Nearly every food book issued this season lives in the long shadow of Grant Achatz’s Alinea. But here are several fine volumes you might want to have a look at between skinning juniper berries and straining fennel stalk gelee.
Along with other mammoth tomes by virtuosic toques like Achatz, Heston Blumenthal, and Thomas Keller, this 527-page volume by Spain’s padrino of techno-emotional cuisine seems part of a collective attempt to demystify the culinary movement of the moment. The handful of recipes included aren’t meant to be duplicated with much success by the average home cook, but along with the many photos and manifestos they do illustrate the technical, organizational, and creative genius required to operate the most original restaurant on the planet. If you’re among the millions every year who try and fail to get reservations at El Bulli, this could be as close as you get.
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This cookbook by Jose Garces, who’s behind the local Catalan-inspired Mercat a la Planxa as well as Basque and Andalusian tapas joints in Philly, is fun to look at but you probably won’t use it much. The recipes require effort and patience—although Alinea makes them look like child’s play—and there’s a relative dearth of food porn to spur the ambitious home cook into action. Mercat regulars won’t find many of their favorite dishes here, either. But because the chef’s pan-Latin influences meld together so fluidly and compellingly, this is a worthwhile document of how to innovate and still respect tradition.
Fourteen years after the publication of Charlie Trotter’s, the first book by the city’s granddaddy of fine dining (and the Alinea of its day), comes this reissue of Charlie Trotter Cooks at Home—an anti-Alinea specifically designed not to call attention to the reader’s mere mortality. Now as in 2000, it’s his most accessible how-to since 1997’s Gourmet Cooking for Dummies. The demographic for this book may not have the knife skills, or the mandoline, necessary to execute the potato pave or vegetable lasagna, but there’s a range of classy recipes—braised leek soup with oyster mushrooms, duck breast-spinach salad with ginger-soy vinaigrette, cardamom beef stew, poached peaches with champagne granite—easily mastered for everyday eating.
PANCAKE: A GLOBAL HISTORY
Martin Picard
Ten Speed Press, $32.50
