标题: 2022.06.07 七本必备的烹饪书 [打印本页] 作者: shiyi18 时间: 2022-7-6 19:08 标题: 2022.06.07 七本必备的烹饪书 Economist Reads | Cooking
Our food columnist selects the seven essential cookbooks
A tasteful tour around the cuisines of the world
Unspecified - 1979: Julia Child cooking with chefs. (Photo by Disney General Entertainment Content via Getty Images)
Jun 7th 2022 (Updated Jun 22nd 2022) | NEW YORK
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This article is part of our Summer reads series. Visit our collection to discover “The Economist reads” guides, guest essays and more seasonal distractions.
What’s a cookbook for these days? Not just recipes: those are available online, in multiple versions, inevitably introduced by screens full of faux-chipper stories and browser-crashing pop-up ads. And not technique: again, anyone who wants to know how to clean a squid or spatchcock a chicken can head to YouTube. But while a single recipe or video may inform, neither can really tell a story of a person, place or cuisine. Any cookbook is only “a” story, not “the” story. Cuisines change; they bleed into each other; and they vary with each person who steps up to a stove and a chopping block. An instructional video or online recipe rarely delights, or bears revisiting just for pleasure. A good cookbook should do both. Here are the seven that most deserve a place on your shelf.
Mastering the Art of French Cooking, Volumes I and II (1961 and 1970). By Julia Child, Louisette Bertholle and Simone Beck. Knopf; 1472 pages; $110 and £50
Are there better books about regional French cooking? Of course. Do some of Child’s recipes use ungodly amounts of butter and cream, and do some seem more museum pieces than artefacts of a living cuisine? Yes and yes. Even so, there is no better and more accessible introduction to serious, foundational French food and cooking techniques. Getting to grips with these recipes is an excellent way to build kitchen confidence. Child (pictured above) was not merely the first celebrity television chef; she was also an outstanding writer. Her recipes are clear, precise and authoritative. Unlike her French predecessors, she is an outstanding demystifier of kitchen technique, and can turn the most complex French dessert or sauce into a series of easily comprehensible steps.
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The Silver Spoon (2005). By The Silver Spoon Kitchen. Phaidon Press; 1505 pages; $49.95 and £39.95
If you’re used to red-sauce cooking and think Italian food begins with spaghetti, progresses to pizza and ends at lasagna, then this book, initially published by a Milanese architecture and design magazine in 1950, will surprise you with its breadth, and relative paucity of tomatoes. But there’s a reason it is a mainstay of Italian homes and probably the country’s bestselling cookbook. It does for Italian home cooking what Child’s does for French cuisine: provides a thorough introduction (nearly two dozen risotto recipes can be found in its pages, which number well over 1,000) as well as grounds for inspiration, in prose so terse and clear it verges on dictatorial. An essential reference for any home cook.
The Food of Sichuan (2019). By Fuchsia Dunlop. W.W. Norton; 480 pages; $40 and £30
Sichuanese is among the most profound, complex and delicious cuisines on earth. Few Westerners understand it better than Fuchsia Dunlop. She is scholarly, relentlessly curious and an unabashed enthusiast; as a result, this book provides a lovely portrait of the region of Sichuan, as well as an outstanding overview of its cuisine. In the West, Sichuanese cuisine has a reputation for being spicy, and it often is, but Ms Dunlop also includes the subtler dishes—the warming soups and invigoratingly sour cold dishes. Anyone who loves Sichuan food will cook their way through this book like a thriller, though many will no doubt keep returning to her “fish-fragrant eggplant,” which, as she correctly notes, “sums up the luxuriant pleasures of Sichuanese food: the warm colours and tastes, the subtlety of complex flavours.”
The Book of Jewish Food (1996). By Claudia Roden. Knopf; 688 pages; $50. Penguin; £26
This book seems an impossible task. Jews, after all, live all over the world, and generally cook much like their neighbours. The only commonalities Jewish cuisine everywhere shares are an absence of pork, shellfish and other foods that Jewish dietary law forbids, and a heavy meal that can be put into a low oven just before sundown on Friday and eaten for Saturday lunch after temple (Jews may not kindle or extinguish fires on the Sabbath). Instead of running from or rationalising that diversity, Claudia Roden meets it head-on. She has produced an ethnography of the world’s Jewish cultures, extant and vanished, told through food. Her book is divided into Ashkenazi and Sephardic recipes, with the latter section being bigger, more diverse and, alas (your reviewer is Ashkenazi), many times more delicious.
Jubilee: Recipes from Two Centuries of African American Cooking (2019). By Toni Tipton-Martin. Clarkson Potter; 320 pages; $35. Ballantine Books; £27.50
It’s impossible to write “the” American-food cookbook: America is immense, immigrant-fuelled and therefore culinarily protean. Fifty years ago pizza and bagels were niche, big-city ethnic foods; now they are found everywhere. A century ago, terrapin soup and canvasback duck were the height of sophistication; Americans ate both species nearly to extinction. New dishes rise and older ones fall away constantly. So cookery writers have to find a throughline for American food, and few have succeeded more brilliantly than Toni Tipton-Martin. Her book shows the breadth and sophistication of African-American contributions to the American table. Even American gourmets will learn as they read. Most importantly, every recipe in this book works beautifully. Usually, recipes are a guide or a starting point; hers are gospel. Start with the pork chops in lemon-caper sauce and go from there.
Made in India: Recipes from an Indian Family Kitchen (2014). By Meera Sodha. Flatiron Books; 320 pages; $35. Fig Tree; £20
Set aside the accessibility and deliciousness of this book’s recipes. Never mind that they can almost all be made from readily available ingredients without breaking a sweat or the bank. Two things make this cookbook, among all South Asian offerings and beyond, stand out. The first is Meera Sodha’s recipe for rice, which is perfect and foolproof (her cilantro chutney is close behind). The second is her prose. Just try to read Ms Sodha’s description of her grandmother, which introduces a millet-flatbread recipe, without smiling: “Aged 80, my grandma enjoys a bit of bingo, the occasional Bollywood film and properly slapping a millet bread about until it’s perfectly round.”
Six Seasons: A New Way with Vegetables (2017). By Joshua McFadden. Artisan; 384 pages; $40 and £30
Everyone knows vegetables should comprise a greater share of the Western diet. But too often, the pitfall of vegan and vegetarian cookbooks is that they prize virtue over taste. This one does the opposite. It isn’t vegetarian; it just puts vegetables at the centre of the meal, and treats them not as something to eat because people must, but as something to happily prepare because, when properly grown and picked at the right time, they are delicious. Joshua McFadden works in fields as well as kitchens, and it shows. He divides the year, as the title suggests, into six growing seasons (summer comprises three: early, middle and late); unusually, the winter recipes are every bit as thoughtful and delicious as the summer ones. A cookbook to plan your garden around.■
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Our co-host of The Intelligence and Checks & Balance podcasts writes “World in a Dish”, a fortnightly column in the Culture section of the print edition. He has written about Ukraine’s diverse, unique cuisine and Iowa’s Maid-Rite sandwich, among other treats.
Do you have your own recommendations? Send them to summer@economist.com with the subject line “Cookbooks” and your name, city and country. We will publish a selection of readers’ suggestions.
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未注明 - 1979年。朱莉娅-柴尔德与厨师们一起烹饪。(Photo by Disney General Entertainment Content via Getty Images)
2022年6月7日 (2022年6月22日更新) | NEW YORK
