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The Potter pusher
REVIEWS BY SYBIL PRATT
By Simon Hopkinson Hyperion, $24.95 240 pages ISBN 9781401308629
Many dessert cookbooks come my way, but few have grabbed my attention like Alice Medrich's Pure Dessert: True Flavors, Inspiring Ingredients, and Simple Recipes. Medrich is a dessert maker's dessert maker. These recipes are elegantly uncomplicated, the techniques and ingredients intensely considered—indeed, this is a cookbook devoted to and driven by ingredients. Medrich is determined to infuse the dessert repertoire with new and better ingredients—fresh delicate cheeses, novel grains, great chocolate, herbs, spices and spirits—while keeping each recipe superbly simple, "an eloquent expression of its defining ingredient" and totally doable in a home kitchen. You can't help but be tempted to try something brand-new or an innovative take on a classic: tender-textured golden Kamut shortbread, made with a nutty-flavored, more nutritious ancestor of wheat; sour cream ice cream topped with raw sugar toffee sauce; Nibby buckwheat butter cookies with bits of roasted cocoa beans; very tangy lemon bars; new bittersweet brownies made with 70 percent bittersweet chocolate, sheer bliss for chocoholics; and a trio of silky panna cottas flavored with saffron, honey or jasmine. You'll get your just desserts and more in these 150 recipes, illustrated with 45 gorgeous, full-color photos.
By Alice Medrich Artisan, $35 272 pages ISBN 9781579652111
Chef, cookbook author and cooking teacher Peter Berley has one daughter who is a committed vegetarian and one an equally committed omnivore. He needed dietary détente in his kitchen, a way to feed his family that was inclusive and efficient. It's hard enough to get one good meal on the table, let alone two. He came up with a "flexitarian" (his own word coined from "flexible" and "vegetarian") approach, a way of including people who eat in different ways in every great tasting dinner. The Flexitarian Table: Inspired, Flexible Meals for Vegetarians, Meat Lovers and Everyone in Between is the culmination of his 30-year experience, filled with wonderfully stylish recipes combined into seasonal menus (10 per month). Berley offers easy, innovative takes on grains, veggie combos, salads and soups and "convertible" dishes like crispy pressed chicken/tofu both marinated in a zesty combo of garlic, mint and more, that allow family and friends to opt for their protein of choice. Now, you don't have to take sides and the vegans at your table won't be restricted to sides.
By Peter Berley Houghton Mifflin, $30 352 pages ISBN 9780618658657
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Here's a bit of trivia: What book pushed Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince off the bestseller list in England in 2005? Don't worry, I didn't have a clue either, but it sure piqued my curiosity when I found out that a cookbook had done the dirty deed. Now that book, Roast Chicken and Other Stories, has finally made its way across the pond so we Yanks can share author Simon Hopkinson's recipes, knowledge and sage advice. A chef and noted food writer, Hopkinson offers his offbeat, charmingly opinionated take on cooking as a craft, a craft founded on good taste and common sense. He's arranged his culinary thoughts alphabetically, starting with anchovy and ending with veal, with lamb and leeks, saffron and squab, cilantro, crab and cream among the 40 chosen categories. Each gets a chatty, informative introduction (the "stories" referred to in the title) and an array of recipes starring that particular ingredient in dishes culled from his own repertoire and those of his favorite chefs. You'll find the eponymous roast chicken, of course; fabulous spiced eggplant salad, a favorite of the famed Elizabeth David; silky cilantro and coconut soup; creamy-crisp parmesan fritters and the "richest little pot of chocolate you will ever eat." The Franco-Brit bits—admiration for sweetbreads, kidneys, smoked haddock (finnan haddie here) and rabbit—are a bit more unusual: You may not want to indulge, but it's great fun for armchair eating.
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