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If you’re like me, you know at least one person who reads cookbooks like novels, following the transformations of clarifying butter or simmering broth with the kind of fervor usually reserved for twists of plot. For the foodie who thinks of canapés as literary characters, “The Essential New York Times Cookbook,” by Amanda Hesser, is a sturdy choice this holiday season. Hesser’s book is more than a rehash of Craig Claiborne’s (equally essential, it must be said) “New York Times Cookbook,” of fifty years ago. Although Claiborne’s fingerprints are in evidence, Hesser’s project is an encyclopedic compendium of American culinary history—as she writes, “a fever chart of culinary passions.” Drawing on one hundred and fifty years of recipes that ran in the Times, Hesser—a food writer and editor at the paper—charts the progression of American taste from the nineteenth century, when dishes like Mary Lincoln’s Horseradish Sauce (”presumably conceived before she lost her mind,” Hesser writes) were all the rage, to the everything-in-aspic nineteen-fifties to the dried-cranberries-in-salads nineties to today. With over a thousand enticing recipes, presented in chronological order and according to type of dish, the book is a perfect reference for that friend who not only loves to make food but loves to read about it, too.

As book clubs have increased in ubiquity over the past decade, so too have the culinary demands placed upon the book-club host. Clubs have become nearly as much about food as they are about books, and the food must often submit to the book’s themes. If your book-club friend often finds herself wondering things like, “What drink says ‘Love in the Time of Cholera’ best?” give her a copy of “The Book Club Cookbook,” by Judy Gelman and Vicki Levy Krupp. The cookbook pairs recipes with a hundred popular book-club selections, like “My Antonia” (Spiced Plum Kolaches) and “The Life of Pi” (Tandoori Shrimp), along with a profile of the book clubs that recommended each book, and a discussion of the role of food in the story. Some of the recipes are drawn from dishes described in the books, and many of the authors contribute essays on the meaning of food in their work, making this a great reference for any literary food-lover. And for “Love in the Time of Cholera”? Definitely mojitos.

Sunchoke Velouté
Brown2T butter/onion&leekwt&garlc/sc sunchoke. Simmer +6c Stock/BqtGrni 20m.Rmv grni; puree+wtpep/1/3c crm.

Huh? It takes me longer to translate this squashed scrawl then it would to read a full recipe. Where’s the fun in that? I want a recipe that will explain to me, step by step, in excruciatingly specific detail, how to make a dish. The books contends it is “like Grandma’s favorite cookbooks, only more to the point!” Here is where I decided that too much precision can itself be opaque, the same way that one side of an acute angle is in fact oblique: this isn’t pointed, but pointless. On the front, Laurence Downs declares the book “deliciousness magically packed into the tiniest carry-on bag.” But literature is not a carry-on bag, nor is wisdom. These diminutive conceits remind me more of the mini bottles of water they dispense on airplanes—awfully cute, but they leave me thirsty.

(Image: Miniature Bread Being Cut by Stephanie Kilgast, via Flickr.)

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Potter covers an array of topics, including “calibrating your equipment” in the kitchen, gastronomy, genetically modified foods, understanding pH levels, temperature, and the psychology of taste, while giving readers a refresher in chemistry that is both accessible and (dare I say) fun when applied to specific recipes. He explains that “the primary chemical reactions in cooking are triggered by heat,” and “you can tell when something is done cooking by understanding what reactions you want to trigger and then detecting when those reactions have occurred.” If you’re cooking a steak, for example, he suggests checking the internal temperature with a thermometer: “Once it’s reached 140°F, the myosin proteins will have begun to denature” (when the molecules begin to change shape).

A chapter in the book deals with food safety and understanding how to prevent food-born illnesses, which greatly appeals to the hypochondriac in me. In order to prevent eating foods contaminated by salmonella, which seems particularly pertinent in light of the recent outbreak, Potter explains that salmonella is killed when it is cooked at 136°F, but only when that temperature is sustained for a sufficient length of time. To be safe, poultry, for example, needs to reach an internal temperature of 165°F, the temperature at which salmonella “dies a quick death.”

My task was to recreate my Madrid tapas experience using only this book, ingredients I could find in New York, and my apartment’s comically small kitchen. I invited four guests—ambitious, perhaps—and on the night before the party began the daunting task of choosing which dishes to prepare. At four hundred and thirty pages, “The Book of Tapas” is nothing short of encyclopedic: common Spanish ingredients are listed in a section at the front, and the recipes that follow seem to combine and re-combine these ingredients in every possible permutation. (The book is divided into no-nonsense categories: vegetables cold, vegetables hot, egg and cheese cold, egg and cheese hot, etc.) As a start, I eliminated anything that required a deep-fryer (so long, croquettes) and recipes calling for hard-to-find sea creatures (baby eel, octopus). My guest list included one vegetarian, so I needed a mixture of vegetable and meat dishes. And because I did not want to spend the whole party in the kitchen on a hot summer night, I decided to choose several tapas that could be prepared ahead of time and served chilled.

I settled on olive caviar, mushroom and olive salad, baked cheese sticks, and melon balls with ham, all of which I would make before the party. After the guests arrived, I would duck into the kitchen to whip up patatas bravas and fried green asparagus with garlic, vinegar, and paprika. All but one of the ingredients were easily found and purchased Whole Foods. For my beloved serrano ham, I was happy to trek to Despaña, a Spanish food boutique in Soho. While I waited for the ham to be sliced, I tasted dozens of cheeses set out on sampling tables throughout the store.

It couldn’t be a better time for a food book of this sort, or of any sort. People have the munchies for culinary writing. Celebrity chef reminiscences, diet books, cookbooks, food travel books, memoirs through meals: they’re ubiquitous, and they capitalize on the simultaneous dawn of a national obsession with obesity and of the era of “foodies,” slow foods, and gourmet everything-under-the-sun. The two trends initially seem at odds. One encourages us to expand the borders of our taste—to eat more things, new things—and the other seeks to restrict that taste. But, as far as I can see, they’re aligned: both, like circling ravenous wolves, make our conversations revolve around food, make us think about it, talk about it, write about it, worry about it, deny it, and, in a Pavlovian way, make us primed to eat more of it. It’s a recursive cycle, and its influential geometry casts doubt on the idea that what people snack on says terribly much about them, whether they are Joe Schmo or Joe DiMaggio. The truth is, we’re omnivorous beings who will down almost anything (just ask that kid in my fifth grade class who favored glue and gummy erasers; or Ray Charles, whose family consumed “everything on the pig but the oink”) and what we eat over the course of a lifetime is, more often than not, what we’ve been told to.

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)