S. Worthen | Weblog

It was like a treasure hunt. We found the address on a sidestreet near the Natural History Museum. Ah, but that was just the ticket desk, where we collected instructions for our next destination, another nearby building. The door was locked. We rang the bell and said the secret password: "Chocolate and Zucchini". With a smile, the door-answerer let us in.

Upstairs, a book launch was beginning in honor of the internet's most charming food blogger and her new cookbook (British edition), Chocolate & Zucchini: Daily Adventures in a Parisian Kitchen. Trays of appetizers, locally prepared from Clothilde's cookbook, greeted the arriving crowd. Soft breads from fruits, bread, and meats were a highlight, but my favorite dish was the zucchini carpaccio, with soft goat's cheese, gently macerated, and eaten on slices of bread, while sipping bubbly. After the main event of the evening, a course of chocolate nibbles followed, a light, moussey chocolate raspberry cake topped with fresh raspberries and crunchy chocolate cookies.

The author gave us a verbal introduction to the blog and the book - how she discovered food as a hobby by moving to another country and seeing food anew through alien stores and restaurants; moving back to Paris; gambling on a book contract to establish a new full-time career as a food writer; the challenges of being one's own team lead; the satisfactions of doing a job which sells people something they want to look at for fun, not just for work.

The audience was primarily in their 20s and 30s. Partially this was a consequence of the blog's audience, partially a consequence of the timing of the event. 6:30 on a Wednesday is likely to be most convenient for students and city workers, although there was a reasonably minority of people who looked to be of retirement age as well. How many other food bloggers whose work I read were represented in that room? I may never know; it mostly didn't seem that kind of social event. We were there for the book.

Thank you for telling me about the different cookbooks you rely on for basic cooking information. I was struck by a few trends in the answers: North Americans - regardless of whether Canadian or American - tended to use the same classic texts as each other. Brits hit all the extremes, from Mrs. Beaton's, which predates all the North American offerings, but with a heavy sample of other cookbooks, new from generation to generation, up to quite recent additions to the fold, with Mrs. Beaton's and Delia being the most frequently mentioned. N.A. has more modern additions, but I'd already mentioned How to Cook Everything (1998) in the post, so perhaps its users refrained from responding because of that.

North American Basic, All-purpose Cookbooks

• The Joy of Cooking
  
• The Kitchen Companion
  
• The Fannie Farmer Cookbook
  
• Better Homes and Gardens Cookbook
  
• Betty Crocker
  
• Elizabeth David
  
• James Beard
  
• Julia Child
  
• A Maida Heatter cookbook
  
• The Settlement Cookbook
  
• The Original Moosewood Cookbook (veggie friendly)
  
• A Roz Denny vegetarian cookbook
  
• Comfort Food
  
• How to Cook Everything

British Basic, All-purpose Cookbooks

• Mrs Beeton's Book of Household Management
  
• Marguerite Patten, Everyday Cookbook
  
• The Penguin Cookery Book by Bee Nilson
  
• Good Housekeeping cookbooks
  
• Pauper's Cookbook (1970s)
  
• (Prue) Leith's Cookery Bible
  
• The Complete Cookery Book
  
• Delia

Other Recommended Highly Versatile Cookbooks

• Larousse Practique
  
• Reader's Digest's The Cookery Year (British, but listed by someone living in the US, so not sure where to list)
  
• Madhur Jaffrey's Invitation to Indian Cooking
  
• The co-op cookbook: Vår kokbok (Swedish staple)
  
• Silver Spoon (Il cucchiaio d'argento; Italian staple, 50s style, recently translated into English)
  
• The Frugal Gourmet on Our Immigrant Ancestors
  
• Rachael Ray's 30-minute books

I grew up with The Joy of Cooking as the staple cookbook in my family, and bought myself a copy once I was living in dorms and needed to start learning to cook properly for myself. I've tried one other basic cookbook - How to Cook Everything and never found it filled as many basic information needs about food as the Joy did. But lots of people swear by it, and that's fine. There are other all-purple staple cookbooks of American cooking too - Better Homes and Gardens issued one which other families I know use. But much as I'm curious as to what other basic, all-purpose cookbooks people rely on in the US - and Canada and all sorts of other countries - what I realized today, when responding to a question which was posed to me by paul_skevington, was that I don't know what the equivalent staple cookbooks are for Brits.

Food more than anything shows up cultural and geographic differences. Why should the Joy have much to saw on the subject of cooking celeriac when it's a rare import food on that side of the ocean? Peanut butter is a staple comfort for many North Americans in a way alien to Brits. Cookbooks more than anything reflect this difference. Also, I grew up cooking with cup measures and sticks of butter, cooking by volume, not by weight. I only recently acquired a kitchen scale, for a while. Really recently - this past Christmas, six weeks or so ago.

So Brits (and anyone else who wants to answer this about their own childhood and their own country) - what are the all-purpose, exhaustive-to-whatever-degree cookbooks you turn to when you need to learn or refresh a cooking basic (how many minutes to boil broccoli, how to truss a chicken)? Did you grow up with it, or find something else, something which better suited your cooking interests, along the way?

Inspired by some combination of the very sophisticated dessert cookbook which arrived in yesterday's mail and a baked egg dish which another group made at the Brunch class I took last week, I baked my first egg yesterday.

I followed an approximation of a recipe in The Gourmet Cookbook (thanks, double0hilly!) and it turned out beautifully. Craving fruit to go with it, I also cooked down some slightly-past-their-prime strawberries into a compote to go with it (with a sprinkling of mint on top). The meal would have been a little too rich and heavy had there been any more of it than there was, but with portions this small, it was just enough.

