Roundup season

November 7, 2011 by
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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
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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

3 ways of looking at a shrimp

October 24, 2011 by
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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

Graphic innovations in cookbooks

August 15, 2011 by
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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
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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

Eat Your Books – minus the books

August 1, 2011 by
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I've been away from home the last week at a summer rental house, confronting all the adjustments required in an unfamiliar kitchen: radiant burners instead of propane, non-stick pans instead of cast-iron, and above all, no cookbooks except the ones I brought.  I brought just 5, which I thought was pretty restrained. And four of those were for ice cream… read more

Susie’s Heirloom

July 26, 2011 by
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I'm particularly excited about our guest contributor this month.  Karen Solomon's whimsically titled books Can It, Bottle It, Smoke It and Jam it, Pickle It, Cure It explore the world of DIY cooking.  They'll be my guides this summer if my garden yields the extra required for putting-up (a first, but it's looking rosy). But Solomon's piece isn't about that. It's about the cookbook… read more

Raw deals

July 18, 2011 by
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Raw food cookbooks...I love the paradox they pose.  If it's raw, then it can't be a cookbook, because there's no cooking involved.  And if there's no cooking involved, then why do you need a cookbook in the first place? This thought came to me most recently upon receiving a copy of Ani Phyo's Ani's Raw Food Asia.  Phyo is a raw food… read more

Kitchen gardeners love EYB

July 11, 2011 by
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Let's step away from the bookshelf and into the garden for a moment, shall we? I don't know if there is a time of year when I am more grateful for EYB than midsummer.  This year especially, when a temperate spring and a balanced summer have made my vegetable garden yield up treasures nearly every day.  A good garden calls… read more

Happy 4th!

July 4, 2011 by
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It being the 4th, a lot of us are celebrating a different sort of independence--independence from the stove. We're going to cookouts and picnics and barbecues.  We're getting buckets of fried chicken from wherever we can.  Of course, for some of us--including, I'm sure, many Eat Your Books readers--the Fourth means extra-big cooking projects, because we are the engine and… read more

Summer fruit cookbooks

June 27, 2011 by
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I have a soft spot in my heart for fruit trees, but the feeling is not mutual.  Over the years, we've tried to plant at least a dozen fruit trees on the property.  Three have survived--two apples and a pear.  The apples blossom gorgeously, but out of sync, and as they must cross-pollinate to bear, they bear scantily if at… read more

The baked and the beautiful

June 13, 2011 by
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When it comes to books about cake, there are the ones you use and the ones you don't.  There are the ones whose recipes you can, with a little attention, manage to produce yourself.  And then there are the ones where you just look through the pictures, slack-jawed.  I'm thinking of a book called Cakes to Dream On, with cakes that… read more

Cold and fizzy

June 6, 2011 by
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Just before the tornadoes struck, we had a week of humid, sweat-soaked heat western Massachusetts.  Then came the twisters.  They broke the heat in the course of their rapid, destructive passage, and we were grateful, at least, for that. Cool relief was the theme, albeit in a superficial way, in the mailbox too.  As I noted in the NPR summer… read more

To the sea! To the sea!

May 31, 2011 by
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The urge kicks in no later than Memorial Day: to hear the ceaseless roar of waves, to sift the sand between your toes, to eat of the shelled and the finned (maybe washed down with a pint of the foamy). Here in the land-locked portion of Massachusetts, I often just have to make do with the eating part.  Luckily, it's… read more

Love-hate relationship with a cookbook–and it’s only day 1.

May 24, 2011 by
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Today I'm wrestling with an intriguing newcomer: The Cook's Book of Intense Flavors, by Robert and Molly Krause.  The premise of the book is fascinating: 101 unusual, vivid flavor combinations and recipes to go with them. Each combination gets a thought-provoking character précis.  Coffee, fig, and vinegar are characterized as "full-bodied complexity"; mushroom, rose and lavender as "opposites attract".  Some are… read more
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