New York Review of Books Review

CONSIDERING that 18 months is a quick turnaround in the cookbook world, it's startling to imagine that editors in the Kobe-and-caviar-foam days of 2007 foresaw that selling Americans on canning and pickling, curing their own bacon, charring meat and baking something called a grunt was a good way to boost sales. If I start seeing galley proofs for "101 Stone Soups," I'm stockpiling water and Valrhona. This summer's selection is a modest palate cleanser after last fall's celebrity-chef-food-porn-o-copia, with its Mount Everest-level recipes and don't-spill-on-me design. (Disclosure: I wrote one of those books. Full disclosure: The last time I cooked from it, I substituted trout roe for caviar.) There are a few celebrity chefs in the mix, but they're mostly on grill duty, or making things that go well with beer. Instead, there are chefs you've never heard of, but whose restaurants you will now want to visit; there are lab-rat cooks who methodically test each recipe as though their government grants depended on it; and there are some culinary civilians with nice taste. Francis Mallmann is a megastar in South America, a Patagonian prince with restaurants in Argentina and Uruguay, TV shows and the lot. I'd never heard of him until I went to his Buenos Aires flagship, a posh, sexy library in a neighborhood that made "Fort Apache, the Bronx" seem cheery. But what do you know? Like some other French-trained celebrity chefs known for their intricate food, Mallmann just wants to go to the country and grill. As SEVEN FIRES: Grilling the Argentine Way (Artisan, $35), his new book written with Peter Kaminsky, seductively illustrates, his ain't no block-party barbecue. Mallmann cooks on parrillas (grills), chapas (griddles) and infiernillos (bi-level fires), in hornos de barro (wood ovens), rescoldos (piles of ash and ember) and calderos (cauldrons), and - the holy grill - on the asador, an iron cross upon which a whole butterflied animal is impaled. Mallmann cooks with the elegant purity achieved only after attaining a mastery of complicated food. Inspired by these recipes, a grill-crazy friend called a metal shop to have an infiernillo made. My husband started thinking whole cow. I craved Mallmann's burnt flavors, from caramelized oranges with rosemary to flattened sweet potatoes charred in butter. Bobby Flay, be very afraid. What makes Mallmann so punk is that he makes six ingredients taste better than 20. (His honey gremolata has already become the sauce equivalent of a hit summer song I can't stop singing.) He also reconnects us to the primal simplicity and visceral pleasure of cooking over a fire - though his recipes can be made over charcoal or in a grill pan, too. A salad of tomatoes and fennel becomes a different course when charred. In many ways, "Seven Fires" was the simplest book I read (cow-flaying aside), and by far the most inspiring. ADAM PERRY LANG is at the opposite end of the grilling spectrum, a blingy S.U.V. to Mallmann's muddy old Land Rover. SERIOUS BARBECUE: Smoke, Char, Baste, and Brush Your Way to Great Outdoor Cooking (Hyperion, $35), written with J.J. Goode and Amy Vogler, is what to give the man who has yet to actualize his outdoor kitchen, or at least his ceramic egg cooker. (If all you have is a Weber, you're going to have to step up your game.) Adam Perry Lang went from the kitchen of Restaurant Daniel to running Manhattan's Daisy May's BBQ, but he never dumbed down. He's making bacon, but it's caramel-smoked. A recipe for a whole pork shoulder calls for an injection, a mustard moisturizer, sesoning blend, wrapping mixture and barbecue sauce. A girl can dream. Somewhere between rustic and complex lies the Big Sur Bakery, where three Los Angeles fine-dining refugees (Philip Wojtowicz is the chef; his wife, Michelle Rizzolo, is the baker; and Michael Gibson is the sommelier, front-of-house and Mr. Fix-It) turned an abandoned house into a Highway 1 destination. THE BIG SUR BAKERY COOKBOOK: A Year In the Life of a Restaurant (Morrow, available in July, $34.99), written with Catherine Price, tells its story, from its breakfast-only beginnings - a k a, how to make scones and influence hippies - through the yearly ebb and flow of tourists, cash and fresh ingredients. The recipes are interspersed with profiles of local characters and purveyors, from the goat wrestler to the couple who grow microgreens on their porch. Like Suzanne Goin's sleeper hit, "Sunday Suppers at Lucques," the B.S.B. cookbook uses a seasonal approach that can be self-defeating: should you crave yam-and-sweet-potato pie in April, you'll miss out unless you skip ahead to October. And like "Sunday Suppers," it's really a restaurant book: many of the recipes require a full day and a sous-chef. A lovely salad of artichoke hearts (poached with aromatics), almonds and asparagus (each roasted separately) in a dressing made