Sharpen Your Kitchen Skills With These 7 Cookbooks
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Mastering the Art of French Cooking
In Pursuit of Flavor
The Flavor Equation: The Science of Great Cooking Explained in More Than 100 Essential Recipes
Roast Chicken and Other Stories
I divide my home cookbook shelves into groups that likely make sense only to me. There are sections for current flames and sentimental oldies, a big one for cuisines of the world, and smaller nooks for fermentation, slow cookers and pressure cookers, grilling, and cocktails. But the section where the books are clearly the most loved and well worn is an entire shelf that could be labeled "techniques for good cooking at home." They are the rock-solid books I turn to again and again, the ones that I give as gifts, and those that make up a big part of what I've come to understand about cooking. Here are a few favorites.
- Photograph: Amazon
Mastering the Art of French Cooking
by Julia Child, Louisette Bertholle, and Simone Beck (Alfred A. Knopf)It may be a weird bit of cultural inversion, but so much of what I learned about French cooking when I lived in France came from this book by its beloved American authors. In fact, right after my mom's home cooking, Julia Child's PBS show was my first real exposure to a larger world of food. Some of my earliest memories involve the two of us watching The French Chef and Sesame Street together. When I lived on my own, MTAoFC was one of the first cookbooks of Mom's that I shamelessly walked off with, and a fantastic choice. One of my best friends likes to repeat the embarrassing/flattering story about how the bouillabaisse I made from the book as "the best thing she's ever eaten" in her charming British accent. I might not necessarily believe her, but know the real credit goes to Mrs. Child and company.
- Photograph: Penguin Random House
In Pursuit of Flavor
By Edna Lewis (Knopf)For the last few weeks, my copy of this book keeps flipping open to the recipe for panfried quail with country ham, and I can think of little else … except maybe also her cheese soufflé, which combines a sharp Vermont cheddar and a bit of Gruyère. Lewis knows how to stretch good flavor. I recently made her "thirteen-bean soup," which, she assures, can be made "with six kinds of beans, or three kinds, or eight," and with smoked pork shoulder or streak of lean, it makes an easy but sophisticated soup. While American food media loves to get in a lather over scalloped potatoes around the holidays, Lewis' Christmas table features escalloped oysters, shucked and breaded, then lavished with butter, cream, and sherry. I'm a particular fan of her opinions about the way things should be done, along with her encouragement. "A lot of people are intimidated by the idea of making a soufflé but shouldn't be," she says, before affirming the simplest advice. "Just try one."
- Photograph: Chronicle Books
The Flavor Equation: The Science of Great Cooking Explained in More Than 100 Essential Recipes
By Nik Sharma (Chronicle Books)I'm a recipe loyalist. This means I always try to cook a recipe as written before I attempt any freestyling. But even with a longtime favorite recipe, I'll eventually wonder how I could make it better, easier, or more flavorful. Could I brine those pork chops? How could I sear all that lamb shoulder faster? What if I replaced the cooking water with a broth, or vice versa? Nik Sharma seems like a guy who asks himself these kinds of questions over and over again. Look, for example, at his recipe for crispy carrots with garlic and mint tahini, where young carrots are cut in half lengthwise. This creates a flat surface for you to cook, giving you more browning per carrot, and more area for crunchy rice crumbs to cling to. Along with that tasty tahini, the carrots are dusted with amchur powder—dehydrated unripe mango—a wonderfully puckery counterpoint to the sweetness of the carrots. If you're at the point where you're looking for a cookbook where the author has already asked themselves how to make their recipes better again and again, The Flavor Equation provides the answers.
