I have a music stand in my kitchen that I use to prop up books and recipes within eyeshot when I’m cooking. It’s made of sturdy, heavy metal, but even so it tends to accumulate so many grease-stained papers and swollen tomes that at any given time walking through the room will set it tilting and swaying like a drunken crane. It’s certainly no match for the Yellow Pages-size cookbooks that publishers release every year around this time, apparently leveling whole forests in the process.
Edited by Ruth Reichl
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
(Houghton Mifflin Harcourt)
(Phaidon)
In 1999 Keller set an impossibly high standard for untold numbers of home cooks (not to mention plenty of pros) with the publication of The French Laundry Cookbook. This one, though just as weighty, seems designed to make you feel better for not for not having days to master the chef’s so-called Quick Duck Sauce. Boost your confidence with recipes for home-style foods as inspired by Keller’s casual Napa Valley restaurant, Ad Hoc, itself inspired by staff “family meals.” Dishes like fried chicken, grilled cheese, and split pea soup imply that simplicity is the rule, but Keller aims to perfect these familiar foods with the application of solid technique and careful preparation, and there aren’t many shortcuts. There are instructions for pulling mozzarella and confiting pork belly, but what I like most are his solid and sometimes quirky deviations from the norm: pretoasting roasts with a propane torch, grinding your own beef, using pigskin parchment paper, and finger pinches instead of measuring spoons. This would be regularly useful if scaled down from its 11¼-square-inch format.
My New Orleans: The Cookbook
