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Neat Observations
Easily the most bizarre book in the gastronomy world I’ve ever read. I’m of two minds (at least) about Observations from the Kitchen by Richard Neat. Let’s start with the style. It’s written in a weird third-person with all the personae titled rather than named, “The Cook”, “The Banker”, etc. It’s strange enough when someone writes about themselves in the third person, but third person abstract is a step way beyond. The book is written with the intermingled threads of a chess game, a series of recipe procedures, and personal interactions. The chess game is meant to be, according to the author, a metaphor for the way things unfold in the kitchen. Unfortunately, the metaphor is lost in translation – here and there it seems to apply to the rest of the narrative, but mostly, not. One reviewer of the book assumed that he himself was lost because of not being a chess player. No, I play chess and the narrative that’s lost.
The text is desperately in need of a good old-fashioned proofread. Spelling, grammar, and punctuation mistakes abound. Homonym interchanges take place with maddening regularity, seemingly several times in each chapter, as the author doesn’t seem to either have understood, or, perhaps, just let some sort of auto-correct feature take place, between pairs like break and brake, your and you’re, bare and bear, etc.
The book is, apparently, intended as an odd auto-biography, tracing the author’s/chef’s journey through his career in various locales and kitchens. There’s no question he’s a brilliant and well-known chef. I’ve used some of his recipe elements myself and they’re without peer (not pier). The food and the recipe procedurals are without a doubt the highlight of the book. And there’s no question he illustrates how much effort and thought go into his dishes.
“The Cook”, perhaps self-aware, or perhaps oblivious, presents himself proudly as an overbearing, histrionic and petulant tyrant and points to this as “the only” recipe for a successful restaurant venture and the training of cooks. I certainly don’t agree… the best restaurants I’ve worked in have never been those with “difficult” chefs.
Worth a read for the food, and perhaps just a glimpse at that infamous line between genius and madness.
Moderately interesting, not quite as “outre” as the excessively long title Anything That Moves: Renegade Chefs, Fearless Eaters, and the Making of a New American Food Culture by Dana Goodgyear might lead one to believe. The author is a bit too infatuated with restaurant critic Jonathan Gold, who makes anywhere from a cameo to a full blown participant in almost every chapter. The book is very Los Angeles-centric – pretty much nothing happens unless it’s there, as if that city is the epicenter of the cutting edge food movement – nothing against L.A., but, really, it’s not. Of course I found the chapter about underground restaurants intriguing until discovering that it’s basically 100% dedicated to Wolvesden, again, nothing against them, but they weren’t the first, they didn’t invent the concept, nor did the concept start in Los Angeles, not by a long stretch.
The book is a bit too self-centered – not in a pretentious sense, and I understand that she’s writing from her personal experiences – but she seems a bit too sure that she’s the one that has discovered, for the first time in history, all the things that she’s writing about, even while acknowledging that she heard about each and every thing she experiences from someone else. In the end it comes across as a series of personal journal entries rather than a well thought out book. That doesn’t take away from the overall subject interest, which is what held my attention through the book.
Chef Selfies
Working my way through my reading “pile” (what do we call it these days when it’s electronic?) with a bunch of chef-authored tomes. First up, To the Bone from Paul Liebrandt. I’ve met Paul numerous times though don’t know him well at all. When I worked at AZ he used to come hang out in the kitchen with Patricia Yeo – he was sort of between restaurants and somehow or other connected in to our kitchen and, like any other smart chef spent his downtime learning new stuff. I’ve only had his food once, an evening out with Patricia and our restaurant GM at Atlas during his short tenure there. The food was interesting, if perhaps a little overwrought and precious – it seemed like someone trying way too hard to impress.
