Inside Jacket

Yesterday’s rumor that Taylor Swift plans to release a cookbook has to be false. Because what kind of just God would allow her to master cookbook-worthy recipes, like beef bourguignon or Earl Grey soufflés, when I’m still struggling with overcooked chickens and awkwardly chewy kale?

This rumor also recalled for me an odd-sounding cookbook mentioned in passing in Adam Gopnik’s recent article: “Monet’s Table: The Cooking Journals of Claude Monet.” Is the idea behind such a book, I wondered, that a genius in one art would lend itself to another? That a balance of colors, or chords, would translate to spices and salts? A little research turned up a host of similar offerings, including a series whose titles sound more like a Sotheby’s auction than a sumptuous meal: “Cézanne and the Provencal Table,” “Renoir’s Table,” and “Van Gogh’s Table: At the Auberge Ravoux,” among others. (The latter was a particularly off-putting offering, to my mind, tainted by the legend that the ravenous Van Gogh’s culinary experiments in those days may have involved such appetizing ingredients as absinthe and lead paint.) Only then did I realize these books were an answer to the oldest party question on the planet: if you could have dinner with any person in history, who would it be? These cookbooks offer a secular transubstantiation, a séance in which, by eating the bread and the wine of our idols, we can, so to speak, invite them to the dinner table and have them pull up a chair. So I’m doing a little research, hoping to uncover some hearty whale-meat recipes, so that I can conjure the ghost of Melville for my Thanksgiving meal. Bon Appétit!

(Image: Vintage Thanksgiving Day Postcard by Dave)

In honor of this week’s Food Issue, I dove into Patricia Tanumihardja’s “The Asian Grandmothers Cookbook.” The title appealed to me because I suspected that an Asian grandmother’s cooking would be far tastier than my well-meaning Russian-Canadian Jewish grandmother’s (memories of watery chicken soup and moldy cakes). The success or failure of a grandmother-themed cookbook seems heavily dependent on whatever culture that grandmother hails from. It sounds particularly enticing if one has French roots—cuisine grand-mere—or Italian—la cucina di nonna—or, indeed, Asian.

Tanumihardja writes in her introduction that she “never really knew her grandmothers.” Yet this book, subtitled “Homecooking From Asian American Kitchens,” is clearly a paean to the role grandparents play in passing on the culinary traditions of their ancestral culture. Tanumihardja suggests that while a first-generation Asian-American mother might opt to prepare all-American meatloaf, a grandmother could be relied on to whip up Caramelized Pork Belly and Eggs Braised in Coconut Water (Thit Kho). The recipes in the book spawn from cultures as disparate as Korea and Cambodia, and have the potential to clash. It would be a mistake, for instance, to serve Vietnamese Fried Shrimp Toast (Banh Mi Tom Chien) alongside Nepalese Nine-Bean Soup (Kawatee). According to Tanumihardja, though, the recipes cohere in that they “represent a universal theme—they tell the story of our immigrant past.”

This week in the Food Issue, Adam Gopnik ponders why we read cookbooks. Here, I consider two of the more puzzling I’ve come across: Heston Blumenthal’s “The Fat Duck Cookbook” and Ferran Adrià’s “A Day at elBulli.”

Some cookbooks are an attempt to capture the heart and soul of a chef. Others are like a pornographic lens focussed on a seat at the table of the reservation you’ll never get. Every year, should you attempt it, you have a .4-per-cent chance of securing a reservation at Ferran Adrià’s restaurant elBulli. It claims to receive two million requests annually for eight thousand spots. (I check the elBulli Web site every week—a futile gesture, I know—but there are worse fantasies in life than wanting to fly to Spain to eat a three-starred Michelin meal, right?) elBulli, which charges two hundred euro a head, actually loses money on the restaurant. It’s only through Adrià’s speaking tours and book sales that he is able to balance the costs of running the restaurant, which operates just a hundred and sixty days a year, has only fifteen tables and fifty guests per day, but employs a staff of a hundred and thirty-six.

So why do we read his book? “A Day at elBulli” opens with beautiful photographs of the ocean, with the sun sparkling off the tops of the waves. “Not every day is the same,” it tells us, “but there are many like this…” The recipes included in the book are flights of fancy, a reading exercise in the bizarre—those ice cubes are…snails?—unless you know where to find Amaranth, an ancient grain commonly eaten in Mexico and the Himalayas, and have four hours to spend on a recipe for honey-roasted nuts. But the book, like all Phaïdon books, is beautiful (we might never look like Kate Moss in those Calvins, but we still want them). And elBulli, book form, comes across like a haute version of “Top Chef” in that even though we’ll never get to taste the food, Adrià—from thousands of miles way—makes us think we know exactly what he did right.

