Cook books by world-renowned chefs at massive discounts, videos, and the occasional recipe
By Philip Johnson
In spite of the title, this book has a good range of desserts from the simple weekday pud to the exotic entertaining masterpiece, according to Keith. “Philip Johnson may be one of Australia’s most acclaimed chefs, but the peach and white chocolate bread and butter pudding takes this British classic to another level,” he says.
Stéphane Reynaud is the French author of the acclaimed book Pork & Sons and owner of the restaurant Villa9Trois in Montreuil, France. But this grandson of a butcher has focused his latest cookbook on a less familiar topic: the terrine. The oft-feared dish is technically a mixture of meat, fish, or vegetables that’s prepared in advance and allowed to set in its container before being sliced and served. It is one of Reynaud’s favorites, and he’s devoted Terrine to making the rest of us feel comfortable with it too. CHOW phoned Reynaud in France to ask about his imaginative interpretations of the dish and get some of his recipes. —
What made you want to do a whole book on terrines?
I like terrines because they’re for friends, for a big table. That’s why I wanted to write this book, because I like to share food with people I like. You can have the best food on your plate—if you are alone or if you are with bad people, it’s not so good. For me, cooking is to share with people. Continue reading ‘Stéphane Reynaud Says: Make a Terrine’
Acclaimed Parisian chef Stéphane Reynaud writes beautiful recipes that combine his passion for traditional French cooking with his enthusiasm for modern cuisine. His range extends from simple home cooking to more complex, intricate dishes. In Ripailles, which loosely translates into English as ‘feast’, Stéphane presents the very best of the French kitchen and delves into the origins of French cuisine. With a unique and delicious array of recipes, this is the most comprehensive French cooking collection you will find.
Pork is the world’s most widely eaten meat, the heart and soul of every charcuterie, and many a culinarian’s obsession. From head to hoof, and all the diverse and flavorful meat cuts in between, the pig is the most versatile and efficient animal raised for food. And no one knows more about the selection, preparation and cooking of pork than French chef and restaurateur Stephane Reynaud.
Coming from a long line of pig butchers and farmers in rural France, Reynaud certainly knows his stuff. This spring Reynaud shares his affection, recipes and deep knowledge of the pig in PORK & SONS. The winner of the 2005 French Gourmand Cookbook Award, PORK & SONS celebrates the swine in all its forms, from slaughter to supper. The U.S. release of this unique and remarkable cookbook introduces Americans to generations-worth of expertise and love of this delectable meat.
Interspersed with humorous hand-drawn sketches and over 200 evocative color photographs, PORK & SONS provides insight into the history of the pig, those who raise them, and of course how to flavor, cook and transform pork into an array of mouth-watering dishes. With 150 simple yet flavorful recipes that encompass the whole hog, PORK & SONS includes chapters on ham, pates and terrines, sausage, roasting, barbecuing, entertaining, and wild boar, with recipes for Warm Sausage and Puy Lentil Salad with Herb Marinade; Proscuitto, Arugula and Parmesan Crostini; Pork Chops with Saint-Marcellin Cheese; Parfait of Pig’s Liver and Muscatel; Barbecued Suckling Pig and many other delectable creations. Also provided are complete lexicons of sausage and ham, top sources of pork in the U.S., and a helpful list of alternative ingredients to those readily available in Europe, so cooks can use PORK & SONS wherever they live.
While this quintessential “pig” cookbook celebrates the delicious qualities of pork in all its myriad forms, it also offers a rare, personal glimpse into a day-in-the-life of a small family business in rural France. Part cookbook and part scrapbook, PORK & SONS spills over with warmth and playful charm in its celebration of community, family and food. Reynaud introduces us to the people in his village, including Eric the Pig Farmer, Aime the Butcher, Bibi the Bistro Owner, among the cast of characters. He even takes us to a traditional pig killing ceremony in Saint-Agrave.
