What follows are book profiles, too short to be reviews but hopefully informative enough to tilt your interest one way or the other.

The book, gorgeously photographed, is filled with quite simple recipes for many light dishes and sides.  Dressings, tapenades, dips, sauces, glazes, salads --all infused with the spices of Morocco, such as his Moroccan Glazed Carrot Salad.  Savory dishes feature lamb, chicken and fish.  How about his Cilantro Chicken with Crispy Cumin Potato Skins?  The grain of choice, of course, is couscous prepared by M'Souli in the same manner as I was taught in school (sans couscoussier) by our French-Algerian master chef.  We love couscous and look forward to preparing it with Hassan's couscous recipes for salad, lamb, chicken, seafood and even dessert. The book has a nice functional introduction on spices and ingredients endemic to Moroccan cooking.  The informed reader can make the case that Paula Wolfert's books are more authoritative, but M'Souli's Moroccan Modern is more fun, more approachable and a visual delight.  The Little Woman already has marked five recipes as "must trys."  This is a very inviting  tour of Moroccan cuisine.  It's hard to put down. 

Nonetheless, I poked about on Amazon.com, found the book and its table of contents.  I discovered that this guy not only shares my view that canned crab meat is OK, he even has a recipe entitled "Costco Quickie."  He also likes to use Panko, tomatillos and lots of celantro.  My kind of cook!  So why not help him out and buy his book? 

Glad I did.  Douglas's book plan was to call every chef he knew and ask each for their signature crab cake recipe.  As a result, the book covers the subject thoroughly from American classics to Asian and European variations;  from crab cakes for dinner to breakfast to brunch;  from hot to cold with, of course, crab cake sandwiches. Included are eighteen sauces and salsas.  A lot of good ideas in this book.  The recipes read well and the photos are great. 

We had a memorable long weekend with friends in Knoxville, Tennessee awhile back and, since they served a delicious braised veal dish, we thought this book might give them more ideas and inspirations.

Braising is cooking with wet heat, low and slow.  Food products are placed in a heavy pot with a small amount of liquid, covered tightly and then cooked at low temperature for a long time. The method is "uncomplicated" and produces marvelous commingled flavors while tenderizing everything in the pot. 

Stevens devotes the first 32 pages of this book to the braising process and it's place in the culinary world, which makes All About Braising a good choice for the aspiring home cook wondering what to do with the huge Dutch oven Aunt Lucille gave them for a wedding present.  There are creative veggie dishes, rolled and stuffed dishes  and some innovative beef, veal and chicken dishes along with the more traditional preparations of pork and lamb. There are also a few braised fish recipes. "OK, so you can braise fish, but why?"  Well, there is a tendency of single subject cookbook writers  to stretch the limits. 

You all have a Dutch oven and some readers have the Le Creuset Tagine.  My real purpose in buying this book was to see if Stevens had recipes that could be modified for the tagine, which is really a Dutch oven for two.  Most all of the veggie dishes can be cut down to fit the tagine, as well as the poultry recipes calling for thighs, legs and breasts.  The stuffed beef and veal recipes should work well in the tagine, too.   In all, the book includes 150 recipes within 479 pages of text.  It reads well and the photos are good.  Before mailing it off to Knoxville, I copied seven recipes of interest and best of show, viz., Braised Green Cabbage, Quick Lemony Chicken with Prunes & Green Olives, Goan Chicken, Chicken and Pork Adobado, Braised Duck Legs, Caribbean Pork Shoulder and Cabbage Rolls with Pork and Sauerkraut. 

Braising is really basic and can put a lot of food on the table with little fuss.  It's a must learn and here's how.
 

Harold McGee’s On Food and Cooking, the Science and Lore of the Kitchen

Harold McGee’s On Food and Cooking, the Science and Lore of the Kitchen.  2005 winner of both the IACP and The James Beard Foundation "Reference Cookbook "of the Year Awards.  It's a nice coincidence that the 20th year revision of this classic comes out about the same time as The Oxford Encyclopedia of Food and Drink in America, profiled below.  While the Oxford chronicles food and drink on the table and how it got there, McGee lifts the lid off the pot, pokes and probes and tells us where foods come from (overlapping a bit with Oxford's historical approach), what they are made of, and how they respond to cooking processes. 