Reading the book gives a bit of insight into that, much of his career seems to be just along that vein, trying hard to impress. I’m not sure that I came away with any deep understanding of how he came to be that way, his writing style is fairly reserved and matter of fact (which is kind of how I find him), but certainly there are glimpses from his upbringing of where that might have come from. The book is interesting from the point of view of someone in the field, I wonder if it would be so for someone not. Much of it almost reads like an expanded CV – “I worked here, these were my responsibilities” – then fleshed out by details of what that looked like. There’s very little human interaction in the book, in the sense of we learn little about any of his coworkers or any time he spent with them. Even the various chefs he’s worked for provide little more than background color to the narrative – you could almost come away from the book thinking that he’s forged through his life and career completely solo, with little to no assistance from anyone else, and other people just pop in and out at random, with minimal purpose.
The book is beautifully illustrated with what can only be described as food porn, and there are, scattered here and there, some recipes, or parts of them, for some of the dishes illustrated, and some of those talked about in the text. Many, if not most, or even all, of them go beyond what most people would want to attempt at home, and while any professional cook might be able to turn their hand to them, it would be an exercise in curiosity more than anything. Liebrandt’s style is his own, informed by his impressive resume. If you like the “jewel box” style of food with intricate plating, this is right up your alley.
At the complete opposite end of the spectrum is The Apprentice: My Life in the Kitchen, by internationally renowned chef Jacques Pepin. Everything about this book and the man is probably close to the opposite side of things from the above as it could be. Now, I’ve never eaten anything that Pepin has cooked, he was out of the restaurant chef world before I ever got to New York City and on into his long career behind the scenes and as a culinary educator.
The book itself reads almost like a novel, a storybook. People are the main focus, far more than the food or his career, and he shares deeply and richly of his personal life, his family, his friends, and his coworkers. We follow him through his childhood on into his teens, we see where and why he made the decisions he did. His life is, literally, an open book. By the end of his descriptions of his time spent at each stage of his career, I felt almost as if I’d been along for the ride. Much like watching him on television, he’s open, warm and welcoming.
This book is filled with illustrations – virtually all of them simply black and white photographs of he, his family and his friends over the years. The recipes are straightforward and the sort that anyone with a kitchen and a couple of pans could jump right into and feel comfortable pulling off.
Both of the books, at least on a professional level, well worth reading. Liebrandt’s book is a night out at the hottest trendy spot in town, Pepin’s is a weekend spent with friends at home. It just depends on what you’re in the mood for.
More, Yo
Almost two years ago I reviewed the book Plenty by chef and author Yotam Ottolenghi, and it’s still one of my favorite “go to” books for creative and interesting vegetarian recipes. At the time he’d just released two other cookbooks but neither was yet available in ebook form. The most interesting of the two that struck me was Jerusalem: A Coobook, and I put in a pre-order for it for when the e-version became available. At some point it did, auto-downloaded itself onto my tablet, and there it sat, forgotten in the electronic reading “pile” that tends to back up on my disk. I finally got around to it a few weeks ago and wended my way through it.
It’s as well written as the previous book, the subject material is far different. He and his co-author/chef Sami Tamimi explore the classic dishes of the interwoven cultures of the city of Jerusalem, be they Jewish, Muslim or Christian, Israeli or Arab, of Middle Eastern or Eastern European origin. There’s a particular focus on the dishes that the two of them, one Israeli, one Palestinian, have from their formative years. And, it’s a great read. In many ways it’s more of a storybook than it is a cookbook, despite an ample number of recipes. It would be an interesting one to cook one’s way through, but personally I’d be more likely to cook my way through Plenty. Still, it’s one to add to my small collection of Middle Eastern cookbooks, and that adds some depth to a particular subset of those cuisines.
I gave a shot at two of the recipes, modified slightly for the ingredients that we have available to us – for the most part I was able to find everything, and we had a delightful dinner of roasted squash and onions with a tahini dressing, and a lovely salad of chickpeas, tomatoes, and cucumbers in a garlickly yogurt. I’d happily eat either again, Henry wasn’t overly thrilled with the squash dish, finding the tahini dressing a bit on the bitter side for his tastes, which is more a matter of adjusting the amount of tahini in the dish, something that the authors bring up a couple of times in the book.
