Category: Cookbooks
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Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat: Mastering the Elements of Good Cooking by Samin Nosrat
In her introduction to this book, Samin Nosrat talks about salt, fat, acid, and heat as “the four cardinal directions of cooking”; in his foreword, Michael Pollan (who learned to cook from Nosrat) talks about how this book will teach you to use those things in combination “to build striking new layers of flavor in…
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Relish: My Life in the Kitchen by Lucy KnisleyFirst Second, 2013
I read Relish in the middle of a week-long vacation that started with amazing food in New Orleans (still-warm house-made potato chips! fried oyster slider! maple sriracha donut with candied thyme! lamb neck and beet green curry! condensed-milk cake with chicory ice cream and Meyer lemon sauce!) and proceeded to less-than-amazing food on Grand Cayman…
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Vintage Cakes by Julie RichardsonTen Speed Press (Crown/Random House), 2012
Vintage Cakes is the kind of book that should be really appealing to me. Julie Richardson, who owns Baker & Spice Bakery in Portland, Oregon, inherited the contents of an old filing cabinet from the previous bakery that was in the space Baker & Spice now inhabits. As she writes in the introduction to this…
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The Truck Food Cookbook by John T. EdgeWorkman Publishing, 2012
I picked this book up from the library after my boyfriend heard about it on NPR, and while I don’t like it enough to want to buy it, it was fun to read through. The subtitle, “150 Recipes and Ramblings from America’s Best Restaurants on Wheels,” gives a pretty good idea of what you’re in…
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The New Brooklyn Cookbook by Melissa Vaughan and Brendan VaughanWilliam Morrow (HarperCollins), 2010
This book’s subtitle is “Recipes and Stories from 31 Restaurants That Put Brooklyn on the Culinary Map:” I’ve lived in Brooklyn for coming up on seven years now, and of those 31 restaurants, I’ve been to exactly three: applewood (literally down the block from where I lived for five and a half years, great food,…
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Cooking Interlude: The Food Matters Cookbook by Mark Bittman
The idea of The Food Matters Cookbook is simple: eat fewer animal products and processed foods; eat more whole grains, nuts, legumes, fruits and vegetables. There are lots of reasons you might want to eat this way, and Bittman mentions a few in his introduction (health, ethics, environment), but this really is a cookbook, not…
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Cooking Interlude: More from Nigella Kitchen by Nigella Lawson
Having spent some more time with this cookbook, I can now share some general things I do and don’t like about it. For starters: every bulleted list in this book (and there are many of them) uses hearts as bullet points. This gets old really quickly. Another small annoyance: all recipes in this book that…
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Cooking Interlude: Nigella Kitchen by Nigella Lawson
This weekend I’d been thinking that I’d go on a 15-mile walk on Staten Island on Sunday with a group of like-minded folks who enjoy city-walks in all kinds of weather. But when this morning came, I changed my mind: I didn’t feel like getting up early, and the arch of one of my feet…