If you are with a crowd of foodies and see a few roll their eyes in hopeless despair when some TV chef again tells an audience that he is now “searing in the flavors” in a hot skillet, you'll know that they have read McGee and have been initiated into the mysteries of “Maillard Reactions” and how, when and why non-sugar foods brown and form a crust. 

This science stuff can get heavy (the book even has a chemistry primer as an appendix), but McGee has made it all quite readable, at least for the determined.  I bought the original when in school and read it through.  Since then, I have used it for reference both as a cook, as a food writer, and as the standard to judge other books with a science perspective—such as How to Read a French Fry and What Einstein Told His Cook, both previously profiled.

If the science side of food is of interest to you, get a copy of McGee’s revised masterpiece.  His articles are short, with lots of paragraph headers, which makes it all quite digestible.

Projects of this type and breadth invite criticism not only about what's in and what's not but also the weight given to entries. For example, James Beard and Julia Childs each get a column and a half, but so does Rick Bayless--a young and trendy chef of Mexican cuisine.  The late Jean Louis Paladin (arguably the most creative cook of our time) gets nary a mention.  French-, Mexican- and Italian-American foods are each summed up in 6 to 8 informative pages, while Native American Foods goes on and on, from acorns and ashes to insects and indian pudding, for 42 pages--the longest article in the set. 

This is a well researched effort by a long list of established foodie academics and writers. It is a substantive contribution to the culinary literature. As a bonus, Volume Two concludes with bibliographies of food and drink, lists of food periodicals,  food-related Web sites, museums and organizations and a great list of food festivals in the United States. 

At a street price of about $145, this set is expensive. You might lobby your library board to purchase it as a worthy aid to young scholars struggling through their school projects and for the curious in need of authoritative answers to many food and drink questions.   Nice gift too. Otherwise I would not rush out and buy this set unless you are a culinary professional of some sort, or an aspiring Native American cook. 

Patrick O'Connell's Refined American Cuisine is another "great chef/fine restaurant" cookbook.  O'Connell is a local hero as chef and half-owner of The Inn at Little Washington, a restaurant that has garnered just about every top award in the industry.  As expected of type, it's a beautiful book. What's different is that the recipes are quite approachable, in contrast to, say, Keller's The French Laundry Cookbook. 

For example, on Christmas day, we had six over for a prime standing rib of beef, au jus, with a side of sour cream laced with horseradish.  Along with sautéed green beans with roasted red pepper strips, The Little Woman wanted a potato gratin dish. That was fine with me but not if prepared with garlic, since garlic clashes with horseradish.  To the rescue came O'Connell's Potato Gratin with Parsnips and Carrots (page 168).  This a simple dish and the instructions were straight forward.  It called for heavy cream infused with a little freshly ground nutmeg, which worked fine.  Not able to leave well enough alone, I added a topping of freshly grated Parmagiano Reggiano.  The recipe is representative of others in this book:  good American food, refined by a pro and well presented.

I am very confident that you will find the recipes in Refined American Cuisine to be "bomb proof,"  that is thoroughly tested and clearly described.  Here's why:  In the acknowledgments, O"Connell has this to say:  "The manuscript might still be unfinished if it weren't for Bonnie Moore, my former sous chef and current projects manager, who kept the book on track while a thousand other things were happening . . ." 

After cooking at The Inn at Little Washington, Bonnie was an instructor chef at La Academie de Cuisine, when I was there as a student.  She then moved on to be executive chef and food director at Foodfit.com, where I worked as her extern for six months.  I have great professional regard for  Bonnie Moore-- a chef who's knowledgeable, thorough and not given to compromise. 

She vetted this book and it shows.