Do I recommend the book? Absolutely, if you have an interest in exploring a facet of Middle Eastern cuisine. And, if not, but you’re a fan of great vegetable dishes, head back to that previous review and pick up a copy of the other book.
Growing Up Russian
Great book by an author who I already liked – Anya Von Bremzen’s Please to the Table is a fantastic resource for the various cuisines of the former Soviet Union. I was surprised that there was little cooking in this new volume, Mastering the Art of Soviet Cooking. While there’s a fair amount about food, much of it is about politics and growing up, and just life in general, and there aren’t any recipes or even hints at them while reading – which I suppose eminently fits the subtitle, A Memoir of Food and Longing. Only upon reaching the end of the prose, about 90-some percent of the way through the book, did I discover that all the recipes are provided at the back, more or less as a final chapter – I think I’d have liked to know that upfront. Still, her story more than makes up for that and I definitely recommend the book.
Red Border Tales
I get a lot of requests from PR folk to review or promote products, books, etc., and generally, unless they’re directly related to the blog, I ignore them. Plus, I’ve found that an amazing number of them want me to do so without ever having tried the product or read the book. Now and again they’ll basically castigate me for “not living somewhere convenient for us to send it to you”. Well then, why contact me in the first place? So when I get an email asking me to promote Time Inc.’s new book Inside the Red Border, in this case because apparently at some point in the book chef Mario Batali makes an appearance and that made it relevant to me and my readers, I sighed my usual sigh and sent back my usual note saying I don’t do promotions, but I’d be happy to review the book if they wanted to send me a copy. I expected not to hear from them again, but, in a surprise move, they gave me a link to an electronic version – not downloadable, but viewable online.
And that’s a shame, because having read through the book, I’d love to download it and own a copy and may end up doing so – the ebook versions are inexpensive (Kindle, Nook, and iBook). I’ll be honest, the vague relation to Mario does nothing for me – it’s a mini-graphic of a cover that never ran that’s included on a page of multiple covers that never ran, with only a short sentence describing it. But, anyone who reads my blog regularly knows I’m a bit of a history buff, and while most of my mentions of history in the blog tend to be focused on Argentina, simply because it relates to the rest of the content, I avidly read history narratives from all over the globe.
The particularly cool thing about this book is it’s a great one for both folk who really want to read some history – admittedly in small bites – but it’s equally as good for folk who just want to look at the pictures. Essentially, it’s an abbreviated look at modern history, i.e., for the period for which Time Magazine has been being published (since 1923), through a combination of selected covers and original text to accompany them. For those who are into the minutiae, they also reveal who authored the cover commentary (if you read Time, there’s always a paragraph or two inside about what the cover picture is all about, but it’s never been bylined in the magazine, and includes some quite well known authors). The book is divided into various sections, that cover topics like U.S. Presidents, World War II, Revolutionaries, Athletes, Artists, Scientists, Technology, Trends, etc., each section beginning with one iconic cover with a longer introduction to the topic, and then followed by pages of smaller cover reproductions with their original captions and an additional short blurb.
For me, leafing through the pages brought back many memories, both good and bad – having lived through 55 of Time’s 90 years of history. And hey, I even found a cover of Eva Peron, so there can be some relevance to the blog!
Although I’d recommend a hardcover copy ($21.38), simply because it’s the sort of book to put out on display, plus page through now and again, these days, some of us just settle for the electronic version ($9.99). Here are links to both, and I do, obviously, recommend the book!
Mixed Roots in Argentina
On Fermentation and Carrot Pudding
I’ve gotten away from posting about various food books that I’ve read, and someone asked me this week if there was anything I’d read recently in the genre that I recommended. So, I thought, let me get back to that – I’ve been reviewing what I read over on Goodreads (yet one more social network to belong to, for book lovers) – so some of this will be copied from my thoughts there.