My version of the Gourmet baked eggs: Preheat the oven to 400 degrees Fahrenheit. Mix two tablespoons of sour cream with a splash of cream, two teaspoons of grated parmesan, a splash of truffle oil, salt, and pepper. Spoon mixture onto bottom of ramikin. Break an egg into another bowl and pour it gently on top of mixture. Bake in a water bath until done, 12-14 minutes.

( Pictures... )

I've eaten plenty of Japanese meals in my life - in restaurants, in homes, in Japan - but today was my first venture into cooking it for myself. Emboldened by the discovery of a nearby Japanese grocery store and an extraordinarily thorough and informative cookbook (Shizuo Tsuji's Japanese Cooking: A Simple Art), I designed tonight's menu around food I was deeply certain I could do reasonable justice to on my first try. This meant no deep-frying, no fish (C. won't eat it), no overly elaborate cutting or animal dissecting, and no recipes which would take more than a few hours at most to finish.

We started with miso soup, a cheat since I had instant packets of it already in the house, so its modest success was no reflection on anything more than my water boiling abilities.

The complication of dinner itself lay in the sauces. Everything required a sauce, but they were all made up of different combinations of soy sauce, sake, dashi, rice vinegar, and sugar, all of which last forever and are thus worth having as staples in the house. The chicken and egg on rice (Soboro donburi) turned out elegantly, although I overcooked the chicken slightly. The beauty of the meal lies in scrambling the egg so that it looks just like the fried ground chicken, the different in colors reduced by the stain of sauce. Even the rice had its own sauce. I made vinegared cucumber (Kyuri no Sumomi) for a salad, the cucumber peeled, seeded, very thinly slices, and, like everything else, soaked in a sauce of its own. We reused the sake for drinks, improvising with our small Finnish drinking cups.

Dessert was wonderful and entertaining. You should all go out and toast mochi / rice cakes! They double, triple, quadruple in size like oversize popcorn or marshmallows under the grill. We ate the mochi with azuki bean sauce (zenzai), delicious, but far too large and heavy after an already substantial meal.

Cooking took about an hour and a half in all, with the red beans cooking the entire time. Next time I would try to make more things in advance, and I would endeavor to have more of an appetite for dinner. Also, next time I will know how long everything takes - that's the cookbook's one major defect - most cooking times are the equivalent of "cook until done". But I would do it all again.

The new Toronto Life Eating and Drinking Guide is now out (and has been for several weeks), so I've been browsing through it. The biggest improvement in this year's guide is the addition of an index broken down by neighborhood - and oh, is it broken down by neighborhood. To find all the recommendations within half a mile of me, I need to look at four or five different neighborhood listings.

Since I was heading down to that stretch of Queen anyways today, I took the guidebook's advice and tried out the Vienna Home Bakery, which the guidebook loves enough to have three different entries. I bought two lemon brûlées, since they looked small and light, unlike the Chocolate Raspberry flourless chocolate cake. They also had date puddings and apple pie in stock when I was there. Most of the display case was filled up with whole pies, way too much food for two of us to eat in the very near future.

The lemon brûlées were tartly lemony, with a smooth custard in a light crust and a burnt sugar topping. Clearly, there's real lemon juice in the custard. They were pleasant, perhaps a little too tangy. If it's convenient, I might go back, but I'm not sure I would go too far out of my way for it. (Then again, my mind's lemon tart category is still won by Café Concerto back in York, a smooth mix of lemonness and sweet without the sharply acid overtones. That's the competition and my ideal for a lemon tart.)

Vienna Home Bakery. 626 Queen St. W. Toronto, ON, Canada. Phone: 416 703-7278
Café Concerto. 21 High Petergate. York, UK. Phone: 01904 610478

A few weeks ago, I began to consciously look for interesting places and ways of reading about food. Having discovered that I really enjoy reading discussions about anything food-related, I looked for recommendations of well-written texts, for much of the joy of reading is in the beauty of the language.

In the process, I discovered a journal called The Art of Eating. It's a quarterly journal with one flat subscription rate for anywhere in the world, a welcome pricing feature for those of us who don't know where we'll be living next year. The journal is one man's pet project, but a number of other writers contribute to it.

My first copy arrived in the mail yesterday and it was, as promised by whatever websites I found the recommendations on, very nicely written, a pleasure to read.

The current issue is themed around Beaujolais, the wines, and the cooking specialties of the greater Lyonnais area. The most striking anecdote in the article thus far dealt with a woman, Mère Brazier, owner and cook for two three-Michelin-rosette restaurants from 1933-1974. (She opened her first restaurant in 1921; it received its third rosette in 1933.) Technically, this means she received six rosettes in total.

Now the Michelin rosette for food is one of the most difficult-to-attain and highly sought after rewards for consistently high-quality cooking in the world, especially in France. Three stars comprise the highest ranking.

Mère Brazier is still, today, the only female chef, the only woman, to ever have received three rosettes from Michelin.

I knew that the world of high-level chefs was still very much male dominated, but not to what degree.

One day, perhaps in the not too distant future, an enterprising, hedonistic sociology student will propose as a PhD thesis ‘Restaurant guides as sociological phenomena’ and enjoy a very pleasant three years.

So writes Nick Lander, foodie and FT correspondant, beginning an article on the changes in British city pub food quality over the last fifty years. What a lovely idea.