“Acid trip” is not typically a flattering description for a book, but “The Fat Duck Cookbook,” by Heston Blumenthal is not interested in presenting food you know and love, including the food that Blumenthal serves at his own restaurant. “I want to make that,” my friend exclaimed, pointing to a bouquet of chocolate grapes dripping on a page. It’s a recipe for chocolate wine, and half-way through we are halted by the instruction: “Spin the mixture in a centrifuge at 4000rpm for 10 minutes to separate the heavy solids from the wine.” But the bough of dripping chocolate grapes are only a fabricated illustration, and a picture of the real glass of chocolate wine on the opposite page looks decidedly less alluring and less bacchanal. Either way, Blumenthal is a scientist gone mad in the kitchen, a point he makes by decorating his book with lots of crazy illustrations of his brain: on one page, his brain is a literal flavor bank, swollen to four times its normal size, with little drawers full of different ingredients. In another section, his brain folds out onto four pages, sliced open and ready for us to examine like surgeons, with mushrooms, snails, and onions sprouting from the membranes. Eating my food, Blumenthal seems to be saying, is like picking my brain.

Whatever you do, don’t bother cooking from these books. They’re purely aspirational, extended and very expensive postcards. They’re intended to sit on your coffee table, to be used like the television when the guests are over, hungry.

This week, the Food Issue hits newsstands. We sent our writers home with new cookbooks and other culinary-themed reads to see how they measure up. Here, Vicky takes on Thomas Keller’s “Ad Hoc at Home” and Michael Tucker’s memoir “Family Meals: Coming Together to Care for an Aging Parent.”

Family dining occasions can be fraught affairs, a condition two cookbooks, both inspired by aging parents, address in distinctive ways. “Ad Hoc at Home,” by Thomas Keller, the precision-loving chef of French Laundry and Per Se fame, is inspired by his larger-than-life father (Adam Gopnik discusses the book in the magazine this week). “Family Meals: Coming Together to Care for an Aging Parent,” by Michael Tucker, the semi-retired “L.A. Law” actor turned writer turned Umbrian ex-pat, recalls the challenge of cooking for a difficult mother-in-law. For baby-boomers struggling to nurture failing parents in the absence of intact family networks and functional social structures, both books, brined in memory and embroiled in necessity, make consoling reading as Thanksgiving looms.

In Tucker’s engaging food-and-family-filled memoir, Tucker and his wife, the actress Jill Eikenberry, are hoping to leave New York and retire to a three-hundred-and fifty-year old house in Umbria, where they plan on cooking for friends and enjoying the cuisine at the numerous family-run restaurants and communal sagras. But the move would involve leaving Lora, Eikenberry’s mother, who suffers from dementia and is prone to slugging her caregivers, behind. The problem of feeding her looms large. It is solved, in part, by looking to the Italian model of the extended family. “In Italy,” Tucker writes, “especially in the countryside—if a child has moved out of the house before the age of thirty-five, Mama has some explaining to do.” Tucker and Eikenberry’s daughter, a caterer, moves to New York and lets her parents hire her to cook for her grandmother, an arrangement which happily allows the whole mishpacha to unfry from time to time.

Keller’s journey in caring for his father, meanwhile, inspires him to recreate, with a little help from dedicated staff, the comfort food of his youth; the heavy-lifting large-format cookbook that ensues includes recipes from Ad Hoc, Keller’s casual restaurant in Yountville, California. His familial cooking odyssey begins with a moving description of the last meal Keller cooked for his dad before he died—barbecued chicken with mashed potatoes, collard greens, and strawberry shortcake—and ends on a sweet note, with desserts, which Keller deems “the most child-connected course,” declaring, “When I have a bite of Coconut Cake, I’m returned to a time when my mother, long deceased, baked me cakes and I didn’t have a care in the world.”

What is it about competitive cooking? Even Michelle Obama appears bewitched. She recently hosted an episode of “Iron Chef” in the White House garden (airs January 3rd). And yet, as Michael Pollan has pointed out, televised cooking contests are turning cooking into something of a spectator sport. Enter The Piglet, a tournament of cookbooks hosted by the new online recipe forum Food52. This tournament, inspired by The Morning News’s Tournament of Books, pits sixteen of 2009’s best cookbooks against each other. Each match is judged by a different food writer or chef, who tests out recipes from two books and reports back with a winner.

So if you’re waffling between the “Momofuku” cookbook, by David Chang and Peter Meehan, and “Simply Fresh Southern,” by Matt and Ted Lee, you might want to consult the play-by-play (Momofuku wins!). This week, Grant Achatz (of Alinea fame) will choose between “Canal House Cooking” and “Real Cajun.” Or, if you’re only interested in the best cookbook of the year, the one that emerges unscathed from several rounds of rigorous competition, look out for the final selection, which will be made by Nora Ephron and announced in a public trophy ceremony at the Astor Center, in New York City, on Monday, November 9th.