Make it meatless

REVIEWS BY SYBIL PRATT

Mark Bittman, the fabulous food columnist for the New York Times and cookbook author extraordinaire, doesn't shy away from the grand and comprehensive. His award-winning How to Cook Everything, published almost 10 years ago, was hailed as a "more hip Joy of Cooking," and has become the go-to cookbook for millions. Now, Mark has gone meatless and given us another essential: How to Cook Everything Vegetarian: Simple Meatless Recipes for Great Food. He's not a vegetarian and he's not here to convince you to become one, but he appreciates how important it can be to increase the proportion of non-meat products we eat. "And," he says, "the only way to do that is to make vegetarian meals both appealing and satisfying, whether you choose them once in a while or every day." And that, in turn, can be accomplished with this new, incredibly comprehensive cookbook—more than 2,000 recipes for salads, soups, stews, casseroles, pasta, rice, beans, drinks and desserts—which offers the basics of cooking every vegetable, fruit, grain, legume and dairy product that you can find. Eating vegetable-centered meals, with less dependence on meat, has never been easier or more fun.


Be a better cook

In the last year or so, fast food or food fast, getting a good dinner on the table in as close to a nanosecond as possible, was the culinary war cry for lots of well-known, cookbook-writing chefs. Right now, it seems, everyone is concerned about our understanding of cooking fundamentals and giving us the confidence to actually go into the kitchen and face the stove. The latest to offer such basic instruction is the wonderfully irreverent Jamie Oliver, who states his goal in the very title of his seventh book, Cook with Jamie: My Guide to Making You a Better Cook. He's perplexed that we've moved away from the importance of home-cooked food to relying on prepackaged, pre-prepped items that may not be healthy or even tasty. So, here are Jamie's modern-day basics for shopping and cooking with great ingredients. He's upfront about his strong opinions on what to buy and what to do with what you buy—explaining his take on "slow, fast, how and why." Each of the six chapters—salad, pasta, meat, fish, vegetables and dessert—have "some nice and simple recipes [more than 175] to show you the importance of getting the basic cooking bit right" and to show you that nothing, not even a green salad, need be boring, or difficult. A great addition to the Oliverian oeuvre.


El más grande

Two years ago, Phaidon, a publisher known for its high-quality art books, took a culinary detour and offered the English-speaking world The Silver Spoon, the "Bible of Italian cooking" and Italy's best-selling cookbook for more than 50 years. Obviously, that detour was the right road, so now the fine folks at Phaidon have delivered 1080 Recipes by Simone and Inés Ortega, the first English translation of "the Bible of Spanish cooking," an instant classic when originally published, selling more than 2 million copies. I've been hearing that "Spain is the new France" for foodies and trendy cooks, but this rich, complex, multiregional cuisine doesn't need to be the "new" anything, and should be treasured for its authentic self. And here are the recipes to prove it—from the beloved, like paella, gazpacho and flan (all with many variations) to a thousand more dishes divided into 17 chapters from appetizers to desserts. Simone and her daughter Inés have worked to keep 1080 Recipes up-to-date, accessible and doable at home, modifying, removing and adding recipes over the years. Here's a new kitchen stalwart that might have been subtitled "The Spanish Joy of How to Cook Everything."


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