steam them you don’t brown them. So, if you want lovely golden brown mushrooms – DON’T CROWD THE MUSHROOMS. This is Julia.
If Julia says ‘do not let the cream come to a boil or it will separate and your potato dauphinoise will suffer’ you know it to be true. You follow her instructions and you produce food fit for the gods.
Delia Smith’s Christmas
This book was a gift and when I was perusing the bookshelf prior to writing this blog I was surprised by how much I use it doing the winter, not just at Christmas. Perhaps Christmas food is the ultimate comfort food for cold weather. If your weapon of choice at Christmas is turkey, goose, beef, ham or vegetarian – there is a recipe for you here. I swear by her roast beef instructions, the red cabbage recipe and the parmesan parsnips. There is also a great planning section with a countdown. Has saved me when I was too tired to do my own planning – I relied on Delia.
On Food and Cooking: The Science and Lore of the Kitchen
Cooking is a chemistry experiment – combining ingredients, processes, heat and cooling to change raw material into food. This book will explain (often in excruciating detail) what went wrong or right in the kitchen and why.
Chefs say ‘beat the egg whites in a copper bowl’. Science & Lore tells you why this is a good idea. (It does work better). I was trying to make white chocolate fudge (it’s a good story worthy of its own blog). First time – would not harden. Second time – hardened in the pan. Then I checked Science & Lore – and the third time I stirred the damned molten white chocolate mixture for twenty minutes (by hand) with the bowl sitting in a bigger bowl of ice water. And the fudge was perfect. Of course, I found the twenty minutes of stirring so annoying I never made the fudge again.
The perfect book for cooking nerds.
Thank you for reading the blog. And best wishes for a Merry Christmas and a healthy prosperous 2020 to all.