Holiday Cookbooks For Foodies

I knew a copy editor at China Daily in Beijing in 1989 who read cookbooks for pleasure. One Chinese recipe after another. 

He was not an adventurous eater (He and his wife sat down to fried eggs and bacon every breakfast of the year they worked at this English-language daily, just as they had at home in New England). But he loved reading recipes for stir-fried lamb with bean paste or sautéed tofu with crab. “The Essentials of Chinese Cooking” by Sumi Hatano, (available then in The Friendship Store on Jiangoumenwai for big money and in American dollars) was a favorite of his, and aside from the color shots of scallop stew and spring rolls, no history, no stories no chit chat accompanied these dishes.

It is still available at Amazon.

Back in 1989, few cookbooks had much to say about anything.

Now there is wonderful writing in wonderful cookbooks that make great holiday gifts for foodies, whether they cook no more than Ramen noodles with a flavor pack or, ambitiously, set out to roast a suckling pig.

A recent favorite of mine is “Momofuku” by chef David Chang and editor Peter Meehan who made the hard-driving Chang and his restaurant tales riveting and who must have convinced censors  at Clarkson Potter Publishers that some of the colorful language was absolutely called for. The book is good to look at with photos by Gabriele Stabile and filled with scary stories about making food  in New York City, about the bureaucracies, the politics, the unions, the gangsters, the critics, the costs, the attempts to steal staff and, scariest of all, the customers.

Chang writes about his development as a cook, about being chastened by a chef after carelessly passing a bad oyster on to a customer, learning to be scrupulous, demanding of himself and everyone who worked for him and coming to understand that “the art of cooking” required above all else, integrity: no tricks, no silly flourishes, no shortcuts. 

And, aside from the great stories, the recipes are adventurous and fun to make. OK, one of them requires two pig ears (singe the hair off first if there is any), but many of the Asian-style recipes here are possible and inspiring. The chicken liver terrine is fabulous, and so is the fried cauliflower with fish sauce vinaigrette.

“Momofuku” is available from bookstores and Amazon. The hardcover there costs $32; used copies are available for $15.49 and the Kindle edition is $8.99.

Another bad boy chef is Anthony Bourdain, who wrote “Kitchen Confidential, Adventures in the Culinary Underbelly,” in 2000. He tells us why we should not attend Sunday buffets, about the incapacitating injuries sustained  by kitchen people in tight quarters with bad tempers, sharp knives and coursing adrenaline, and how the best thing a chef can do is get out of the kitchen, write for a living and make television shows about dining far from home. He abuses drugs, alcohol and, sometimes, people and writes of it all freely. But he has written real cookbooks, too, with useful instructions on the rigors of making things like a traditional brown sauce (it takes days and messes up the kitchen) along with, of course, lusty stories. Take your pick. 

Another book, “Heat,” written by Bill Buford, a longtime staff writer for The New Yorker magazine, is for all the people who have wondered: Could I make it as a professional chef? Buford went ahead and gave it his best shot. He talked his way into Mario Batali’s restaurant Babbo, where the menu offers fresh sardines with caramelized fennel and lobster oil, black spaghetti with Bottarga, gluten-free fusilli and accompaniments such as white truffles, duck eggs, chanterelles. It’s pricey, exacting of its staff and famous. Buford learned how to make glazed fennel, how to stop asking stupid questions (No you don’t have to stir polenta for the entire period of its cooking; A spoon in the pot gives anyone passing by a chance to give it a stir), how to anticipate every step during service, where in the world to get great beef, and how to do good work. “I liked that,” Buford writes. As for opening his own restaurant after his stint with Batali and excursions to places Batali studied in Italy, “There is still much to learn,” he said.

When I was a kid, my family liked a Swedish restaurant in Manhattan somewhere in the East 50s as I recall. What thrilled me was the smorgasbord, how you could pick what you wanted and then go back for more. I liked the meatballs, I liked the pickled herring, I liked the potato salad. So in later years I picked up a Swedish cookbook, the wrong one as it turned out. The recipes leaned heavily on hay, pine needles, rare wild berries with “skye” in the title, foraged on wild mountain tops. My interest waned. Then I came upon “Kitchen of Light” by Andreas Vested. Recipes include home-churned butter, poached salmon with horseradish sour cream and only three recipes requiring lingonberries which are available now, anyway. I mention this book because the recipes are lovely, including the best roast chicken I ever made, and because of the commentaries on things like potatoes, bacalao, curing fish and Nordic customs. And the photos of people: A naked woman wading in a chilly lake, children dressed for Christmas in sweaters with complicated designs, both boys standing in tall rubber boots, cows, of course, and beautiful mushrooms make it a pleasure to look at.

Finally, a note on the tremendous power of cooking. I picked up “The Food of Indonesia,” which helpfully included a map indicating the country’s location, just south of Singapore as it turns out. I might never have seen this book were it not that my mate was offered an interesting job in Jakarta. I was all for it. So was our older child. But our younger, well, not so much. So I decided I would make an Indonesian dish just to sweeten the deal. 

I ruled out spicy fried sardines (in the mid ’80s I could not buy tamarind juice, candlenuts, galangal, shallots or salam leaf around here), Stewed eggplant and fern tips (still no galangal, no fern tips either) and Fish Head Soup for obvious reasons (although we found, eventually, this is a tasty dish). So I settled on making Nasi Kebuli, chicken rice with pineapple. It was missing the lemongrass, of course, the cardamom pods, the shallots, but that was OK. And though it did not brighten the idea of living in Indonesia for a couple of years, my youngest saw that he would not starve (In fact, he learned to like grilled goat, the national dish gado gado and the fact that barkeeps did not hesitate to sell liquor to 14-year-olds).

And not once in two years did we ever come across nasi kebuli. 

I do not recommend this book, but it is actually still available in hardcover for $1.99 and in paperback for  $1.80. All the rest, even “The Essentials of Chinese Cooking” with its terrific egg dishes, are available from Amazon and elsewhere.

And one last word: Books by Elizabeth David, Gabrielle Hamilton and M.F.K Fisher are treasures for people who love to read about food and about the people who make it.