Appetite for Reading

illustration by Lisa Kirkpatrick

Cookbook sales are soaring and the consuming public still seems hungry for more. What's a publisher to do now that most of the world's identifiable cuisines have been recorded for posterity several times over? The new trend in cookbook publishing appears to be the "reading cookbook," which offers receipts and reminiscences, hints and history, pie recipes and slices of life. Publishers are betting that foodies have an unsatisfied appetite for stories and anecdotes about cooks and cooking. Consequently, this year's publishing catalogues all feature a few cookbooks that could keep us company all afternoon curled up in an armchair or make delicious bedtime reading long before they've been used in the kitchen. Recipes haven't become obsolete or even secondary; it's just that in some instances actual food writing seems to be making a comeback.

The cuisine of Italy is still very much a hot literary property. Two accomplished authors have new books this year that warrant a good read. Because of my high regard for her previous books on Italian breads and appetizers, I was predisposed to favor Carol Field's new work, In Nonna's Kitchen: Recipes and Traditions from Italy's Grandmothers (Harper/Collins, $30 hard). Field spent months in Italy interviewing le nonne (the grandmothers) about traditional peasant recipes as they are perhaps the last generation of women in that country to live an exclusively rural, agrarian lifestyle. The author presents the women lovingly, sharing their recollections and recipes with respect and admiration that befits "the keepers of memory and the providers of many of the sacred moments of everyday life." Sample, for instance, the profile of Guilia Tondo, who has homes in Viterbo and Roma. Guilia grows fruit in the garden of her house in Rome and turns it into fruit syrup to flavor her grandchildren's bibite (soft drinks) and jams for the fillings of sweet crostate (tarts). Field says of Guilia, "She wouldn't eat a proscuitto that was cured for less than eighteen months, or a piece of veal from a calf whose life history she did not know" because of her father's admonition never to eat meat "if you don't know the butcher as well as you know your brother." Guilia Tondo's recipe for pasta di crostata a quadratino appears just before her profile and, just for a moment, reading about her made me wish for a little ethnicity in the grandmother department.

Those who subscribe to the idea that the French were initially taught to cook by the Italian chefs brought to French court by Catherine de' Medici at the time of her marriage will be pleased to find the de' Medici name still associated with good cooking several centuries hence. The latest in the oversized "Beautiful" cookbook series is Italy Today -- The Beautiful Cookbook (Collins, $50 hard) by Italian cooking teacher/author Lorenza de' Medici, an exquisitely photographed collection of contemporary recipes from many of the regions of Italy. While the coffee table format would make this a daunting read at bedtime, Italy Today can provide hours of enjoyment with award-winning journalist Fred Plotkin's informative text and the simple, straightforward recipes and the elegant photos for inspiration. Mangia!

It seemed entirely appropriate that two books on the subject of American regional cooking should arrive at my home while I was researching the state of "home cooking" restaurants in Austin. By far one of the best books I've encountered on the subject is Betty Fussell's I Hear America Cooking (Penguin, $16.95 paper), recently out in paperback. Fussell is a tireless researcher with an encyclopedic knowledge of American foodstuffs who manages to impart that knowledge in personable, engaging prose. Fussell traveled to six distinct regions of the country: the desert Southwest, the Louisiana Delta, the tidewater Carolinas, New England, the Great Lakes region, and the Pacific Northwest. She chronicles the definitive flavor, smell, and feel of the folk customs and traditional dishes of each, offering faithful renditions of their recipes, histories, and voices. This book is an informative treasure.

On the other hand, we have the newest gigantic recipe collection from former Silver Palate gourmet shop owner and current Parade magazine food editor Sheila Lukens. Her U.S.A. Cookbook (Workman, $19.95 paper) is a compendium of over 600 (ugh) recipes the author re-created during her travels around this country. Lukens and an assistant traveled across America, attending fairs, eating in local restaurants, and sampling rural cuisines, then they cooked up their own versions of the dishes they'd encountered for the book. I approached this book with trepidation because Lukens' similar treatment of world cuisines, the All Around the World Cookbook, was uniformly considered a disaster. Unfortunately for the reader, Lukens' prose is somewhat flat and self-absorbed. Actually, there may be some good recipes in the U.S.A. Cookbook, but it would take hours of sifting through a mishmash of ultra-trendy fusion silliness (e.g., "North Carolina barbecue in corn tortillas with pineapple relish and cilantro") to find them. Though I was committed to reading the whole book, I periodically came across recipes so unappealing or unnecessary (e.g., "Picadillo Meatloaf" or "Cinnamon Toast: bread, butter, cinnamon, sugar" -- duh!), I was tempted to fling it across the bedroom, yelling "Who edited this mess?"

Harmony and good humor were ultimately restored as I joined chef/restaurateur Joyce Goldstein's Kitchen Conversations (Wm. Morrow, $25 hard). The former chef at Chez Panisse and until recently chef/owner of the highly regarded Square One restaurant in San Francisco, Goldstein provides eager home cooks with the opportunity to engage in kitchen conversations about balancing the flavors of each dish with an experienced, thought-provoking teacher, herself. She begins with a very informative treatise about taste, flavors, and training the palette, encouraging the reader to deconstruct each dish to better appreciate and balance flavors. There is also an equally informative section on matching food and wine according to taste components by the author's son, Sommelier Evan Goldstein. Evan's wine suggestions follow the kitchen conversation about each dish. Goldstein's expertise is in Mediterranean cuisines, but the beauty of what she teaches is that cooks can apply the same knowledge of how taste elements work to bring flavors to their peak with any food. A must-read that could change the way you think about cooking, take it into the kitchen in a hurry.

The Julia Child Cookbook Awards committee chose Spirit of the West: Cooking from the Ranch House and Range (Artisan, $35 hard) by Beverly Cox and Martin Jacobs as the best book in the American cookbook category in 1996, and rightfully so. Beverly Cox is a fourth-generation Wyoming rancher who studied cooking at Le Cordon Bleu and already has one award-winning cookbook to her credit. This lovely book is her second collaboration with excellent food photographer Martin Jacobs, and the chapter introductions are by Western historian David Dary. Cox provides simple, robust dishes that have satisfied cowpokes, ranch hands, vaqueros, and cattle barons, tracing the mythic history of the American west through the foods eaten by those who settled it. She begins with recipes brought from Mexico by the first western ranchers and comes all the way to mouth-watering dishes served at the dude ranches of today. The authenticity is unimpeachable and the simple photography evokes the aroma of cowboy coffee and bacon frying on a crisp desert morning.

As a person who has made a fair number of pies, I'm always interested in new books about them. My new favorite pie book is by Pat Willard, entitled Pie Every Day: Recipes and Slices of Life (Algonquin,$19.95 hard). I especially love Willard's rationale for learning to make pies when she was a newly married writer working as a waitress at the BarTen Restaurant in Ravenna, Ohio. This was her thought equation: My husband loves pies + I learn to make pies = We will be forever one. It seems to have worked; the book is dedicated to him. In among the 30 crust recipes and 118 ways to fill them, Willard weaves stories and anecdotes about her family and friends who shared their tales and recipes for this charming book. It all makes for a reading experience as comforting as a generous portion of pie.