- Photograph: Hyperion Books
Roast Chicken and Other Stories
By Simon Hopkinson with Lindsey Bareham (Hyperion)The titular recipe neither disappoints nor turns out to be a “regular” roast bird. To keep it moist and encourage crispy skin, you use your hands to slather a stick's worth of softened butter all over it, something Julia Child—who once cooked a rotisserie chicken almost entirely covered with bacon to keep it juicy—would almost certainly endorse. A celebrated London chef, Hopkinson has a gift for translating what he knows into useful information for home cooks in ways that are somehow chummy, encouraging, pedagogic, and infectious. I became a green-sauce addict thanks to him—try his cream of coconut, cilantro, mint and cumin combo he calls “green paste.” (My margin notes for that one just read, "bonkers good.") Or try his anchovy studded take on its cousin, salsa verde. Speaking of anchovies, this is the book where I learned about turning bits of anchovy fillet into little umami bombs in non-fish foods. In his roast lamb, slivers of garlic, anchovy halves, and little rosemary sprigs go into a dozen two-inch incisions in the leg. Just “push all of them right in with your little your little finger.” (NB: You're better off buying a used copy of this title. Both the paperback and hardcover versions are easy to find used, while “new” copies of this older book are sometimes oddly inflated.)
- Photograph: Hachette
Jacques Pépin New Complete Techniques
By Jacques Pépin (Black Dog & Leventhal Publishers)I always like joking about the cute way the illustrative overhead photos in this book draw attention to Jacques Pépin's hairy forearms, but I really love the way this cookbook combines the best bare-bones cooking methods (which you could teleport into someone else's recipe) and has a whole Basics section for common tasks like peeling tomatoes, cleaning leeks (a personal struggle), holding a knife or mincing an onion, teachings most cookbooks skip right past. Trimming a tenderloin? Its in there. Carving that roast chicken? Here's how. There's certainly an old-school French lilt to the book, but many of the techniques in Techniques are in there because they're the best way we know to do it. As he says, “creation in the kitchen follows your mood. Some days are clear and sunny, some dark and cloudy. The only constant is technique.”
- Courtesy of Penguin Random House
Rodney Scott's World of BBQ: Every Day Is a Good Day: A Cookbook
By Rodney Scott and Lolis Eric Elie (Clarkson Potter)For all the cookbooks about barbecue out there, up until March 16, 2021, none of them were written by Black pitmasters, a horrible omission. Yet Scott's motto is “every day is a good day,” and this is a book full of optimism and technique. I'm a big fan of page 95, where a lifetime of grilling knowledge is summed up in nine precise paragraphs. He is a fan of a clean grate; vent management; and temperature control, especially in the low 200s Fahrenheit for long sessions and between 400 and 450 for quicker cooks. Scott is a whole-hog specialist and the centerpiece of the book is about 20 pages devoted to instructions for building a pit with cinder blocks, rebar, and 14-gauge welded wire mesh, then cooking the pig. After that, he swaps to recipes that can be done in home grills and smokers. There's a nice restraint to his cooking which favors a small list of good ingredients, rubs, and sauces over showy excess. (For more from Black pitmasters, and check out writer Kevin Miller’s Black Smoke, and keep an eye open for Bludso's BBQ Cookbook slated for release in early 2022.)
- Photograph: Chronicle Books
The Bar Book: Elements of Cocktail Technique
By Jeffrey Morgenthaler with Martha Holmberg (Chronicle Books)As someone who embraces the nerdier, more esoteric side of making cocktails, renowned barman Jeffrey Morgenthaler is no stranger to WIRED. His The Bar Book is my go-to for simpler reasons: it's practical and I learn when I use it. The back cover gives a great sense of what you're in for as the three biggest words on it are, “That's Right: Techniques.” Those techniques start off each chapter, and are followed by a few drinks to put that new knowledge to use. Photos by Alanna Hale are employed in a perfect ratio between how-to and whistle whetting. The Book gives details without getting so bogged down that you want to put it on the nightstand and close your eyes. In a defense of using metric measurements in some circumstances, Morgenthaler leavens the learning with a tale of James Bond's enormous Vesper cocktail from the Casino Royale novel, which he reckons has more than 2.5 times the amount of booze as most modern cocktails. This book hits the sweet spot for people like me who make cocktails for special occasions and appreciate a bit of coaching so it comes out just right.
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