Silver Case

My kitchen shelf has all the Jamie Oliver cookbooks. They’re dog-eared, stained, and used.   Jamie Oliver makes me hungry.  Every recipe has an attractive photo and alluring descriptions of its clean, simple ingredients.   There are few Jamie Oliver recipes that require too much technical ability. The few things that do (making risotto, raw pasta, pastries) he manages to describe well enough and describe a just-dumb-enough recipe that generally works.  His real magic is demonstrating time after time that simple, high-quality, fresh ingredients in a simple recipe is just as fast and tastes better than regular fare. He also repeatedly shows how simple, quality ingredients (olive oil, fresh herbs, real parmesan, etc) turn a routine dish into a memorable dish.

Nigel Slater has a similar approach.  He makes up for fewer sexy food photos by writing great prose. I enjoy reading his long recipe descriptions that tend to be more like essays or journal entries than a conventional recipe.  He emphasizes simple, fast recipes made from fresh, simple, pure ingredients.

The Reference is undoubtedly Mastering The Art of French Cooking.  This is The Seminal. Have a question? It is answered in beyond-amazing detai.  Have any western European dish in mind?  It has that recipe plus six variations.  Does it make me hungry? Never. It’s like a textbook. There isn’t a photo to be found, it’s all hand-sketched diagrams of butchering spatchcock chicken or rolling poulet bread.  This is very much a reference book to consult when you know what you want to cook.  It’s absolutely essential, but not inspiring. For instance, reading its sections on meat gravies was critical to me finally making a decent turkey gravy.  Learning how to cook beautiful crepes also came from its recipes and techniques. No one else comes close in explaining these things.

The latest food writer I’ve discovered [hat tip to RogerWarez] is Alton Brown, who is principally a TV host.  I downloaded all eight seasons of his “Alton Brown’s Good Eats” tv show from the Food Network.  He created a very unique niche in food programming.  He generally takes one dish or cooking problem, breaks it down into the technical theory behind it,  and then explains a very well-tested and effective solution for it.  It’s wrapped in vaguely loopy, tacky entertainment, but the core of his show is really good.  I really appreciate the level of technical accuracy he introduces to the cooking concepts.  Some of my best technical successes have come from him recently, including a deep fried turkey, barbequeued ribs, and king crab.   His cooking is very US-centric. These are foods we’ve generally all eaten but maybe have never prepared (for example corn dogs).

I have all his episodes but have only watched a small fraction. I’ve used them more like reference works when I need something in particular and if I am free I’ll watch others for inspiriation. (The episode about chili is beckoning me next).

I am sure my mom is wondering why I haven’t mentioned our perennial Everyone’s Friendly Uncle, Jeff Smith, the Frugal Gourmet.

This entry was posted on Monday, February 5th, 2007 at 11:08 pm and is filed under Alton Brown Good Eats, Food, Uncategorized.You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.