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)

We have a salt fetish, Adam Gopnik writes this week, because we want to bond with the pro cooks. “Why does my food never taste as good as yours?” I once heard a woman ask a chef at Blue Hill Stone Barns. “Salt,” he said. “And butter.” And so, Gopnik says, if you’re lacking a prep chef who will nimbly dice an onion into perfect squares, or a centrifuge, you can “still salt hard. And so salt, its varieties and use, becomes a luxury replacement, a sign of seriousness even when you don’t have the real tools of seriousness at hand.”

But who will teach us how to salt? For if there is any graver sin than over-cooking a dish, it’s over-salting one. Enter Marco Canora, the chef behind the East Village restaurants Hearth and Terroir. “When most people watch me salt a pot of boiling water for the first time, their reaction is disbelief,” he writes in his new cookbook, “Salt to Taste.” Simplicity is key: “I don’t think you need a fancy stove to cook great meals.” As if to prove it, there’s a photograph of all the equipment you will need to prepare his recipes. And despite having trained with Tom Colicchio at Gramercy Tavern and Craft—in addition to a stage with the famous Florentine chef Fabio Picchi—Canora says his mother and his sister “probably taught me more about cooking than anyone else.”