If we can leave aside the yellow type headers, which are unreadable under all but optimum lighting, this is an extraordinary cookbook.  It is the new magnum opus of Gourmet magazine. With over 1000 recipes, I was not surprised to find one for nearly each of my recipes on this Web site.  It even has a couple of tagine recipes. 

Last Saturday night, we had a dinner for eight.  We decided to do Cioppino and had all but filled out our event planner, when The Little Woman saw a write-up on paella in the current Williams-Sonoma catalog.  "You've done cioppino to death, why not do paella?"  "Why not," said I.  (Besides, I thought, maybe I can go buy a paella pan.)  The Little Woman read my thoughts again as she said, "You can use the big roaster pan in the garage instead of one of those special paella pans, which I don't even want to hear about."  So, paella was the dish for Saturday night.  Not having made it at home, I dug out recipes from four books (Peterson, McClane, Wolfert and Labensky) and bounced them against the school recipe in my Chef's Companion.  Paella, by the way, is a rice dish with meat, fish, shellfish and short grain rice seasoned with paprika and saffron--all cooked and presented in a round shallow pan. 

I then paid special attention to the Seafood Paella recipe in the The Gourmet Cookbook (page 349). The instructions read well.  Indeed, the whole article was attractive—the best, by far, of my five references.  It started out with: "True, [paella] is a somewhat daunting project, but you are making a feast," and went on to sing paella's praises. So, while composing my own ingredients list, I decided to follow Gourmet'sinstructions as a means to judge at least one of its recipes--and a complex one, at that. 

I found the instructions for this dish to be descriptive and detailed.  For example, when boiling the rice on the stovetop prior to baking it in the oven, it said to do so "until the rice appears on the surface about 6 minutes," and then added "spoon should leave a path exposing bottom of pan when pulled through center of rice." I did exactly that:  boiled the rice at high heat for 6 minutes and, lo and behold, the spoon left a nice wide trace on the bottom of my new paella pan.   It called for 5.5 cups of broth for 3 cups of short grain rice, which was right on.  However, I found the recommended baking time to be about 20% short. 

Other recipe articles appear equally attractive—all suggesting thorough research and appreciation for the dish and its ingredients. This is a great cookbook to give to grandchildren who have learned their way around the kitchen.  If you have a copy of the old red Gourmet cookbook, or boxes of the magazine in the basement, get this book and toss the old stuff.  I look forward to using this cookbook: a canonical addition to culinary  literature. 

The Little Woman treasures Jeffrey's earlier work,  An Invitation to Indian Cooking, which came out in 1973. She has prepared Jaffrey's Pork Chops With Whole Spices and Tamarind Juice many times.  That book and my Navy experience with curries got us started. 

I like Indian food, or more precisely, I like Indian spices and condiments.  How I use them to season Mediterranean, Mexican and American dishes (from lamb shanks tagine to pork barbecued ribs) probably gives my Indian readers the vapors (and there are quite a few regular readers from India--thank you very much).  But this book may reform the Geezer since we are intrigued by many of the recipes, especially the curries and veggies, and are anxious to try them as written. 

About half of the book is concerned with the history of Indian cooking, its influence worldwide and the regional origin of each dish presented.  It's all quite readable and thorough enough to serve as a valuable reference and recipe source for those who wish to explore Indian cuisine.  Jaffrey, of course, encourages the reader to make her dishes from scratch, but she does write about the Japanese curry sauce mixes that are available worldwide.  She describes these packaged mixes as curry roux and rightly states that "...they lie at the heart of the curry most Japanese eat."  Readers will remember that I use curry roux from my Curry in a Hurry.

With apologies to Jaffrey and with her book in hand and not much time to get a dinner together a couple Friday's ago, I made Shrimp Curry.  I selected the mild version of curry roux and "cherry picked" ingredients from Jaffrey's Shrimp Curry with Roasted Spices recipe. 

1. The packaged curry roux calls for 2.5 cups of water. Following Jaffrey, substitute a 14 oz can of coconut milk for a like quantity of water and mix all well. 
2. Sauté about 20 large shrimp, in peanut or grapeseed oil, in a shallow pan and set them aside underdone. 
3. In a medium sized chef's pan, sauté a couple sliced shallots to translucent and then toss in a stalk of fresh lemon grass ( I used 1 teaspoon of dried ground lemongrass). 
4. Then add the thoroughly mixed roux, water and coconut, bring to a boil, immediately reduce the heat to simmer.