PORK & SONS, an affectionate tribute to all things porcine, is the perfect release in this “year of the pig.”
Starred Review. This delightful, affectionate homage to the pig is a blend of cookbook and travel guide, celebrating the pig and the bounty it provides. Reynaud, the owner and chef of restaurant Ville 9 Trois, just outside of Paris, learned about pigs through his butcher grandfather, attending his first pig killing at the age of seven. Now, more than 30 years later, he shares his reverence for tradition and all that the pig offers in this exceptional book. Taking the reader on the journey from slaughter to table, he reveals a rich and rustic world largely unknown to most Americans. Readers meet Aimé, who can butcher a 400-pound pig in just a few hours; Blachou and his faithful dog, Florette, who help out during the slaughter; and the pâté team of Pompom, Kiki and Jacquy. Hearty, mouth-watering recipes—150 in all—range from the more common (Pork Tenderloins with Porcini Stuffing and Super Maxi Royale Choucroute) to the unusual (Pig’s Tongue with Sorrel and Stuffed Pig’s Ears). Sections on blood sausage, ham, sausage making and wild boar will fascinate as well as tantalize. Reynaud offers alternatives for hard-to-find ingredients and provides a list of mail-order butchers in the U.S. and France. Originally published in France in 2005, this collection is a must-have for cooks and food lovers everywhere. 240 color photos and 100 line drawings. (May)
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What makes Pork & Sons (Phaidon 2007) such a fabulous book? Stephane Reynaud writes beautiful recipes that stretch from simple home cooking to fanciful dishes using the whole pig. Jose Reis de Matos‘ marvelous piggy cartoons and excellent photographs by Marie-Pierre Morel illustrated the book.
But perhaps it is the story of the rural folk in Stephane’s home village of Saint-Agreve in the Ardeche, the rugged faces, the passion and purpose, and the very nature of swine that make this book so good. Pig meat is delicious and these people know it. Preparing a pig correctly means turning out the subtle and robust flavors of France. This is a book that glorifies but never sentimentalizes a family tradition.
Last year, the French version won the Grand Prix de la Gastronomie Francaise. It is not hard to see why. Stephane’s restaurant, Villa9trois in the Paris suburb of Montreuil sous Bois specializes in pork. The story starts with Stephane’s tipping his hat to his maternal grandfather, Francois Barbe and his dedication to his butcher shop/charcuterie and his passion for acquiring the best animals. The store passes down to Stephane’s uncle and times change. Animals are no longer butchered on premises, but that doesn’t stop Stephane exploring the world of slaughter, preparing the pig, and the creation of charcuterie.
Opposite a photograph of the chef (pp. 10-11) staring resolutely in front of him, with a simple backdrop of canvas, is a list of details of his first pig slaughter at age 7 and present day at age 40. Not much has changed except a more grown-up meal of wine, cheese, and pate to replace the hot chocolate, bread and butter. Continue reading ‘Stephane Reynaud: Pork & Sons’
theage.co.au | April 24, 2007
French chef and author Stephane Reynaud recently visited Australia and demonstrated his skills in a dying art. Richard Cornish was there to witness it.
Grandma Barbe's roast pork
STEPHANE Reynaud is a big man. He could be a rugby player. He uses his size and strength to lift the 70-kilogram pig onto the rafters of the old barn. In front of a small ensemble of onlookers, the French chef opens his arms and gesticulates towards the carcass and says: “OK! Let’s eat!” There is a silent pause before a relieved chorus of laughter. Reynaud also has a big sense of humour.
He has taken a day off from his busy schedule publicising his award-winning book Pork & Sons to take part in a Slow Food Central Victoria pig workshop. Over the course of the day an entire rare-breed Wessex Saddleback pig is to be broken down, cooked, made into pate, terrine, roasts, grills and sausages. Local farmer Nick Chambers helps Reynaud cut the pig in half.
