Ron Suhanosky

January 9, 2012 by
 |  Leave Comment
Our guest cookbook author this month is Ron Suhanosky, author of Pasta Sfoglia and, most recently, The Italian Table.   Suhanosky, currently the chef at Nonna's Table on theUpper Eastside, shared his thoughts about writing cookbooks.  I was interested to learn what he considers the most difficult part of the process--scaling down to 4-6 servings per recipe!  I've often thought it's almost two completely different… read more

6:00 timesavers, am and pm.

January 9, 2012 by
 |  Leave Comment
I'm testing a slow cooker cookbook this week, and it's making me consider (or re-consider) the ways we try to conserve time as cooks.  It was only last year that I came to slow cookery, and I instantly loved the convenience.  Strictly speaking, a slow cooker isn't a time-saving device so much as a time-banking one.  You still have to invest a… read more

The winnowing

January 3, 2012 by
 |  Leave Comment
The first week of January: holiday roundups are over, and after a week of bingeing on festive food I need to get back on my treadmill, which kept getting covered in books throughout December.  Time for cookbook cleanup!   Only problem is, somewhere between 200 and 300 books came in over the fall, I want to keep them ALL, and… read more

2011: The missing cuisine

December 27, 2011 by
 |  Leave Comment
The last week of the year has a special gift for the cookbook-obsessed: perspective. From our vantage point at the very end of a long, busy year of food publishing, we can see trends that weren't so obvious before.  There was a great swell of Mediterranean cookbooks, including a sudden spate of rustic Italian.   There were long, loving glimpses… read more

Holiday food traditions

December 19, 2011 by
 |  Leave Comment
Just for fun this morning, I ran a little EYB search (Occasion: Christmas; Course: Main Course)  to see what holiday proteins our cookbooks feature.  The results read like some kind of crazy, carnivorous 12 Days of Christmas (I know I'm leaving out our vegetarian friends here):  85 beef joints82 whole turkeys81 pork joint77 whole ducks or geese62 hams, cooked or… read more

Threshold ingredients

December 12, 2011 by
 |  Leave Comment
We all love "usable" cookbooks, but "usable" is different for everybody.  And one big part of "usable," I've come to realize, is the availability of specific ingredients.  Each of us carries with us an internal dictionary of the ingredients we consider normal--the ones we know how to get without thinking about it--and a sort of anti-dictionary consisting of the ones… read more

3 ways with ground beef

December 5, 2011 by
 |  Leave Comment
Over the weekend, we got the yearly beefer delivery--1/4 of a steer, or approximately 125 pounds.  Some 25 or 30 pounds of that is ground beef, which I *could* just turn into hamburgers or chili.  Or, I could hit the new cookbooks with my pal EYB! and see what insights they have to offer. Spicy Glazed Mini Meatloaf, from Serve Yourself by… read more

Thanksgiving sides–some better ones.

November 22, 2011 by
 |  Leave Comment
If you haven't yet drawn up your menu for Thursday, you've still probably made it as far as pinning down which turkey recipe you're going to use.  A lot of us, though, don't bother worrying about the vegetables because...they're vegetables!  It's enough work dealing with the bird, the stuffing, the pies.  The same goes for starchy sides. But with so… read more

Roundup season

November 7, 2011 by
 |  Leave Comment
I love this time of year, and not just because of the cool air and the glowing woodstove.  No, what's special about early November is that it's Holiday Roundup season, when I get to pick the top 10 cookbooks of the year for NPR.  (I also do the Boston Globe's roundup, which tends to vary a bit more in number… read more

Post cards from the powerless

October 31, 2011 by
 |  Leave Comment
As you may have heard, Halloween came early to New England this weekend, in the form of an out-of-season snowstorm of heroic proportions.  It wasn't the the storm that was so bad, but the damage it inflicted on the trees, their boughs still laden with unfallen foliage--perfect for trapping heavy, wet snow.  All night long we heard the CRACK! of… read more

Tracey Zabar

October 27, 2011 by
 |  Leave Comment
Susie interviews Tracey Zabar about cookbooks, kitchen favorites, and what makes a cookie tick.   I confess it: the cookie is my favorite dessert, any time of year, any day of the week, and (if we're being honest here) practically any time of day. I love cookies because they have a glorious variety of textures. I love them because they come… read more

3 ways of looking at a shrimp

October 24, 2011 by
 |  Leave Comment
Here's an interesting exercise I thought we could try.  Let's take 3 up-to-the-minute cookbooks at random off the pile and see how they address an everyday ingredient. Say shrimp. Shrimp Biryani (Indian Shrimp and Rice), from The Food52 Cookbook.  It's a fairly simple one-dish meal, with an attractive photograph at the end.  It has 18 ingredients if you count all the spices;… read more