Toss in the shrimp, simmer for a minute until they are pink and serve over basmati rice.

The Slow Mediterranean Kitchen

Awhile back, Paula Wolfert gave a demonstration at a culinary professional gathering in Washington DC and I volunteered as her assistant.  Earlier, I had discovered couscous at L' Acadamie and bought her Couscous and Other Good Food from Morocco, which she wrote in 1973.  It's a classic.  Her latest book is up for top international cookbook awards at both Beard and the IACP and for good reason.  Wolfert gathers together a wonderful array of authentic savory dishes prepared in heavy pots, tagines and on low temperature fires in homes and restaurants along the littoral of the Mediterranean.  Lots of chicken and lamb dishes here.  I marked a half a dozen of them (and five or so more throughout the book) as very attractive and worth doing because they called for ingredients that should go very well together and because they read well.  That is, the recipe procedures are consistent with good cooking practices.  I was a bit put off by Wolfert's persistent nudges to buy expensive organic products (though it's now a foodie icon and probably a requirement if you want to get published these days).

This is a very good cookbook.   Its loaded with baked, braised and roasted dishes of ancient origins, all thoughtfully tailored by the author. Wolfert has spent a lot of time "in the Med."  She knows her subject.  I bought the book. And a month later it won the International Association of Culinary Professionals (IACP) award for best International cookbook for 2003.

Sweet, sour, bitter and salt are the tastes that have specially designed receptor cells in the human mouth.  These tastes go from the palette to the brain without going through the olfactory sensors. There has been much talk of late of a fifth taste, as pure as the four.  Unfortunately, there is no consensus among food writers on what exactly this fifth taste is or how it should be described.  Since both the taste and description of sweet, sour, bitter and salt are straightforward to the point of being intuitive, I, for one, remain unconvinced that the fifth taste, be it called umami or savory, is in the same league with the canonical four.

Unfortunately, Sybil Kapoor, a respected British food writer, is as confused as many others.  Here we have a book about taste that includes umami with a lengthy description.  But the cover of her book includes lovely photos of sweet, sour, bitter, salt, chili and flavors.  Where's umami? 

It is not until page 48 that we are told that umami is so often found in salty or cured foods, such as Parma ham, that Kapoor has elected to cover umami  in the chapter on salt.  So for Kapoor, umami is but fat and salt.  Left less explained are the separate chapters on chili and flavors. I was also annoyed by the author's call for free range organic chicken as the bird of choice for chicken stock.  Come on, after two hours of simmering and after discarding the bird, who's to know?  A complete waste of money and a good bird.  PC amuck in the UK.

This is a curious cookbook, albeit beautifully presented with great photos. 

"Dear Uncle Chic:  We thought of you and your admonishment to not fear salt while cooking! 

How thoughtful of them to send the geezer something foodie to read and write about.  How nice they remembered the admonition.

In Salt, A World History, Mark Kurlansky takes us from one end of the globe to the other and from ancient times and cultures to the present telling us the same story.  Salt's influence on mankind is pervasive.  And that, "Fixing the value of salt, one of earth's most accessible commodities, has never been easy."  The harvesters of salt deposits founded villages, developed markets and trade routes.  Governments taxed the stuff from earliest times to build cities and empires and to fund armies to trash other cities and empires.  The salting of fish and meats, to prolong preservation, was a major contribution toward reliable food supplies in a starving world.  The simple processes of adding salt to cod, herring, beef and pork, to preserve them, has endured but also evolved over the millennia into complex salt-curing regimens for fish, meats and cheeses that have created food products of great value (caviar and parma hams, for example).  He notes, at the very end of the book that  "Fashionable people are now divided into two camps.  One is passionate about being healthy and eating less salt, the other is passionate about salt."  He votes (without passion) for moderation saying that the body needs salt, but that clinical evidence shows that people who consume large quantities of it are not as healthy as those who don't.