“How does this compare with your French pigs,” asks Chambers.
“We let our pigs grow much larger to 18 months old and they weigh 200 kilograms, so about 120 kilograms dressed,” he says.
“How many men does it take to cut up a pig in France?” asks an onlooker, a well-known home butcher. “Drunk men or sober men?” Reynaud asks cheekily in reply.
The owner of popular Paris restaurant Villa9trois, Reynaud spent childhood winters with his grandfather Francois Barbe, the butcher in the town of Saint-Agreve in Ardeche, 560 kilometres south-east of Paris. With him Reynaud learned the tradition and etiquette of the traditional French pig kill, taking part in his first slaughter at the age of seven on a day that was minus 12?degrees.
Despite a busy life in the city, Reynaud keeps his rural roots by attending the annual kill in Saint-Agreve and is even part owner of a pig. “I still return to Ardeche to kill the pig with a friend. He is a machine salesman,” he explains. “We do it for the good food and the tradition.
“In a village where people still kill the pig for their own consumption, the animals don’t have names. They do (however) have free-range lives and are eating the produce of the farm,” he insists.
“A friend’s pigs will eat the milk from a nearby goat’s milk dairy,” he says as he cuts off the head and splits it open, reserving the brain. He cuts off the cheeks and places these and the head into a stockpot with vegetables and seasonings to make a terrine. Continue reading ‘The whole hog’
Stephane Reynaud, le chef cuisinier du Villa9trois, propose un réveillon gastronomique et décontracté
Perché sur la colline de la Noue à Montreuil (Seine-Saint-Denis), le Villa9trois a serré les prix du menu de reveillon. A 80€, c’est une affaire. Derrière le nom se cache une cuisine moderne “Le nom, c’est un pied de nez, une façon de dire j’habite la Seine-Saint-Denis et j’assume” raconte le chef cuisinier Stephane Reynaud. Avec son associé Nicolas Bessière, il a quitté il y a près de deux ans son bistrot parisien de la rue Didot. “Un coup de coeur, je voulais de la verdure”, raconte ce lyonnais d’origine, qui a racheté le réputé Gaillard, confortable bâtisse entourée d’un jardin dans la banlieue devenue bobo.
Le service s’adapte :”Il peut être protocolaire, si besoin, poursuit-il. Tous mes produits sont frais. Ils viennent de Rungis et de producteurs que je degotte de-çi, de-là”. L’adresse est donc restée gastronomique, mais le décor à la Chabrol a laissé place à une ambiance contemporaine colorée. La cuisine, elle, mélange les saveurs. Pour le menu de la Saint-Sylvestre, le chef mitonnera des saint-Jacques poëlées au caviar de Sevruga suivies d’une volaille de Bresse pochée. Dans la cave pas moins de cent vingt références de vins. On peut même venir avec son chien, le patron n’a rien contre. Le chic décontracté.
Marie-Pierre BOLOGNA
Written by one of TV’s first celebrity chefs, if you’re not sure what to do with a glut of tomatoes or blackcurrants, this no-nonsense guide to jams and pickles will point the way. “Forget those over-sweet, mass-produced jams and chutneys,” says Keith. “For over a decade amateur cooks have been benefiting from this very usable tome. Most recipes have variations on the mother recipe and Ms Patten’s basic apple jelly easily becomes elderberry, elderflower, geranium or even cranberry.”
Jaffrey’s recipes celebrate the Indian diaspora and its rich culinary heritage. Dishes are as diverse as they are delicious and include western interpretations on Indian food, fish curries from Thailand, fiery Trinadadian flash fries and curried Burmese soup,” says Roopa Gulati. “It was here that I first learnt the ropes of cooking South African masalas for my Durbanborn husband. Even his mum approves of Jaffrey’s boldly spiced biryani, crammed with meaty morsels, veggies, and perky chillies.”
