TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/082090/0820470.000

Text File | 1992-08-28 | 10.5 KB | 222 lines

                                                                                BOOKS, Page 65

Beyond the Perfect Pot Roast


New cookbooks show the sophistication and variety of American
cuisine

By JOHN F. STACKS


    Cookbooks tumble forth from American publishing houses like
frites from a frying basket. In the past six months, hundreds
have been published. They are profitable for the simple reason
that everyone has to eat, which means that someone has to cook.


    That is precisely why I have been messing around in the
kitchen since high school days, when I was the first football
player to hold membership in the Chef's Club. If I knew how to
cook, I would be sure to eat when and what I wanted, even
though my mother and father were both steady producers of great
food. Cookbooks should serve the same end: better, more
flexible eating.

    I have been reading and cooking from a large pile of the
newest cookbooks for the past several months, full of wonder
at the variety and sophistication of modern American cookery.
That is all the more remarkable because only a decade or so
ago, most of the country was stuck in the
pot-roast-and-mashed-potato syndrome. This new crop of
cookbooks will tell you everything from how to clean raw
abalone to how to prepare a really good, well, pot roast with
mashed potatoes, one of my favorites. The cookbooks incorporate
all the flavors and delicacy of the new American cuisine as
practiced in imaginative restaurants across the country, but
there is also a pile of books that resurrect the wonderfully
old-fashioned regional cookery, from Cajun to Mennonite. Most
cooks won't buy more than a couple of cookbooks a year, so I
have ranked the following in order of purchasing preference.
Work from the top down, as in a recipe, to stock the kitchen
library.

    At the very top is a very modern version of the great old
war-horse cookbooks like The Fannie Farmer Cookbook and Joy of
Cooking. It is called The New Basics Cookbook by Julee Rosso
and Sheila Lukins (Workman; $29.95). These are the people who
founded New York City's swell little gourmet-food store the
Silver Palate and then produced one of the pioneer nouvelle
American cookbooks. At 849 pages, The New Basics describes and
prescribes just about everything one does in the kitchen.

    Let's see, how about pot roast? The comprehensive 44-page
index says "pot roast pasta." Huh? Yes, you make this pot roast
that sounds delicious, but then you chop it all up and, with
its juices, spoon it over a pound of penne or pappardelle. The
old pot roast is now actually a stracotto. How modern can you
get? You wouldn't want the mashed spuds if you've got the
pasta, but let's check anyway. Three listings: the basic one,
with sour cream; one that has a whole head of cooked garlic
(yum!); and one that is half potatoes and half parsnips  (hmm?).

    By comparison, the 1964 version of Joy of Cooking has one
straightforward recipe for pot roast and one for mashed
potatoes. But Joy is an amusing cultural icon, atwitter with
the new availability of frozen food and the wonders of the
blender. It is stern and didactic in tone, urging its female
readers on to culinary excellence: "You will eat at the hour
of your choice . . . And you will regain the priceless private
joy of family living, dining and sharing."

    The New Basics is diverse, sophisticated and essential. It
is also, however, cloying in parts. "We have known and loved
Sarabeth for years -- and love having breakfast in Sarabeth's
Kitchen," begins the recipe for Sarabeth Levine's Goldilox,
which turns out to be scrambled eggs with cream cheese and
smoked salmon. Go straight to the recipes -- especially the
quick and easy bouillabaisse with a peppery rouille -- and skip
the biographical musings in the preface, which tell us more
than we want to know about the authors' families and herb
gardens.

    As a rule, cookbooks with big, beautiful pictures should be
avoided. The more pictures, the fewer recipes. But my second
favorite new book is Pacific Flavors by Hugh Carpenter
(Stewart, Tabori & Chang;  $35). The gorgeous photography is by
Teri Sandison, but it can be forgiven because of the
imaginative excellence of the recipes. Carpenter's aim is to
blend Oriental flavors with American cooking techniques, thus
preserving the flavors of the East but eliminating many of the
more tedious steps required in traditional Eastern recipes.
Even the Oriental flavorings he uses are now fairly common
grocery-store items.

    Pan-fried Sichuan chicken is a good example. Chicken breasts
are sauteed in a regular skillet, then drenched in a delicious
sauce composed of the usual Chinese suspects: oyster, bean and
hoisin sauces, sherry instead of Chinese wine, ginger, garlic,
chili sauce and Sichuan peppercorns. Another of the charms of
this book is the notion of serving these Oriental-style dishes
along with Western foods, in this case with steamed carrots in
parsley butter.

