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Eggstra! Eggstra!
New cookbooks to egg you on |
REVIEWS BY SYBIL PRATT
Simmons has created novel twists for her favorite dishes -- scrambled eggs, mu shu pork style, served on a bed of hot rice, Earl Grey (yes, the tea!), and creme brulee. She's included memorable morsels from her global travel -- lamb stew with artichokes and avgolemono sauce, thickened with eggs and flavored with lemons, "brik," a Tunisian treasure made by frying filo packets filled with egg, onion, and cilantro. I've admired and used Simmons's previous books, especially Fresh & Fast, and this new addition only eggs-tends my admiration.
More Than 200 Fresh Approaches From Soup to Desserts By Marie Simmons Houghton Mifflin, $27 ISBN 0395909910
By Gayle Pirie and John Clark Artisan, $15.95 ISBN 1579651518
Wayne Harley Brachman, executive pastry chef at Bobby Flay's trend-setting Manhattan restaurants and connoisseur of culinary cool, knows that retro is hip, funky is fun, and that June Cleaver-style fluffy coconut layer cake really tastes great. His paean to the past is Retro Desserts: Totally Hip, Updated Classic Desserts from the '40s,'50s, '60s, and '70s, a gastronomic scrapbook of mouthwatering memorabilia and kitchen kitsch made up of solid standards, clones, and composites, with a few fakes thrown in of the favorites we remember from Mom's cooking -- or rerun-looking. Bachman's prose is snappy, his advice sound and savvy, the photographs are, well, swell, and there's that special joy in noshing on nostalgia. I found treats from my childhood and many goodies I would have gobbled if given the chance (not for nothing did I wear "Chubbies") -- chocolate blackout cake, caramel-apple chiffon cupcakes, chocolate-wafer whipped cream roll, flaming crepes suzettes, piled high nesselrode pie (altered and vastly improved), rocky road ice cream, and bourbon balls. If these, and the many others included, don't bring back marvelous memories of waiting impatiently to lick the bowl, spoon, or mixer, I don't know what will. How nice if all memories could be so sweet and all cookbooks so positively neat.
Totally Hip, Updated Classic Desserts from the '40s,'50s, '60s, and '70s By Wayne Harley Brachman William Morrow, $27 ISBN 0688164447
A year ago, the good folks at Good Morning America decided to find out how the good folks of America were decreasing the fat and calories in the food they prepared at home. To that worthy, weight-reducing end, they established the GMA Cut the Calories Cook-Off. More than 1,100 recipes poured in and the best have now been collected in The Good Morning America Cut the Calories Cookbook: 120 Delicious Low-Fat, Low-Cal Recipes from Our Viewers by Sara Moulton with Jean Anderson, and a foreword by Emeril Lagasse. Contestants had only two categories -- entrees and desserts -- yet that seems to have ignited imaginations. Cheesecakes (a caramel version with praline sauce won one grand prize) and chicken dishes (oven-fried with andouille sausage won the other) were the most numerous, but seafood, beef, pork, veal, venison, and vegetarian mains get their day in the culinary sun. The champion cheesecake, too, gets plenty of competition from a sweet array of pies, puddings, cakes, and cookies. Moulton and the GMA food staff share their collective kitchen wisdom in the headnotes and tips that preface each recipe, and in the exceptionally clear cooking instructions. When recipes are low in fat and low in calories, you have nothing to lose but unwanted weight; when those same recipes are high in flavor, quality, and appetite appeal, you have everything to gain but unwanted pounds. No contest here -- it's a win-win situation for every cook and eater.
120 Delicious Low-Fat, Low-Cal Recipes from Our Viewers By Sara Moulton with Jean Anderson Foreword by Emeril Lagasse Hyperion, $24.95 ISBN 0786861630
Sybil Pratt has been cooking up this column for more than five years.
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Free from the cholesterol cloud that almost made them taboo, eggs are back in favor. Well-known food writer and cookbook author Marie Simmons celebrates the re-emergence of these essential, malleable, valuable ovals, symbols of spring and life, with The Good Egg: More Than 200 Fresh Approaches From Soup to Desserts. Between those kickoffs and finales, you'll find egg-ceptional innovations: the artfully scrambled and fried; the original omelettes and fragrant frittatas; the beguilingly baked and perfectly poached; the seductively stuffed; the unstandard salads; the stews and the braises; the sauce that reaps praises; the steaming hot pastas coated with comfort; the stratas and custards and cutting-edge quiches.
Support your 
Gayle Pirie and John Clark's small, charmingly designed and illustrated Country Egg, City Egg has more than five dozen recipes for new egg classics that will turn the gloomiest day sunny-side up in no time. While working as eggs-perts (OK -- I'll stop before I'm eggs-iled) preparing brunch menus at the Zuni Cafe in San Francisco, this pair of chef/consultants came up with wonderful egg dishes -- simple and sophisticated, with farmhouse freshness and uptown pizzazz -- that serve as the focal points for lovely little meals -- a bracing brunch, a luscious lunch, a light dinner, or a midnight winner. A nifty gift that won't lay an egg.
Thanks for the memories
Sweet -- savory -- and low