“Bacon is a standard choice for many a simple supper, but there is nothing standard aboutVillas’s book,” states Keith. “The irresistible smell of bacon oozes from the pages, as Villas shows the versatility of bacon, even bacon desserts – for example, bacon and peanut butter chocolate truffles. Vegetarians beware; these dishes could prove too tempting.”
“Nearly 50 years after it was first written this classic, which introduced us to ‘la cuisine terroir’ – what grows together goes together – is still the first book many consult for French classic dishes,” says Keith. “Even if you aren’t tempted to cook any of the dishes described in it, the book is so well written that you cannot fail to be impressed by the variety in French regional cuisine,” he adds.
This book promises “pure photographic decadence and a great insight into the traditions – and recipes – of 14 of the best French chefs”, says Tom Lewis. One to get your creativity flowing, it offers a whistlestop tour through French cuisine, with advice from renowned culinary masters as well as up-and-coming names, and an insight into the varied gastronomic character of each region of the country.
The latest venture from Masaharu Morimoto, the former Japanese baseball-playerturned- chef. This book is “sheer gastro porn” according to Keith. “Fantastic photography highlights innovative healthy recipes and, while luxurious pouches of Caviar tempura may stretch some pockets, everyone can stun their guests with “frozen lettuce” – an original take on a Caesar salad.”
Written by Guy Watson and Jane Baxter, this brand-new book promises “a sensible look at simple meals using British vegetables, in tasty seasonal recipes – many with international influences”, advises Keith. “Beetroot and blackcurrant relish may not be an obvious combination, but it is superb with duck and game. Celeriac and cabbage will never be mundane again!”
Double Michelin-starred chefs might be forgiven for writing books beyond the average home cook, but Everitt-Matthias falls into no such trap, says Keith. “Offering exquisite variations on classical recipes – such as roasted rib eye of black Angus beef with braised lettuce and winkles – all are clearly described with helpful advice for both the amateur cook and professional chef. David makes it all seem so simple. You know it isn’t, but this very reasonably priced book generates confidence.”
The latest book from the head chef at Petersham Nurseries Café in Richmond. This one puts individual ingredients as the star players, wrapping a collection of sure-to-impress recipes (from blood oranges with warm honey and rosemary to grilled partridge with chilli, marjoram and ricotta) around groups of seasonal produce. Gorgeous photography by Jason Lowe and a clear layout make it easy to use, too.
According to Keith, Basan’s compendium of North African dishes is “a beautiful book from an experienced writer who, as with her Middle Eastern books, creates flavoursome recipes set in their social context”. From excellent, spicy tagines to inventive variations on couscous and much, much more, this is sure to “provoke holiday memories,” he adds.
Produced by the team behind one of New York’s most renowned vegetarian restaurants, this useful tome boasts “no enticing pictures, just 175 easy recipes that taste so good, meat eaters mightwell be converted”, says Keith Aris. Don’t be put off by the use of American-style “cup” measurements, he adds. “Just enjoy the proven reliability of these recipes.”
I’m so over being lectured by food writers to honor the seasons and stock up on sea salt and otherwise comport myself virtuously in the kitchen that it was a small thrill to come upon one whose mission is to make us eat fat. Eat fat! That’s a message I can get behind. In fact, Jennifer McLagan’s substantial and by no means unserious FAT: An Appreciation of a Misunderstood Ingredient, With Recipes (Ten Speed, $32.50) makes the same argument Michael Pollan created a stir with earlier this year in his much talked-about “In Defense of Food: An Eater’s Manifesto”: that the craze for animal-fat substitutes has damaged our health. Fat, it turns out, is a lot like TV — nourishing as long as it’s not your whole diet. From time to time you should eat a little salad. (You can toss it with McLagan’s brown-butter or hot bacon dressing.)