And what of my admonition to the Minneapolis nephew?   It's been some time since they visited our kitchen but I'm sure that I expressed my firm conviction that salt is an essential ingredient to good cooking.  Indeed, as an experienced culinary wag said many years ago,  "Cooking is all about hard work and salt."

If your doctor has told to you to severely reduce your salt intake, then do so.  If not . . . 

Along comes a little wire-binded book, Bundt Classics, by Dorothy Dalquist, published by the Nordic Ware people, that collects and updates all the cakes they have promoted over the years.  Quite a few:  92 cakes and desserts, supported by 19 glazes, sauces and syrups. There are also 31 bread recipes and even a dozen savory dishes -- all written to be prepared in a Bundt Pan of one shape or another.  From Apple Streusel to Walnut-Bourbon Pound Cake, the list is a trip through days of  yore.  However, getting a cake out of a Bundt Pan, in one piece, is a challenge as old as the pans themselves.  The secret is to meticulously coat the inside of the pan with unsalted butter and a dusting of flour. One cannot spend too much time in preparing a cake pan.  "Prepare in haste, repent at leisure," as our master pastry chef instructed.

Anyhow, the book is inviting and reasonable in price.  The Little Woman is anxious to try some of the old recipes again "for the first time."

As I read on, I began to wonder if she was going to address the health risks of non-natives eating street food.  (I ate the stuff without regret in Japan and Hong Kong, as a young dashing naval officer, but I doubt if I would do it now.)  She views a perceived lack of hygiene as often more apparent than real, and leaves it at that—save for a note to herself to carry her own cutlery when next in Cairo. Mmmm.

If you give a thought to what street food in all about (quick and/or uncomplicated), the chapter headings here are intuitive, namely soups, snacks-salads-dips, breads and pizzas, sandwiches, BBQs, one-pot meals, sweets, desserts and drinks.  She presents about 135 recipes, most capable of being prepared quickly without the need of much more than fire, a pan, product, spices and oil.

Readers of Wright’s A Mediterranean Feast or Wolfert’s Couscous and Other Good Food From Morocco will find much familiar here.  If you have prepared some of Wolfert’s dishes or my tagine dishes you have the pantry and spice rack to tackle Helou’s Mediterranean street food.

We did her Moroccan Eggplant Salad the other night following the recipe, which was straightforward.  It was delicious, though a bit too oily.  This led me to check her other recipes to determine if Helou is a bit heavy on the olive oil.  She is, at least in her salads.  So, as you should do with all recipes, mark them up to your liking after following the author's recipe.  Fair enough.  Next time I do this dish, I’ll cut the oil by 20%. 

We'll try, I'm sure, some of the snacks, salads and dips as well as the kebab BBQ’s.  Her one-pot meal recipes look good and I should try one or two as quick-prep variants of the more elaborate lamb dishes that I favor.  But, given the cost of fresh lamb shanks, maybe I won't. 

I bought the book because I liked the concept.  You might too.  It's a welcome addition to the two related books, aforementioned.

Readers can expect writers of kitchen science books to delight in debunking old cooking fictions and deflating the exaggerations of both consumer and industry advocates.  Wolke is no exception and the results are right up there with McKee and Corriher.  Concerning what I consider the hallmarks of the food phobics and wellness hypochondriacs, he says, “I hate warnings without reasons . . . [and] anxiety without information.” 

I found but one lapse.  Regarding the thawing of frozen products, Wolke fails to mention thawing under potable running cold water, which is the only in-kitchen method approved by the FDA.

I've stated before and hold to it that Shirley Corriher’s Cookwise is the most useful of the “here's why” books.  What Einstein Told His Cook is also worth your time, in contrast to How to Read a French Fry, which is trashed in a profile on this page, below.

