Inside Jacket

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.

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.