In long chapters on butter (“worth it”), pork fat (“the king”), poultry fat (“versatile and good for you”) and beef and lamb fats (“overlooked but tasty”), the author furnishes information on rendering, deep and shallow frying, grating suet, preparing marrow and a host of similar topics, filling the book’s margins with fat-related anecdotes and lore. (“It was rumored that New York journalist A. J. Liebling used a piece of bacon as a bookmark.”) None of which would matter if her recipes weren’t brilliant. Most of them aren’t for neophytes, but they reward the effort.
McLagan’s slow-roasted pork belly (the same cut as bacon, but uncured) cooks on a bed of fennel and onions, saturating them with its juices; then they get mixed with cooked kale. The meat is crunchy on the outside, succulent within; the vegetables sing three-part harmony. A halibut fillet topped with sage leaves, wrapped in prosciutto and cooked on lemon slices grants every element its say, the prosciutto crisping into a salty foil for the fish.
Actually, this dish is easy. So is a smoky bacon-and-squash soup that, as a bonus, freezes well. McLagan’s brown-butter ice cream, on the other hand, is a real pain — you have to cook the butter (being very careful not to burn the milk solids), then make a custard, then let it rest overnight before you freeze it. But it may be the smoothest ice cream I’ve ever tasted. McLagan recommends topping it with her salted-butter caramel sauce — also a pain and unnecessary for the ice cream, though delicious on something else (like your finger). Her spice cookies substitute bacon fat for butter, a notion that may cause an unpleasant tickling in the back of your throat until you taste them: the salt sounds a blue note under the sugary ginger, cinnamon and cloves.
Sara Jenkins has been cooking in restaurants around New York for several years now. (Her latest perch, Porchetta, in the East Village, serves a pork sandwich that’s worth the trip over in a cab. Or a plane.) She has a lovely sensibility, tradition-minded but delicately modern. OLIVES AND ORANGES: Recipes and Flavor Secrets From Italy, Spain, Cyprus, and Beyond (Houghton Mifflin, $35), written with Mindy Fox, offers a few surprises, like a Tunisian salad of grated raw turnips seasoned with nothing more than salt, lime and a little harissa (North African pepper paste) that I would have passed on if she hadn’t talked it up in her introduction. (She says it can sit for as long as six hours, but I liked it even better the next day. Maybe by then I’d gotten used to the idea.) She scatters bacon, onions and sautéed sugar snap peas on top of broiled salmon, and the sweet vegetables caress the salty meats. A simple stew of lamb, grapes and green tomatoes effaces any regrets over your unripe autumn fruit.
Jenkins’s pasta recipes are appealingly straightforward, like one that combines cannellini beans, mustard greens and anchovies and another with flaky fish, almonds and capers. But again, the unexpected: her Turkish-inspired concoction of noodles sauced with yogurt, mint and two pounds of ground lamb, at once sour and creamy, is a meat lover’s dream. Her cloud-textured panna cottas — one scented with orange zest, another with jasmine tea — get that way by being lightened with egg whites.
If such dishes strike you as suspiciously silken, then Andrew Carmellini may be for you. Carmellini is the chef who opened A Voce, in Gramercy Park (he’s since left), and his URBAN ITALIAN: Simple Recipes and True Stories From a Life in Food (Bloomsbury, $35), written with his wife, Gwen Hyman, is full of two-fisted recipes. You get a taste of his culinary philosophy in a question that one of his desserts prompts him to pose: “What could be more fun, at the end of a long, boozy meal, than fluffy doughnuts filled with pastry cream and dipped in chocolate?” (I don’t know. A Zantac?) His Rigatoni Pugliese is goopier, I suspect, than anything you’re likely to sample in southern Italy, with three cups of tomato sauce dousing one unsuspecting pound of pasta — plus a pound of hot sausage, a bunch of broccoli rabe, half a can of chickpeas (he genially excuses you from boiling up dried ones — “no one but the pickiest Pugliese grandmother will be able to tell”) mashed into the sauce and the other half stirred in whole: all in all, the kind of dish you would make Michael Phelps for breakfast. Carmellini’s fennel braised in orange juice and Sambuca (with golden raisins, yet) all but shouts its flavors at you. A rack of pork, beautifully tenderized in brine, gets slathered with a paste of fennel seed, thyme, rosemary, sage and (way too much) salt, roasted and then topped with a sweet sauce of plums and grappa. If that doesn’t wake up your palate, it’s deceased.