    My objection to all the pretty pictures in this and other
books is the inevitable sense of inferiority they produce when
the food comes out of the kitchen. For example, Michael
McCarty, owner of California-style restaurants in New York City
and Santa Monica, Calif., has published Michael's Cookbook
(Macmillan; $29.95), which rates three stars for  art direction.
Each food section opens with a page of modern art by, say,
Helen Frankenthaler or Richard Diebenkorn. What they have to
do with eating eludes me. Worse, in each section there are color
plates showing the finished dishes. Each is an artistic
triumph. When I took a shot at the grilled tenderloin of pork
with cognac and green peppercorn sauce, it tasted just fine,
but it looked on the plate more like a Jackson Pollock than a
Michael McCarty. I just couldn't get the little slices of pork
to form the perfect crescent that was pictured. Still, this
book is a perfect distillation of the best of new American
culinary inventiveness, in which old favorites get a new twist
from the clever combination of other flavors. Good old
soft-shell crab, for instance, gets dressed up nicely in a
simple deglazing sauce made with lime juice and grated ginger,
which breaks up the usual overly buttery taste of this summer
treat.

    For sheer usefulness, the best book on the market must be
La Varenne Pratique by Anne Willan (Crown; $60), the Briton who
in 1975 founded the famous Paris cooking school La Varenne.
This is a how-to book more than a book of recipes, although
Willan has scattered many simple recipes throughout the
technical sections of her well-illustrated manual. In one of
the most instructive sections, double-page illustrations show
the kinds of meat cuts typically available both in the U.S. and
France. I have often wondered just how to butterfly a leg of
lamb when, at the last moment, I have had to settle for the
whole leg. Eight quick steps, each with its own picture, show
how to debone the thing, and then it's an easy, two-step
process to lay open the fillet so that it's ready for the
grill. For the more adventurous, the book teaches the
construction of a crown roast of lamb, which is fashioned from
two racks of lamb, bent round and tied. A simple roasting
recipe features the typical lamb seasonings of garlic and
rosemary, accompanied by an elegant rice pilaf served from
inside the crown roast.

    Just about every technique the home chef could need or
aspire to need is contained in this pricey volume. It never
occurred to me to make chocolate truffles at home, but the
process looks easy in Willan's book. You whip up a genache by
pouring a boiled combination of butter and cream over chopped
chocolate. Chill that and then roll into little balls and chill
some more. Melt some more chocolate, dip the genache balls in
the warm chocolate and roll them in powdered cocoa.

    At the same time that American cookery has become more
inventive, there is a resurgence of interest in both purely
ethnic cuisines and down-home, regional foods. The best in this
category are a pair of over illustrated but authentic books on
country cooking from France and Italy. Recipes from a French
Herb Garden by Geraldene Holt (Simon & Schuster; $24.95) is as
helpful with its gardening instructions as with its recipes.
If my lavender ever blooms, I'm going to try the ice cream with
fresh lavender flowers and muscat. The companion book, Recipes
from an Italian Farmhouse by Valentina Harris (Simon &
Schuster; $24.95), is equally beautiful but can be a bit too
authentic. I thought the sausage-meat-risotto recipe sounded
good right down to the one-half cup of fresh pig's blood, at
room temperature (optional, of course).

    The casual cook will be intrigued by The Foods of Vietnam
(Stewart,  Tabori & Chang; $35), especially now that good
Vietnamese restaurants have spread across the country. But
Nicole Routhier's handsome book presents a difficulty with
ingredients, which are hard to come by except in coastal urban
areas.

    A converse problem emerges in Hot Links and Country Flavors
by Bruce Aidells and Denis Kelly (Knopf; $19.95). Good fresh
sausages are available in such variety and quality all over the
U.S. that the let's-eat-soon crowd will wonder why they should
spend all day stuffing sausages when they can simply buy them.
But for the real sausage aficionado, this is the book.

    Louisiana has not been slighted in recent cookbook
publishing, but Paul Prudhomme's blackened everything has
overshadowed the basics such as red beans and rice and
pralines. Justin Wilson, who has a Cajun-cooking show on PBS,
has remedied that with his humorous tome, Homegrown Louisiana
Cookin' (Macmillan; $19.95). Biscuits, Spoonbread, and Sweet
Potato Pie by Bill Neal (Knopf; $19.95) serves the same purpose
for Southern baking. It is comprehensive and sparingly
illustrated.

    There is not a wide audience for what is usually called
Pennsylvania Dutch food, which is actually a kind of
Americanized German cuisine I remember from childhood as
featuring at least three starches with every overcooked piece
of meat. But in Cooking from Quilt Country by Marcia Adams
(Potter; $24.95), this excessively hearty cuisine  gets
lightened up. The recipes from Amish and Mennonite families in
Indiana are less daunting to the cholesterol conscious. But how
can there be an Amish cookbook without shoofly pie, that gooey
concoction of molasses and brown sugar? And I still have never
found a good recipe for the peach tart that Grandma Fultz used
to make in late summer.