from grapefruit juice (reduced to a tablespoon) took an hour-plus, but it had the complexity to show for it. I'm already scheduling time to make the pork-belly pizza with barbecue sauce and sweet corn - Step 1: Cure pork belly for five days. And the recipes for breakfast pizza and brown-butter rhubarb bars are worth the cover price (or the airfare). Cajun food has touristy, shake-on connotations that cease to tempt once you've left the French Quarter. In recent years, the New Orleans chef Donald Link has restored its appeal by resuscitating Cajun classics at his restaurants Herbsaint, Cochon and the new Cochon Butcher. Herbsaint was one of the first fine-dining restaurants to reopen after Katrina, and the invitingly packaged REAL CAJUN: Rustic Home Cooking From Donald Link's Louisiana (Clarkson Potter, $35), written with Paula Disbrowe, shows why his food means so much to the community. Link shares the fare he ate growing up on the bayou, as well as what he cooks for family, friends and funerals. Some recipes are aspirationally insane - fried chicken and andouille gumbo, or "game day" choucroute with sausage, tasso and duck confit - while others I simply aspire to make, like a fried oyster and bacon sandwich (bacon recipe included), and Link's outstanding boudin, which he also uses as a heart-stopping beignet filling. The tone is easygoing, the explanations clear. Before I knew it, I was frying up spicy hush puppies and serving chicken and sausage jambalaya while drinking Abita beer. Even as Link liberates Cajun food, most Greek food seems stuck in its gyro-stand past. But in the big fat VEFA'S KITCHEN (Phaidon, $45), the Greek food writer Vefa Alexiadou shows us there's much, much more: over 650 recipes, to be semi-exact. Squashing so many dishes into one book means that instructions are terse and photos few - not great if you've never made Lenten spaghetti from Corfu or wrestled with 20 sheets of phyllo. The chicken pilaf in said phyllo was a washout, but the zucchini fritters have entered heavy rotation on my hors d'oeuvre list. Mark Miller, who is credited with creating modern Southwestern cuisine at his Santa Fe restaurant, Coyote Cafe, makes street food into art in his latest cookbook. TACOS (Ten Speed Press, $21.95), written with Benjamin Hargett and Jane Horn, is not about 30-minute fajita platters - or 30-minute anything. But you'll be grateful, even as you stock your pantry with mail-ordered chilies you can't pronounce. The fastest after-work recipe I found was for bacon tacos with honey and red chili, which was genius, a satisfying combination of smoked, sweet and spicy flavors fried into a taquito. Miller layers flavors and heat in thoughtful ways, from a filling of beer-braised beef short ribs, brightened with tamarind paste and orange zest, to rabbit with green chilies, mint and tomatillos. My husband, a Los-Angeles-raised taco purist, is hooked on this book and all its challenges, minus the Santa Fe'd chicken, goat cheese and apple taco. Back in the land of non-chef cookbooks, the food writer Eugenia Bone's WELL-PRESERVED: Recipes and Techniques for Putting Up Small Batches of Seasonal Foods (Clarkson Potter, $24.95) was uncannily prescient: in October, sales of Ball canning supplies were up 92 percent over the same month a year earlier. Her handy little book grew out of the omnivore's real dilemma: what to do with all the expensive things you bought too many of at the farmers' market. Bone demystifies canning for those who didn't grow up at their grandmother's elbow, front-loading the book with how-to's accompanied by answers to commonly asked questions. Her alluring, easy-to-follow recipes for small quantities of jams, sauces, pickles and cured meats (more bacon!) are followed by recipes that incorporate them. Adam Perry Lang, left: "Pork is built for barbecue." Right, Francis Mallmann prepares for salt-crust roasting. That three-citrus marmalade you'll put up next winter? Try it with shrimp or chicken wings, or folded into a crepe. A powerful sauce made from pine nuts, garlic and raisins can be lobbed onto pasta, packed into a pork chop or simmered with quail. That bacon you cured in a Baggie for a week? You'll want to serve it with rigatoni, dates and Gorgonzola. The combination of this book and the newspaper stories about spikes in jar and seed sales sent me to the hardware store to buy every Ball product before it sold out. Now I'm just waiting for my back-ordered Seeds of Change shipment to arrive. Diana Henry, a food columnist for the Sunday Telegraph and a busy mother, proposes PURE SIMPLE COOKING: Effortless Meals Every Day (Ten Speed Press, $21.95), originally released in Britain in 2007. Her brand of insouciant chic begins with the cover image of a coppery roast chicken haphazardly topped with crisped prosciutto, cooling on a rumpled linen towel. British food stars excel at a kind of easy pleasure, that