Carmellini, however, is a girlie-man fussbudget next to Kenny Shopsin. But then Carmellini is a restaurateur and Shopsin is a diner-eur. His namesake restaurant (now in its third incarnation, in the Essex Street Market) is, despite his loathing of publicity, semifamous in New York for its gargantuan menu and the curmudgeonliness of its owner, who discourses in EAT ME: The Food and Philosophy of Kenny Shopsin (Knopf, $24.95), a memoir-cum-cookbook written with Carolynn Carreño, on the joy of ejecting customers. Shopsin’s writing is much like his cooking: blunt and flavorful. (“When it comes to food,” he says, “subtlety is lost on me.”) His book is a lot of fun to read, though it’s marred by his constant bragging and his tendency to call anybody who doesn’t do things his way dirty names.
He’s big on how-to, laying out the techniques that enable him to deliver on a menu that at times has contained upward of 900 items. His main trick, though — having everything he needs within reach and everything that takes more than five minutes to prepare pre-made and frozen — won’t be of much use to home cooks. As for complexity, his chicken salad is chicken, mayo, salt and pepper. His egg salad is the same thing, with eggs. I cooked up his recipe for Patsy’s cashew chicken and winced at the acridness of too much soy sauce battling too much lemon. Shopsin’s beanless chili, on the other hand, I’ve got absolutely no complaints about. (He doesn’t explain why half a cup of coffee goes in — you can’t taste it, or at least I couldn’t — but it didn’t keep me up.)
I would love to see Shopsin in conversation with Martha Stewart. He’s all about fast; she’s all about perfect, and that takes time — conceivably eons. MARTHA STEWART’S COOKING SCHOOL: Lessons and Recipes for the Home Cook (Clarkson Potter, $45), written with Sarah Carey, may intimidate the novice — it intimidates me. Her recipes for pot-au-feu (“You can make the first stage a day before serving and refrigerate the meat in one container, then strain the broth and store it in another”) or scrambled eggs with caviar in eggshell cups (requiring such specialty tools as a pastry bag and an egg topper) seem less like cooking K-12 than postdoctoral work. Imagine a textbook called “How to Speak French” that took its practice passages from Proust and Derrida.
Michelle Bernstein, whose restaurant mini-empire includes Michy’s in Miami, Michelle’s in Key Largo and MB in Cancún, filters the Latin American flavors she grew up with in Miami through her French training. Sometimes the recipes in CUISINE À LATINA: Fresh Tastes and a World of Flavors From Michy’s Miami Kitchen (Houghton Mifflin, $30), written with Andrew Friedman, struck me as more timid than they had to be — where she calls for half a chili, I’d throw in the whole thing. Her watermelon-and-tuna first course is a visual pun — red on red — but it needs an additional something (more jalapeño, or maybe vinegar) to bring out the contrasting fruit and fish. But most of what I tried I loved. Bernstein enriches a scrumptious “Latina bouillabaisse” with untraditional cream and then brightens it — the perfect touch — with lime juice. Her melt-in-your-mouth oxtail sauce for pappardelle is deepened with cocoa, like a Mexican mole. The eight cups of stock make for a soupy pasta sauce even after it’s thickened with the mascarpone cheese she prefers to Parmigiano-Reggiano, but none of the guests I served it to interrupted their slurping to object.