Two other restaurant books are reviewed on this page.  The kitchen scenes at Daniel are at another, higher, level than those portrayed by Bourdain in Kitchen Confidential, and Brenner's narrative lays waste the dismal title of Patric Kuh’s The Last Days of Haute Cuisine. Fine dining is alive and well.  Still, the three books are of a piece.  A dark side of Kitchen Confidential is here too, where cooks at Daniel, albeit in a prize kitchen, endure long hours, low pay, burn out and high turnover.  Front of the house operations at Daniel are apace with those described historically by Kuh.  Brenner documents the key requisites of success in today's restaurant world:  culinary flair, command leadership and marketing genius. Daniel Boulud has all three.  If your interest in fine dining includes diners as well as restaurant operations, Brenner portrays them--the regulars and VIPS--as quirky yet lovingly catered to by Boulud who recognizes them as vital to the success of his restaurant.  A lot of pointers are provided here for the eccentric diner.

To get a feel for the level of detail and soundness of techniques, I baked her lemon tart, which called for using cookie dough instead of pate sucrée to make the tart shell.  Her instructions are clear and very detailed.  Laborious in fact (she takes two paragraphs to tell the reader how to “blind bake” a tart shell without ever using the technical term).  The ‘by flavor’ organization of the book is as inviting as it is innovative.  An average of 22 pages is devoted to each of 13 flavors (chocolate gets 35). If, like the Little Woman, you don't like almond, you can flip past it with the assurance that you will not see it again. 

Yockelson knows her subject.  She presents all the classics here, updated and inspired.  If you do not have a confectionery baked goods cookbook, Baking by Flavor is well worth a look.  For sure¸ this book will win an award next year.

Well, along comes a single subject cookbook on ceviche.  Better still, the book has been nominated for a James Beard Foundation book award this year.  “Got to buy this one,” says I. “ No need to look at it at the bookstore, just go Amazon.” 

¡Ceviche! by chef Guillermo Pernot and Aliza Green, offers 48 ceviche recipes—and everything you need to know about this little side dish—along with chapters on salsas, salads and cocktails—all tied together with extraordinary full-page color photographs. That's the good news.  The bad news is that ingredients called for in most of the recipes are not readily available.  To their credit, the authors have a chapter on special ingredients and sources, as well as a glossary of 54 entries pulled out of the recipes.  Nonetheless, to make the dishes in this book requires a commitment to shop for and stock the pantry with niche spices, condiments, veggies, fruits and booze.  The material on escabeches, salads, salsas, vinaigrettes, garnishes and cocktails is more user friendly, but even here the ingredient requirements are daunting. 

The book is impressive from the culinary point of view.  Pernot’s techniques are well grounded.  The text is to the point and fun to read.  His interest in Japanese fresh fish cuisine influences his ceviche creations in inventive and delightful ways.  The food presentation, serving dishes and settings for the photos are terrific.  In all, Pernot presents an in-depth look at ceviche. 

No, there is more to this book.  Upon reflection in the process of selecting some recipes that I might use in class, I now conclude (a week or so after writing the above) that Pernot takes civiche to new and creative heights.  This book is "way out there," in the manner of The French Laundry.  It is full of ideas that experienced cooks will ponder and use.  Which, come to think of it, is a desired outcome of reading any cookbook.  Few chef/authors, however, reach this level of creative substance.

Now, 15 years later, Schneider has produced an updated and upscale version of the 1986 book.  In Vegetables from Amaranth to Zucchini, she has dropped the fruits and winnowed out the veggies.  Cilantro and other “spice” type veggies are not in the new book.  Sprouts, squash and other single items in the old book are presented now within generic headings.  Hugely informative, more fun to read and with lots of new material, the format and presentation of the new book—with large heavy weight glossy paper, 275 superb photos, 500 meat and meatless recipes and 220 more pages—is as elegant as the old book is text bookish.  The 1996 reprint of Uncommon Fruits costs 28 dollars; Vegetables goes for $60!  If I had neither and wanted a book on veggies, I would go Vegetables, price notwithstanding.  Schneider has been writing for 30 years.  Quite likely, this book is her magnum opus.  It is a 2001 nominee for a James Beard Foundation book award.