chuck-it-in-the-pot cheer of Nigella and Nigel. Henry's globetrotting recipes tilt toward the spices of North Africa, Spain and Italy. But a "(virtually) no-cook starter" of boiled quail eggs dipped in dukkah - that is, ground hazelnuts toasted with sesame seeds, coriander and cumin - was oddly bland, and poussin painted with harissa, cumin and coriander offered surprisingly little bang for the buck. It's a shame that what's breezy on the page isn't always satisfying at the table: Henry is either effortless to the point of carelessness, or her metric conversion software is on the fritz. The roast potatoes with chorizo, however, made me forget all that wasted cumin. Who needs cookbooks anyway? Michael Ruhlman wants home chefs to cast them off and walk toward the light, entering a kingdom of creativity and confidence. In order to get there, though, they'll have to be good at memorizing numbers, or at least make a photocopy of the ratio wheel on the book's cover. (If you know that 3:2:1 = pie crust, you're probably a professional chef, to whom these ratios are second nature.) WHILE Ruhlman was attending the Culinary Institute of America for a book project, a chef showed him a copy of the golden rules, which boiled down the elements of (French) cooking into ratios. They represent "the truth of cooking," notes the omnicurious author, who's also written books on charcuterie, heart surgery and home renovation. In RATIO: The Simple Codes Behind the Craft of Everyday Cooking (Scribner, $27), Ruhlman guides readers through the ratios for a variety of doughs, batters, stocks, sauces, custards and sausages, explaining their chemical and culinary basis in clear, earnest prose and providing tasteful recipes that lay out the technique for each formula. His goal is noble: who wouldn't want to be able to whip up a béarnaise sauce and some gougères without cracking a book? That is, unless you don't want to whip up a béarnaise sauce and some gougères. The editors of Cook's Illustrated magazine make their cookbooks seem indispensible. A dedicated team, they're united in masterminding dishes that meet their culinary (or childhood) ideals with the calculated fervor of Russian hackers. In their latest book, THE BEST SKILLET RECIPES (America's Test Kitchen, $35), they set out to see what they can do with that cookware essential. "Like finding 1,001 uses for duct tape," the magazine's founder and editor, Christopher Kimball, writes, "we wondered if the skillet had unrealized potential." Did you know that lasagna, pizza and soufflés can be made in a skillet? They're not so bad, though they're more impressive for their resourcefulness than for how they actually taste. The recipes trend toward the low- to-middlebrow (tuna noodle casserole, sloppy Joes, pad Thai), with a variety of ethnic entrees and French-Italian classics, from salmon with lentils and chard to Tuscan-style steak with garlicky spinach. To be honest, the best part about Cook's Illustrated is the writing: the editors' dogged, formulaic process has lapsed into parody, reading like a cross between Goldilocks and Garrison Keillor's Guy Noir: "We tried replacing some of the cheddar with Gruyère, but its strong flavor did not sit well with tasters," they write of a mac 'n' cheese. "Gouda, havarti and fontina were all given a shot, but none tasted just right. We hit the jackpot with Monterey Jack - it helped smooth out the sauce and created that silky texture we were after." Phew! MIX SHAKE STIR: Recipes From Danny Meyer's Acclaimed New York City Restaurants (Little, Brown, $29.99) has us cooking up cocktails. You can recreate drinks served at Meyer's restaurants, from the Modern Martini to Blue Smoke Lynchburg Lemonade, but you have to plan ahead (and change some of the names, unless you want to hand out Lots o' Passions or Hampton Jitneys). At this point in the cocktail craze, infusing a bottle of rye with ginger, cooking spiced rhubarb syrup and making your own grenadine can only win you friends. Even if it's going to be a summer of doing more with less, there's always room for dessert. In this case, more oozy scrumptiousness on a French linen towel, via Portland, Oregon's Cory Schreiber and Julie Richardson (he at Wildwood restaurant, she at Baker & Spice bakery). Their RUSTIC FRUIT DESSERTS: Crumbles, Buckles, Cobblers, Pandowdles, and More (Ten Speed Press, $22) is a seasonal mini-bible that goes beyond basics. The authors make a classic crisp interesting - put the topping on the bottom and the top! - and introduce us to a wonderful thing called a caramel-peach grunt. Their upside-down cherry cake was a thing of beauty, even when made with frozen fruit, and come winter I can look forward to a modest apple cobbler with cheddar cheese biscuits, which will hold me over until the next onslaught of celebrity-chef cookbooks. Christine Muhlke is the food editor of The New York Times Magazine.