Inside Jacket

Sad but true: “The Frankies Spuntino Kitchen Companion & Cooking Manual” sat unused in my apartment for months before I finally cracked it open. My husband and I live half a block away from Frankies Spuntino—the much-lauded Brooklyn restaurant of Frank Falcinelli and Frank Castronovo, a.k.a. the Franks—and, when faced with the prospect of spending four hours making tomato sauce versus putting on our shoes and walking fifty feet, we opt for the latter every time. We’re a little lazy; also, Frankies has a much better wine selection than we do. But my husband loves the meatballs at Frankies—they contain both raisins and pine nuts, just like his mother’s—and when I heard the book had made the final round of food52’s Second Annual Tournament of Cookbooks, I decided, at long last, to give the meatball recipe a try.

Actually, there are two meatball recipes in the cookbook: the one used at Frankies, and the original on which it is based. The original comes from Tony Durazzo, a friend of the Franks and an unofficial consultant of their restaurants, and his recipe is different in that it calls for frying the meatballs. It also, like most recipes in the book, has a backstory that is equal parts information and noir: “On first meeting, Tony told Frank, ‘I’m not a cook.’ It was only partly the truth.”

I opted to go the baked, not fried, route. And really, the four-hour tomato sauce is no joke—Frankies does Italian food right, which means slow. But I’m an impatient cook who consequently burns almost everything I make, so I walked across the street to the Prime Meats deli (an outpost of the restaurant of the same name, also owned by the Franks), and bought two containers of the sauce, pre-made. I am a cheater.

Once the ill-gotten sauce was simmering, I combined wet bread, ground beef, garlic, parsley, grated Pecorino Romano, raisins, pine nuts, eggs, bread crumbs, salt, and pepper into a meaty paste, which I rolled into clumps about the size of racquet balls. The whole batch fit on one cookie sheet, which needed about twenty-five minutes in the oven; once the bake time was up, I transferred them all into the saucepan.

They needed to soak for half an hour; with time to kill, I poured myself a glass of red and thumbed through the rest of the Frankies story. It was then that my husband came home from work and surveyed the scene. “I’m not embarrassed to admit it,” he said. “This? Is hot.”

Even hotter: the meatballs were fantastic. I’m trying sausage with peppers and onions next.

I will say it up front: If you are one of the hundred and fifty subscribers to MilkMade, the subscription-only ice cream service mentioned in a recent Times article about exorbitantly expensive ice cream, you probably don’t need to read this post. MilkMade is among the most exclusive—and by far the priciest—of high-end ice cream providers that have popped up in the city over the past few years. Fifty dollars will get you just three pints of flavors like Blackcurrant With Gingersnaps or the free-trade Coffee + Donuts delivered to your home over a period of three months.

For everyone else (or anyone living outside of Manhattan, the only place MilkMade delivers), “The Ciao Bella Book of Gelato and Sorbetto” is a good alternative. The book, too, has a fancy pedigree—its recipes come from a downtown store whose gelatos also place on the Times’ list of the city’s most expensive. As a cookbook, though, it is deliciously down-to-earth.

The book is colorful and inviting. Recipes range from “American Favorites” like Mint Chocolate Chip to more exotic “Uniquely Ciao Bella” flavors: Red Bean, Saffron Spice, and a fancy selection of gelato cakes. Thankfully, these are all straightforward to make. Most gelatos stem from a single custard base, which is then mixed in with other ingredients. The base can be tough to master—I undercooked one custard and then boiled another before getting the right consistency—but the book’s clear instructions provided good support.

Making ice cream is a time-intensive process. It requires cooking, chilling, and churning in an ice cream maker—and then chilling again. Several of the recipes took a full twenty-four hours to come to creamy completion, but I was grateful for the indulgent reward. The Grapefruit Campari sorbet tasted like an elegant cocktail, and the Crème Fraîche gelato made the perfect accompaniment for a peach cobbler. The texture, too, was unexpectedly rich. Gelato, the book explains, is denser than traditional ice cream, which accounts for its thick consistency.

If I have one complaint about the book, it is that the serving sizes are uneven, and rarely produce as much as promised. Might the company have made an error in reducing the ingredient quantities from industrial recipes? I don’t know, but it is too bad. With ice cream that precious, one can’t help feeling greedy.

Flipping through the exquisite photographs in Simone and Inés Ortega’s “The Book of Tapas” made me instantly nostalgic for a week I once spent in Madrid. I remembered plentiful, inexpensive wine; olives of every shape and hue; ham so good I was still stuffing it in my mouth when I got on the plane to leave.

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.

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.”

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.”