Cookaholics Bulletin Board

Annoyingly, when you order cookbooks through Interlibrary Loan, you have no control over when they show up ... and they tend to show up all at once. So I've been trying to swap off my three cookbooks, and suddenly another one has arrived.

I've been reading through Claudia Roden's Jewish Food. So far, so good; I haven't had a chance to cook anything from it yet, but it's full of stories, background and ingredient histories, so it's a fun read. The book is in two major sections: Ashkenaz and Sephardi. I flipped through the first section (boring) and headed straight for the Sephardi, which has Georgian, Spanish, Lebanese and Turkish Jewish food. Anyway, passover is next week, so I should have some chance to cook from it.

On the other hand: Southern Comfort arrived today. I should know better than to take up a Southern cookbook named after a cheap, mass-produced whiskey whose authors are named "Rushing and Rushing" (Allison Vines Rushing and Slade Rushing, no less). Possibly if the book was named for what it is -- Southern Fusion -- I'd be less disappointed in it, but as it is, I'm returning it to the library right away. Some gems:

• Hush Puppies with Caviar
• Shrimp Sausage Wraps with Lime Dipping Sauce
• Sweet Potato Pappardelle with Rich Shitake Sauce
• Oysters Rockafeller "Deconstructed"
• Muscadine Wine Jello with Tropical Fruit

It's hard to tell if the authors are being creative or appalling without trying to make a few of the recipes, and I don't have time. My guess is that, since they bounced back and forth between NYC and NOLA, they've munged the two cities together with their cuisine. "Gotham on the Bayou" would have been a better title.

Fuzzy,

I'm surprised you would show interest in a southern CB, given their love for pork, as well as fried foods.

This subject reminded me of a cookbook I received in 2009 to review and am still impressed by how thorough and great it is. It's "A Tradition of Soup" by Teresa Chen and she discusses in great detail the history, health features, ingredients, and recipes for soups from the Pearl River Delta, which is where a large number of Chinese immigrants come from. Photographs are gorgeous and her explanation of ingredients is especially good. Not sure how well it sold so am not sure if it's in the libraries, but if you ever run across it, well worth your time to look at it.

Lindsay,

Thanks! I'll look for it!

Dave,

Well, I have a love for strong flavors and fried foods. So I like catfish, shrimp, grits and collard greens. I just try to stay away from the pork. Besides, if you think about it, Southern food is the first really "American" cuisine we have (chronologically speaking).

So Jim Lahey* did a "No-Knead Pizza" cookbook, called simply enough "My Pizza". As you'd expect, the first 10 pages cover making pizza dough where you just barely slap together the dough, and then let it sit for 18-24 hours.

Anyway, I decided this was a good approach for sourdough pizza. So I didn't exactly use his recipe, but I did use his general approach. It worked pretty well ... allowed me to make pizza dough using high-protein flour which was still easy to handle and roll out when it was ready. The one drawback is that because the flour wasn't uniformly incorporated, it was hard to get a really good stretch on the dough.

The rest of the cookbook is recipes for toppings. He also has some salad recipes in the back ... the one I tried was a "shaved asparagus and avocado salad". It was tasty, but hard to prepare and not very picturesque.

Overall, recommended if you know somebody who's obsessed with either pizza or no-Knead bread. Otherwise not very exciting.

(* of "No-Knead Bread" fame. Not to be confused with Jim Lahey of the Canadian reality show "Trailer Park Boys", or Tim LaHaye, whose writing is equally crusty, but quite different.)

Further to Lindsay's review of "A Tradition of Soup", this was the first book I could not cook from due to lack of ingredients being available. Half of the book is the sociology of soup in a myriad of uses and then come the recipes... I've made a lot Keller's from scratch but this book beat me - from techniques & ingredients. My town of 250,000 has a few Oriental groceries but I was unsuccessful in getting key ingredients for those few recipes I thought I could manage!

Wino, that reminds me of the problem Cook's Illustrated always had - when you work on international cuisines do you print recipes calling for authentic ingredients or ingredients that can be more easily found. The latter argument always won - at least while I was there - but I guess that made me more appreciative of the books that took the risk to be authentic at the possible cost of popularity.

And speaking of authentic, I just finished reading Deborah Madison's new book, Vegetable Literacy. I thought it was great - not very many recipes but rather she discusses vegetables (including grains and beans, by the way) in the context of their genetic families. She emphasizes that the relationships mean that not only can they often be substituted for each other but that the same compatible flavors that work with one member of the family will probably work with the others. In other words, she encourages experimental cooking on a rational scientific bases. One of the few cookbooks I actually have read cover to cover in the living room.

Did you try the bake and then broil approach? I do that now and love it. Just have to watch to make sure I don't set the pizza on fire.

and, to be fair, Trailer Park Boys, is not really a reality show. Although there's a character on it that reminds us of a high school friend of my husband.

Lindsay - thanks for that! My library has 2 copies on order so I am first in line!!

My favorite CI international recipes were always the ones that gave the option for the exotic ingredient or the substitute. I'm thinking of recipes like their Pad Thai and Hot and Sour Soup.