Every year around this time I get lost in the forest’s worth of food books released before the holidays, most of which would best serve as kindling. But often there are a handful of extraordinary ones I’d proudly give as presents. A resurrection of the lost art of punch making, a tombstone-size monument to Nordic haute cuisine, and a collection of kitchen atrocities from metalheads are among my ten favorites this year.
If anyone but Harold McGee said it was OK to disinfect water with household bleach I wouldn’t believe it. But that’s just one of the tips offered here, in the follow-up to McGee’s indispensable food science reference, On Food and Cooking. His latest book is designed to help readers navigate recipes, even the best of which he calls “incomplete description of a procedure that has worked for the recipe writer.” It contains not a single recipe, focusing instead on just-the-facts info on ingredients, tools, techniques, and food safety. Some of it is patently obvious but much more is not. This ought to become the source its owners consult to clarify butter, stabilize egg foam, or relieve anxiety about grain safety. Seems destined to be developed into an iPhone app.
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
Thai Street FoodDAVID THOMPSON(TEN SPEED PRESS)
Yet another elaborately designed (it looks like a rice bag), encyclopedic food book from Phaidon, this tome is almost too heavy to drag into the kitchen. It boasts 1,000 regional recipes—including a section from Indian chefs living around the world—gathered over 20 years by a former foreign policy professor. With lotus root curry, dal stuffed wax gourds, chicken stuffed quail, and a universe of breads, rice dishes, pickles, chutneys, and raitas, it’s much more practical for the home cook, as big as it is, than Street Food of India.
Some 800 restaurant industry professionals voted Rene Redzepi’s Noma restaurant “Best in the World” last year, but I have to admit I’d never heard of it. This tome convinces me I need to get to Copenhagen. Redzepi’s aggressively seasonal and local approach in northern climes makes some of the most disciplined U.S. students of the Alice Waters school look like slackers. You won’t be executing most of these recipes—you’d have to chop down a tree for birch stock, forage your own sea buckthorn, or shoot your own musk ox. The chilly composed beauty of the photographs and obsessive technique in the recipes are a mindfuck.