The current darling of the die-hard foodie set is Sandor Ellix Katz and his books on fermentation. This one came to my attention first, if I recall correctly through Aki and Alex over at Ideas in Food as a recommended book, but I could be wrong about that. Here’s what I had to say over on Goodreads: “Easily the most comprehensive introduction to the world of home fermentation (primarily of vegetables and fruits, but not limited to those) that I’ve seen. Well written, interesting, and very smartly lays out the procedures rather than specific recipes (which I believe can be found in his previous book, Wild Fermentation, next on my reading list), so you can adapt the procedures to what you have around or want to work with.”
It led me to play around with a fermented Brussels Sprout idea that resulted in these delicious little things – I posted briefly about it, there was more in the followup comments after someone asked me for the recipe:
The Brussels Sprout ferment was pretty basic, and I plan to play with it a bit, but:
1 kg brussels sprouts, cored and quartered
1 rocoto chili, slivered
1 red onion, sliced thin
1/3 c coarse kosher salt
1 Tb yellow and 1 Tb black mustard seeds
Water to just barely coverI left it for a week in a warm spot in the kitchen, covered, and just opened it once a day to make sure any buildup of pressure was released – though I don’t think in the end it was likely necessary. Then I put it in the refrigerator for another week before using them – fermentation continues, but slower.
As a first change, I think on the next run through I’m going to separate the sprouts into their leaves (core them and then pull them apart) – I’ve been finding that some of the middle layers of leaves haven’t fermented as thoroughly and are a little bit to crunchy still. I think I’d also toast the mustard seeds on the next go-round to help bring out their essential oils a little more, the mustard was just a bare hint in the background and I was hoping it would be more prominent.
And if you missed it, here’s how I used it in last week’s dinners. More ferments to come….
I truly don’t remember how this one came to my attention. I’m sure it was in some article I was reading about the history of American cooking that probably mentioned it, and I found this on Gutenberg as a free download in various formats – rather than paying Amazon $5 for the download. I mean, the book was written in 1760, I don’t think the author is going to miss out on residuals. My thoughts on Goodreads: “Just an interesting glimpse into the world of cooking in the U.S. a bit over 200 years ago. Generally acknowledged as America’s first published cookbook, it’s a guide for unmarried women who find themselves needing to take work as domestic help in the homes of the wealthy and covers how to select meats and produce and how to prepare them properly for the tastes of the day.”
I don’t know why, but a recipe for Carrot Pudding caught my eye. It’s a semisweet sort of pudding, and I was thinking it might make an interesting side dish. It’s a little too sweet and pumpkin-pie filling-ish for that, but I’m going to play with the general recipe and see what I can come up with as a savory version. In the meantime, a little step-by-step, because it really was delicious!
Here’s the recipe the way the book gives it: “A coffee cup full of boiled and strained carrots, 5 eggs, 2 ounces sugar and butter each, cinnamon and rose water to your taste, baked in a deep dish without paste.”
Note there’s not a whole lot of info when it comes to how to do it – the assumption in older cookbooks like this, I’ve found, is that you know how to cook, so recipes are often little more than lists of ingredients with a note or two.
Peeled, sliced and boiled the carrots, drained them.
I took “strained” to mean pureed, otherwise it would be a very odd pudding. I basically just threw everything in the food processor together (melting the butter first) – I ended up using a teaspoon each of the cinnamon and rose water.
Although it doesn’t say to, I lightly buttered the baking dish. The “without paste”, just based on reading other recipes in the book, I take to mean, “without a top crust”, since the dough used for topping pies in various parts of the book is referred to as a paste.
No details are given on the baking process, one can assume that there were not digital temperature controlled ovens at the time. I decided to go with the way I’d normally bake a cheesecake – pop it in the oven at 180C/350F for 10 minutes, then turn down the heat to 140C/285F for roughly 30 minutes more, until the pudding had firmed up and gotten lightly golden on top.
As I said, it comes out in many ways like a pumpkin pie filling, a little less spice, and a little less sweet. The rosewater gives a really light floral note in the background that you probably wouldn’t pick up on what it is, but that adds some interest to the flavor profile.
Next version, making it more savory – probably cut the sugar in half, add a little salt and some other spices, and see how it comes out.
