Inside Jacket

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.”

The label on a bottle of Lea & Perrins Worcestershire Sauce lists vinegar, molasses, sugar, salt, anchovies, tamarind extract, onions and garlic as key ingredients but the true secret is hidden under the guise  of  “spices” and “flavouring”. For 170 years, the specific contents of the popular sauce has been a closely guarded secret. That is until now.

A former employee of Lea & Perrins Brian Keogh, found a valuable treasure in a trash bin outside the sauce company – neatly written notes dating from the mid 19th century,  in two leather-bound folios, detailing the original Worcestershire Sauce recipe.  When Keogh died three years ago, his daughter came across the notes amongst his possessions and is now working with the Worcester Museum to have the notebooks displayed.

According to these notes, the tangy flavour could also come from cloves, soy sauce, lemons, pickles and peppers. The way the sauce is mixed and made  however, remains unknown as do the quantities the noted recipe was intended to make.

Whatever the exact ingredients, ratios, or  blending methods the sauce was, and is, a rip-roaring success. In a 2007 poll, Worcestshire Sauce was named the number one British ingredient to have the greatest impact on the food industry.  Even English chef and restauranteur Marco Pierre White says that the sauce is what enables his to create the ‘the most delicious sauce in the world to serve with beef’.

See what delicious delights you too can create with the supreme Worcestershire Sauce with the help of the The Lea & Perrins Worcestershire Sauce Cookbook !

Two New York cookbooks for the fall, tested in my kitchen.

David Chang is a chef well known for his expletives. Not much has changed with his new cookbook, “Momofuku,” named after the four East Village eateries that bear the name. Expressions like “It’ll be banging” and “A great fucking dish” are scattered through pages like Sichuan peppercorns. My friends and I settled on recreating Chang’s spicy pork sausage with chewy rice cakes. His version at Ssäm bar is delicious. It’s oily and spicy with chewy rice cakes that help sop up the heat. Chang likens it to a combination of Ma po tofu and pork Bolognese sauce. “The result isn’t Sichuan or Korean or Bolognese or anything,” he adds. “But it is very Momofuku. And banging.” Though for an amateur chef, “very Momofuku” translates to “very difficult.” I found myself in Han Ah Reum, a Korean Grocery store, hunting down ssämjang (jarred Korean fermented bean and chili sauce), rice cakes, silken tofu, and kochukaru. Other ingredients, like packaged Chinese fried shallots and Sichuan peppercorns had to be substituted with regular peppercorns and French’s French Fried Onions. One pot, two large pans, and three messy burners later, we had cooked up something delicious. The peppercorns gave it a distinctly Western whiff, which meant it didn’t taste exactly like Chang’s, but still mouthwatering. And that’s the Momofuku spirit anyway, right?

Over on the Upper East Side, we enter the dining rooms of the ladies who lunch where Florence Fabricant has organized the second book in her “Park Avenue Potluck” series. “Celebrations” is culled from the files of society dames who are charitably involved with the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center (partial proceeds will go to fighting cancer). Here you’ll find what to cook for your Easter luncheon and what to serve at your holiday cocktail party. I tried the Beef Stragonoff in a New York Minute on a Tuesday night, hoping for an easy meal. It was. And cheap: the bill at the grocery store totaled no more than twenty bucks. The flavors were old-fashioned—the sauce is a mixture of beef stock and sour cream, thickened with flour and garnished with dill—but tasty. It made me realize that, as the book notes, “thoughtful touches make all the difference.” Rachael Ray’s infuriating “Thirty Minute Meals,” debased by her yelps of “EVOO” and “Yum-Oh” are probably not too different in timing, cost, and taste. But presentation matters. “A New York minute” just sounds so much better.

For those of us who want to eat locally, but maybe don’t have the time to grow our own vegetables, nor the salaries to buy everything at the farmers’ market, Lisa Jervis’s “Cook Food” is a fantastic how-to guide. Jervis, the founder of Bitch magazine, dubs this tiny volume a “manualfesto.” The “festo” part comes at the beginning, when Jervis briefly parses some of the political and environmental issues that face us at the dinner table: how far most ingredients travel, the petroleum and chemicals used in food processing, the mistreatment of animals.

Jervis’s writing has an off-the-cuff quality: she never spells out the word “because” (she prefers “ ’cause”) and sometimes substitutes apostrophes for “g”s (“talkin’ ”). But because she’s inconsistent about it, it registers as laziness rather than kitsch, which I thought only added to the book’s charm. Her whole point is that eating well—in the fullest sense of the term—isn’t all that hard to do. The second part of the book is a kitchen guide and twenty easy, affordable vegetarian recipes. She also has some useful tips on how to save money and effort (for tomato paste: buy the type that comes in a tube; the type in a can goes bad too quickly) and for enhancing flavor (salt early!). PM press, a new publisher based in Oakland, is charging only ten dollars for the book, and it’s well worth it. I’m going to test out her “spicy brownies” recipe tonight, which calls for silken tofu in place of eggs. I imagine it must be quite good: otherwise, I don’t think Jervis would have bothered to write it down.

TV programs such as Cake Boss and Ace of Cakes show us an amazing array of beautiful cakes but there is an equally entertaining side of the cake business — the goof-ups and the downright bad ideas!

Cake Wrecks, a fantastic blog showcasing funny cake bloopers and misguided artistry,  is now available in book form. Cake Wrecks: When Professional Cakes Go Hilariously Wrong by Jen Yates features “the worst cakes ever, including the ugly, the silly, the downright creepy, the unintentionally sad or suggestive, and the just plain funny.”

Featured on the cover is the cake that started it all…