The British used to be the wretched of the food world; they’re now among its nobles. One reason for that is Simon Hopkinson, the founding chef of London’s Bibendum restaurant and a leading exponent of Modern British cooking (though in his chapter on suet — this seems to be the year for suet — he dismisses that label as a “tiresome moniker”). I’m aware there are those who think Hopkinson writes as splendidly as he cooks, but his mixture of snippiness (“Everything I cook I try to do as carefully as possible; it is a habit born of some quirky desire to sit down and eat something of excellence rather than something second-rate”) and adorableness (“Florence is a little-known city about a third of the way down Italy, with a big church thing in the town center”) sets my teeth oxn edge.
Still, most of what I cooked out of SECOND HELPINGS OF ROAST CHICKEN (Hyperion, $24.95), the follow-up to his much admired “Roast Chicken and Other Stories,” I liked very much. His cold cucumber soup is a snap: cucumber, chicken stock (from a bouillon cube), tomato juice, Tabasco sauce, cream and yogurt, with a few shrimp tossed in and mint and cayenne pepper scattered on top: summer in a soup bowl. A raspberry clafoutis is lusciously rich, and “savory mince” — a traditional British stew that’s something like chili minus the cumin — is gratifyingly oily, owing to the half-pound of bacon that goes in. Braised fennel “à la Greque,” the anise flavor accented with fennel seed and Pernod, is refreshing and lemony, but a more ambitious fennel dish — a pork belly braised with fennel (and the same fennel helpers) — emerged from the oven a pale wet thing compared with McLagan’s majestic roast. It would have been better if I had made it a day ahead: the leftovers, with the flavors melded (and aided by another big shot of Pernod), were much tastier.
Among the English, there’s a strain of lefty loopiness that Mike Leigh captured in his early movie “Nuts in May.” I started to scent it when I read in the introduction to THE RIVER COTTAGE FAMILY COOKBOOK (Ten Speed, $32.50), by Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall and Fizz Carr, that “the fish on Page 227 really was gutted by Mack, aged 9.”I certainly approve of teaching young people to cook (and to eat), but the charm of the book’s friendly pedagogy is crushed under the weight of its political correctness. The recipes don’t call for eggs — they call for free-range eggs. The detailed explanations of different flours, the instructions for growing your own potatoes and curing your own bacon (from free-range pork) seem designed less to awaken an interest in food than to breed cooking nerds. But at least the recipes are meant to be fun. I’d choose the River Cottage’s version of mac and cheese over Martha Stewart’s, since it’s not only less fussy (while still satisfying) — it’s served with bacon.
To end with, an English Christmas present: ELIZABETH DAVID’S CHRISTMAS (Godine, $25.95), assembled by David’s friend and editor, Jill Norman, from articles and papers for a holiday volume the renowned food writer left at her death in 1992. Though David begins by lamenting the season’s “grisly orgy of spending and cooking and anxiety” (“There are times indeed when it’s difficult not to regret the failure of the Cromwell regime’s bid to suppress the whole thing”), she forges ahead all but encyclopedically, with the mandatory stuffed turkeys and roast geese and Christmas puddings and a great deal of information about age-old and sometimes lost traditions. There are also ideas for meals before and especially after the big day, when revelers are likely to feel “a craving for a few vegetables freshly and simply cooked . . . without so much as a sniff of the turkey or ham leftovers.” I tried a couple of sweet-and-sour cabbage recipes, one Italian-inspired, the other a slow-cooking dish with smoked sausage; both were delicious. Encouraged by McLagan’s and Hopkinson’s enthusiasm for suet, I even took the plunge and bought a pound in order to make David’s mincemeat. (I won’t know how it comes out for a few weeks yet.)
Like all of David’s books, this one is even better for daydreaming. The author seems to have viewed it that way herself. As much as she loved thinking about food and sharing it with friends and family, her own idea of a fine holiday was to “stay in bed, making myself lunch on a tray. Smoked salmon, home-made bread, butter, lovely cold white Alsace wine. A glorious way to celebrate Christmas.”
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