But one other book claimed part of the spotlight this season. For the first time there was a national contest in which home cooks-rather than professionals–could vote for their favorite cookbook, and they chose Sharon Tyler Herbst’s “Cooking Smart.” This book, subtitled “Recipes, Tips, and Techniques for Really Using the TimeSaving, Work-Saving Gadgets in Your Kitchen to Make Delicious Food,” has chapter headings like “Appeteasers” and “Soup for All Reasons” and features uncomplicated recipes jammed with chic ingredients: wild mushroom salad with hot brie dressing; garlic mayonnaise with jalapenos. Two notable cookbooks, one of them up-to-the-minute trendy and the other steeped in tradition - but take another look. Which is which?
“The Splendid Table” may look like an excursion into history, but it captures today’s culinary Zeitgeist so perfectly it could be tucked into a time capsule dedicated to food fetishes of the 1990s. Kasper spent 10 years researching and writing about the food of Emilia-Romagna, the area south of Milan where Parmigiano-Reggiano cheese, Proscuitto di Parma and balsamic vinegar originated. Clearly, she’s obsessed-publicizing her book at a recent specialty-foods show in New York, she served her admirers chunks of a sublime Parmigiano-Reggiano doused with a rare balsamic vinegar, all the while lecturing passionately about how the vinegar was made. But this obsession with glorious traditional ingredients makes her utterly contemporary. These days the most with–it chefs look to the past, seeking out farmers who use Old World methods to come up with produce, poultry and cheese of exactly the quality Kasper revels in. What’s really old-fashioned nowadays is to rely totally on modern agriculture.
Despite Kasper’s emphasis on authenticity, this is a book for ordinary cooks (OK, ordinary cooks with time on their hands). The directions are admirably clear and comprehensive, and she suggests substitute ingredients whenever feasible. Many dishes are daunting–one pasta stuffing involves cooking a pot roast for three days–but some are a cinch, including her shrimp stuffed with crumbs and parsley and her excellent buttery cornmeal cookies. Armchair cooks-who will relish her way with culinary history and lore–will have no trouble with the recipes at all.
The cookbook that belongs on the history shelf is “Cooking Smart,” which sprang to prominence after Julia Child, on behalf of the International Association of Cooking Professionals, announced on “Good Morning America” that viewers could vote for their favorite cookbook by mailing in a ballot available at bookstores. Some 5,000 people responded. Why did they pick “Cooking Smart”? Because it’s the kind of fancy cooking Americans have loved for more than half a century. Born of women’s magazines and nurtured by a stream of new products, America’s snazziest cuisine has long represented the triumph of ambition over common sense. Sixty years ago, cooks dressed up string beans with mushrooms, egg yolks and cream. Years later the dish had become a casserole of frozen string beans, canned mushroom soup and canned onion rings. Now comes Herbst: she restores the fresh string beans and mushrooms, adds sundried tomatoes, stirs in milk, sherry and Gouda cheese-and arrives at much the same dish.
This is company cooking, every lily gilded beyond recognition. Herbst fills baked apples with sausage, cinnamon candies and cranberries, tops them with whipped cream and syrup, and serves them with gingerbread pancakes. She revises baked alaska so that under the meringue, where cake and ice cream used to nestle, guests find papaya and raspberries. She makes “Aztec Salad,” “Thai Risotto” and “Pina Colada Bread.” It’s no surprise this book is a hit: the food is just what many people like, and it’s easy to make. But the real feast is reading Kasper on Emilia-Romagna. With her bountiful knowledge of the region and its food, she’s written a book as sumptuous as the dishes themselves. Herbst’s readers will be dazzled. But Kasper’s will be enlightened.
