Tuesday, April 29, 2008
Screen Doors and Sweet Tea By Martha Foose
Screen Doors and Sweet Tea By Martha Foose
Buy This Book
2009 James Beard Foundation Awards Nominees
Screen Doors & Sweet Tea, by Martha Hall Foose, hardcover, 256 pages
The 10 Best Cookbooks for Summer
After flitting from Mexico to India and other equatorial points, this year the summer's warm-climate cookbooks centered on the American South. The best of many contenders is Screen Doors & Sweet Tea, a wisecracking, storytelling treasury of Southern dishes, both the well-known (cornbread, lady peas, juleps) and the slightly less familiar. Some, like Apricot Rice Salad, have an elegant, dinner-on-the-porch feel. Others (All for Okra and Okra for All), are resolutely egalitarian.
Foose has a marvelous gift for the pithy turn of phrase, and all of her recipes carry intriguing subtitles: "Proper Fried Chicken: My Thoughts, at Least," "Lunch Counter Egg Salad Sandwich: Ode to Waxed Paper," "Baked Macaroni and Cheese: A Vegetable in Some States."
As I see it, there are two ideal ways to enjoy this book: 1) Pick out your favorites, cook your way through them one by one, and gorge yourself silly; or 2) sit on the porch and read it while somebody makes you a julep. Either will do just fine.
June 1, 2008
Thursday, April 17, 2008
Jewish Home Cooking By Arthur Schwartzs
Jewish Home Cooking
By Arthur Schwartzs
2009 IACP Cookbook Award Finalists
And
2009 James Beard Foundation Awards Nominees
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Visit Arthur Schwartzs
Arthur Schwartz's Jewish Home Cooking: Yiddish Recipes Revisited
Schwartz (Arthur Schwartz's New York City Food) breathes life into Yiddish cooking traditions now missing from most cities' main streets as well as many Jewish tables. His colorful stories are so distinctive and charming that even someone who has never heard Schwartz's radio show or seen him on TV will feel his warm personality and love for food radiating from the page. Oddly, even the shorter anecdotes often run longer than the actual recipes; anyone intending to cook from the book should have some kitchen experience or risk frustration at the often brief instructions. Dishes run the gamut from beloved appetizers like gefilte fish to classic meat and dairy main items (cholent, blintzes), plus less familiar items like onion cookies and Hungarian shlishkas (light potato dumplings). Schwartz intersperses engaging commentary on everything from farfel and matzo to Romanian steakhouses and why Jews like Chinese food. Those with Westernized palates may recoil at the thought of gelled calf's feet, but Schwartz shows how stereotypically heavy Ashkenazi food can be improved and made at least somewhat lighter when prepared properly. Cooks and readers from Schwartz's generation and earlier, who know firsthand what he's talking about, will appreciate this delightful new book for the world it evokes as much as for the recipes. (Apr.)
SeeTuesday, April 8, 2008
Georgia Cooking in an Oklahoma Kitchen by Trisha Yearwood
Georgia Cooking in an Oklahoma Kitchen
by Trisha Yearwood
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SOUTHERN COMFORT: If you are looking for a cookbook by a hardier hungry girl, you could do worse than snag a copy of Trisha Yearwood’s superb “Georgia Cooking in an Oklahoma Kitchen: Recipes From My Family to Yours.” (It is No. 9 on the advice list.) It’s a smart, generous, friendly and no-nonsense comfort-food primer. Yearwood, a country singer who is married to another (Garth Brooks), put her book together with her mother and sister, raiding her family’s bountiful store of recipes. There are some almost dainty things to eat here (cheese straws, a minty Greek salad), but Yearwood isn’t playing to the foodie cognoscenti — she’s not afraid to use canned ingredients when the moment seems right, and she’s great on toothsome Southern classics like fried chicken, pink salad, pork ribs and something she calls “cooked-to-death green beans.” Yearwood won me over when she suggested (for her mashed potatoes) pulling out a pressure cooker, an old-fashioned device that’s wonderful for flushing out food snobs. I haven’t seen one since the glorious kitchens of my youth, my mother’s and my grandmother’s. Mine’s been broken for years. It’s time to buy another.
