Spring food books are sprouting up like sweet peas and stinking onions, and I’ve been indoors, digging into them instead of my own little patch o’ dirt. Here’s a half dozen of my favorites, in no particular order—I’ll run down a bunch more over on our blog the Food Chain.
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Based at the Center for Sustainable Environments at Northern Arizona University, Renewing America’s Food Traditions (RAFT) is an alliance of organizations devoted to identifying and rescuing heritage animal breeds and heirloom plants. The group’s second book is a beautiful encyclopedia of beasts and verdure that, owing to their obscurity, you may well never get to eat (though recipes are included). Guided by the principle of eater-based conservation, which holds that to survive such species must be reintroduced to consumers (and eaten) rather than treated like museum pieces, editor Gary Paul Nabhan and contributors cover dozens of once-secure native foods—Palmer’s saltgrass, the Tennessee fainting goat, Snake River salmon, and the Southern Queen yam, to name just a few—and document efforts to save them. But this otherwise admirable project isn’t helped by the dewy-eyed preciousness of its tone, and it’s outright harmed when the information presented is wrong—Nabhan, for example, contends that there are only 150 purebred mulefoot hogs left when in fact there are at least three times that, probably more.
In this appetizer to the Chicago couple’s forthcoming South Beach wine bar, Enoteca Spiaggia, each of ten chapters focuses on a traditional pairing of libations and small plates found in a particular European city—Venetian Bellinis and cicchetti, for example, or the pinchos and sherries of Seville. It’s more accessible to the average home cook than 2004’s lavish Spiaggia Cookbook, with sections on cheese, cured meats, and how to source quality prepackaged ingredients. Simple but not strictly traditional recipes for things like Sicilian arancini (stuffed deep-fried rice balls), Florentine tripe, or Portuguese cataplana (a seafood stew) are punctuated by a few extravagances, like Barolo risotto.
TERRINE
Until now the story behind Fuschia Dunlop’s remarkable regional Chinese cookbooks, Land of Plenty (Sichuan) and The Revolutionary Chinese Cookbook (Hunan), remained in the background. But this memoir tells the tale of how the British Sinophile went from working a stultifying gig as a socioeconomic analyst to being a passionate student and interpreter of Sichuan cooking—in fact, she was the only foreign student in the provincial capital’s culinary academy during the last gasps of Maoist seclusion. Her gradual seduction by what she calls “the spice girl among Chinese cuisines, bold and lipsticked, with a witty tongue and a thousand lively moods,” provides terrific cultural context for both of her previous works.
