6 of the year’s most tasteful titles
You can tell the approach of fall when football floods the airwaves, the kids go back to school — and the cookbooks start hitting the shelves, thick volumes penned by high-profile chefs and filled with prettily photographed, highly cravable dishes. This year’s crop is impressive, with first books from Sean Sherman on Native American cuisine and wd~50’s Wylie Dufresne, new books from Andy Ricker on the drinking food of Thailand and David Tanis on vegetables, and the first all-dessert cookbook from Yotam Ottolenghi — as well as an all-cookie book from the folks at America’s Test Kitchen. Here are six of this year’s best, out now or coming in the next few weeks. And there are more on the way, including highly anticipated bread books due in November from Massimo Bottura and Nathan Myhrvold. Because although the world may be uncertain, our love for baked goods is not.
“Sweet” Yotam Ottolenghi and Helen Goh (Ten Speed Press, $35)
This is the fifth cookbook by the London-based Israeli chef, and the first one devoted solely to desserts. Written with Goh, a pastry chef and longtime Ottolenghi collaborator and product developer, and photographed by Peden + Munk, the book has more than 120 recipes for cakes, cookies, tarts, pies and, yes, meringues. The book begins with a “sugar manifesto” and Ottolenghi’s note that his first professional restaurant job was whisking egg whites for vanilla soufflés. Thus, his justly lauded meringues, which have shown up in a few other of his cookbooks. The recipes are accessible and charming, as you’d expect from the guy who’s pretty much single-handedly responsible for the current renaissance of Middle Eastern cooking (with apologies to Claudia Roden). So there’s “take-home chocolate cake” and “frozen espresso parfait for a crowd,” as well as pages of desserts flavored from along the Ottolenghi spice route — rosewater, pistachio, saffron, pomegranate, lime — plus a few fun gems, such as “festive fruitcake.” Because, yes, Ottolenghi can even get us to bake fruitcake.
“Pok Pok the Drinking Food of Thailand” by Andy Ricker with JJ Goode (Ten Speed Press, $35)
This is the follow-up to Ricker’s first Pok Pok cookbook, a terrific book that chronicled the food of his Portland, Ore.-based Thai restaurants. Consider this the late-night companion, a cookbook devoted to the bar food and booze-friendly snacks that Ricker fell in love with over decades of trips to northern Thailand. Thus, there are recipes for all the spicy, salty, sour things that accompany the bottles of lao
khao, or rice whiskey, beer and other tipples, as well as asides on the making of many of those drinks. The book, it must be said, is also fun for those who don’t drink, as it includes recipes for some seriously heady stuff: aep samoeng muu (pig’s brains grilled in banana leaf ), som tam thawt (fried papaya salad), tom
leuat muu (pork soup with blood and offal) and sii khrong muu tai naam (pork ribs cooked underwater), just to name a few. Ricker’s prose, written with Goode, is chatty and engaging, and the photos, by Austin Bush, will pretty quickly get you looking up flights to Chiang Mai.
“The Sioux Chef ’s Indigenous Kitchen” Sean Sherman with Beth Dooley (University of Minnesota Press, $34.95)
The chef ’s first book is a kind of manifesto as well as a cookbook. Sherman, a South Dakota-born member of the Oglala Lakota tribe, has translated his years of professional experience, cooking in restaurants in Minnesota, South Dakota and Montana, and catering and teaching, into a compelling book about indigenous cooking. These are recipes using the techniques and ingredients of the Dakota, Lakota and Ojibwe tribes, based on heirloom fruits and vegetables, wild and foraged ingredients — which is to say, bison tartare and wild rice cakes rather than fry bread. Sherman, who wrote the book with Dooley, fills the pages with interesting and helpful notes and asides — a tutorial on beans, “the backbone of Native cuisine”; instructions on how to cook rabbit; a list of indigenous stocks; sourcing information for Native suppliers; seasonal feast menus. This is a pretty good time for Native cuisine to get attention, as Sherman himself points out in his introduction: “It’s hyperlocal, ultraseasonal, uberhealthy,” as well as gluten- and dairyfree. Maybe with Sherman’s excellent book, which includes recipes for things like duck egg aioli, wild rice sorbet and Native granola bars, it will finally start getting its due.
“David Tanis Market Cooking: Recipes and Revelations, Ingredient by Ingredient” David Tanis (Artisan, $40)
Tanis has long been one of the best voices on modern American cooking, a gifted chef — 25 years at Chez Panisse — and equally gifted writer. His new book is a lovely one, with 200 recipes embedded in almost 500 pages, all geared toward today’s vegetable-driven cuisine. The term “market cooking,” as Tanis points out in his introduction, is a French one, which means what you’d expect: cooking based on what the cook finds at the market that day. This was the ethos behind the famous Berkeley restaurant where Tanis cooked for much of his career, and also behind his New York Times cooking column. So we have a book divided by ingredients and devoted to their appreciation. Strewn throughout are notes on the qualities of all those vegetables, considerations of spices, techniques, pantry essentials and a meditation on seasoning. Tanis’ food is deeply flavorful, honest, creative and always, always fun to cook.
“The Perfect Cookie: Your Ultimate Guide to Foolproof Cookies, Brownies & Bars” America’s Test Kitchen (America’s Test Kitchen, $35)
Just in time for the fall baking season, the folks at America’s Test Kitchen have come out with their first all cookie cookbook. Hooray. So we have a hefty volume of well over 400 pages, filled with 250 recipes that, it is safe to say, have been quite thoroughly tested. There are chapters devoted to drop cookies, bar cookies, sandwich cookies, gluten-free cookies and, yes, Christmas cookies. Not only are there plenty of lovely color photographs to help you out and make you hungrier than you already were but there are also how-to guides, shaping instructions, tutorials on
candymaking and making puff pastry dough, tempering chocolate and more. How to form perfect pretzel sables? Yep. How to cleanly cut bar cookies? Of course. What pans to use when? Absolutely. All this and a recipe for a giant chocolate chip cookie you cook in a skillet.
“wd~50: The Cookbook” Wylie Dufresne and Peter Meehan (Ecco, $75)
Dufresne’s New York City restaurant wd~50 closed in 2014, after a pretty spectacular Michelin-starred 11-year run. Now Dufresne, with former Lucky Peach writer and editor Meehan, has written a book about the place that is both cookbook and homage. It’s an extremely compelling read, whether you were a regular or never had the chance to cross the restaurant’s threshold — stocked with artsy photography by Eric Medsker, restaurant anecdotes, interesting asides (“more about meat glue”; “how the slow-poached egg came to Clinton Street”) and many, many recipes. Yes, there’s Dufresne’s fried mayonnaise, also aerated foie gras puffs; poached eggs with edible shells; and miso soup with instant tofu noodles. Even if you’re not well-versed in molecular gastronomy, there will likely be recipes to suit your skill level, like the lavash that begins the book and that began all the meals at the restaurant. And the story of the place — jammed into an old bodega on the Lower East Side until developers eventually tore the building down — reads like an edible elegy. Maybe chefs should write books about their restaurants only after they’ve closed.