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Cookbook of the year
REVIEWS BY SYBIL PRAD
Houghton Mifflin, $40 1,056 pages, ISBN 0618374086
Master Marcella
By Marcella Hazan HarperCollins, $29.95 400 pages, ISBN 0066209676
Welcome to the Welcome Table
By Maya Angelou Random House, $29.95 240 pages, ISBN 1400062896
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According to book business buzz, this is the year of the cookbook. If that's so, and even
if it's not, The Gourmet Cookbook is the cookbook of the year. Ruth Reichl—food maven of the highest order, best-selling author and editor of Gourmet magazine—and her team poured over the last 62 years of Gourmet, sorting through more than 50,000 recipes to come up with the 1,200-plus included here. I've always thought of Gourmet as the food magazine of record—the place for cooks, new to the game and seasoned practitioners, to get the real deal on every food trend, the most authentic recipes, the best ideas for elegant dinner parties and easy workweek suppers. So to have this hefty (that's an understatement) tome is heaven (that's an understatement, too) for an avid cook. This isn't a history of cooking in America; Reichl's purpose was to produce "a book that wants to live in your kitchen," a book "with every recipe you could ever want." She's done it and every one of these most-wanted recipes has been tested, tasted, reworked (if needed) and retested. It's all here, from nuts to soup, hors d'oeuvres to breakfast and brunch, a multitude of main courses, desserts in scrumptious variety, salads, sauces, vegetables, bread, pizza, preserves and pickles; plus tips on how to throw an angst-free cocktail party, pit olives, cook pasta, choose chocolate, tell soba from udon and much more. If you're eager for adventure in the kitchen, this is the place to find it.
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Marcella Hazan was one of the very first to bring authentic Italian cooking to the attention of American home cooks. Her cooking classes are legendary and her cookbooks classics. She has never cooked to dazzle or to show off her creativity—as she says, "I am never bored with a good old dish. . . . I don't cook 'concepts.' I use my head, but I cook from the heart, I cook for flavor." Coaxing that deeply satisfying flavor out is fundamental to "simple, true Italian cooking," fundamental to Marcella's classes and now fundamental to her new book,
Marcella Says...: Italian Cooking Wisdom from the Legendary Teacher's Master Classes, with 120 of Her Irresistible Recipes. An extensive "master class" begins the book, covering the procedures and techniques essential to a "well-grounded understanding of the Italian way of cooking." You're invited to drop in as you wish, or read it from start to finish, taking what you need from Marcella's warm, conversational instructions. Then come the recipes—each introduced in Marcella's inimitable, informative style—that take you through all the delectable parts of an Italian meal, from antipasti to gelati. A master class taught by a classy master.
Unlike Proust, Maya Angelou didn't have to bite into a madeleine to unleash a flood of memories. Favorite dishes and newfound delights have been focal points in her life from the time she was a little girl living in Stamps, Alabama, with her brother and beloved grandmother, to the present as a world-renowned poet, writer, performer and teacher. She makes that quite clear in her latest book,
Hallelujah! The Welcome Table: A Lifetime of Memories with Recipes. The memories come as self-contained vignettes that take us through her fully lived life, each amplified by recipes for the food that was so much a part of them. There's her grandmother's heavenly Caramel Cake made to reassure a troubled young Maya, Braised Short Ribs of Beef improvised when she cooked for a Creole restaurant, the cassoulet that pleased M.F.K Fisher, the Smothered Chicken and Biscuits that delighted Oprah and many more that mark Maya Angelou's passage "up and away from the days of poverty and the Southern place of need."