Ground swell

October 17, 2011 by
 |  Leave Comment
Here's a completely new cookbook micro-trend:  ground meat.  To me, it seems surprising because meat cookbooks have been, if anything, increasingly DIY in recent years. There are smoke-and-cure books, and sausage books, and books dedicated to one kind of animal, and books dedicated to offal.  Diagrams of livestock sectioned into their primal cuts abound.  But only now do we see… read more

Choosing the best cookbooks–the 7 questions

October 14, 2011 by
 |  Leave Comment
Well, I've just about emerged on the other side of my first holiday cookbook roundup, and this time, I was unusually aware of my decision-making process.  You know how you're standing in front of the cookbook shelves at the store, leafing through cookbooks and trying to figure out which one to take home, and you feel paralyzed and uncertain, and… read more

Chef cookbooks, two ways

October 11, 2011 by
 |  Leave Comment
This week, two cookbooks from the Big Apple got me thinking about what it means to write a cookbook, when you're a famous chef.  It's certainly not the first time I've given thought to the subject--most recently, we looked at the new phenomenon of chefs' home-cooking cookbooks. The two I wanted to look at today, however, define the opposite ends of… read more

All tied up with a bow

October 3, 2011 by
 |  Leave Comment
Lately I've noticed a new subgenre in cookbooks, hovering somewhere between "D.I.Y.", "Entertaining," and "Baking/Pastry".  It's that tiny category of books focusing on homemade gifts from your kitchen.  You know, the box of holiday truffles, the little jar of blackberry jam, the syrup you tapped from your own trees. The first time I saw a book of this kind was… read more

Looking south, with flavor

September 26, 2011 by
 |  Leave Comment
Remember a few weeks ago when we were thinking about what defines "American" cooking?  I don't think we arrived at any conclusions, but what an interesting conversation!  This week, a cluster of books forced me to recognize that even the term "American" is hard to agree upon. What prompted this thought was the rapid upsurge of Latino or Latin American… read more

Famous at Home

September 20, 2011 by
 |  Leave Comment
This past week, I began putting together a preview of the fall and winter cookbooks I'm looking forward to--you'll see it soon in this space.  As I was paging through press releases and stacks of advance copies and catalogue lists, I couldn't help noticing something.  Here's a short list of what I noticed.  I'm pretty sure you'll see the same… read more

New book choices

September 19, 2011 by
 |  Leave Comment
You may not have seen so much as a single leaf turn, but fall is here in the cookbook world.   And what a fall it is shaping up to be!  There will be hundreds and hundreds of titles, as usual, but even a small selection will capture the breadth, depth, and grandiosity of what's coming out in the next few… read more

Someday books

September 12, 2011 by
 |  Leave Comment
I think we all have cookbooks we keep around and never use.  Books all about appetizers, say, but who has time to entertain?  Books on Malaysian cuisine, for the day we find a bigger Asian grocery, one that stocks the ingredients.  Books on butchering hogs, because, well, you never know.  And books on making your own beer, which mostly remind… read more

“American cooking” – what’s it to you?

September 6, 2011 by
 |  Leave Comment
A fat package in the mail got me thinking this week.  It was The Great American Cookbook, by Clementine Paddleford--a revised edition of an older Rizzoli publication, How America Eats.  I peeked inside and saw curried potato salad from Arkansas, apple muffins from Washington, oyster pie from New York, borscht from Michigan.  I saw sauerbraten from Colorado and barbecued shrimp from Hawaii.… read more

When we cook, we cook alone

August 30, 2011 by
 |  Leave Comment
Jeff Keys' ruminative author piece had me thinking about the solitude of cooks--not just chefs like Keys, who bear the responsibility for feeding and pleasing tables and tables of visitors every night, but home cooks too. Personally, I like company in the kitchen.  It takes the edge off after a long day, and it makes the expectation we all face--coming up with… read more

Jeff Keys

August 16, 2011 by
 |  Leave Comment
It's 12:30 AM at Vintage Restaurant and my work day is finally over. The restaurant is dead quiet and sparkly clean and I'm the last one to leave. The imprint of the day is hard wired into my bones and the echoes of the wild night still hum in the walls and whether it was a good day or a bad… read more

Graphic innovations in cookbooks

August 15, 2011 by
 |  Leave Comment
I notice more and more of late that publishers are experimenting with cookbook design.  Not just in cookbooks intended for kids, where bold pictures, big type, and the occasional Elmo are par for the course.  They're re-thinking everything from illustration and type design to what the book is printed on. Last year there was BBQ25, with its heavy board, wipe-off pages.… read more

40 degrees of latitude

August 8, 2011 by
 |  Leave Comment
I've often noticed that the equatorial and tropical cookbooks come out in summer, when the greatest number of people have a chance of getting the warm-weather produce typically found in those climates.  So we often see Mexican cookbooks and Thai and Vietnamese cookbooks around this time of year. This year, what I'm seeing are subtropical cookbooks--cuisines from that zone of mild… read more
« Older posts
Newer posts »
Seen anything interesting? Let us know & we'll share it!

Categories

Archives