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Crisis of faith
Scientists who use evolutionary psychology to explain religion are ignoring facts and missing the point.
By Margaret Wertheim
[12/24/99]

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"I May Not Get There With You: The True Martin Luther King, Jr." by Michael Eric Dyson
What would the civil rights leader think if he were alive today?
By Dante Ramos
[12/24/99]

Ivory Tower
Are you there, God?
The Templeton Foundation invests millions so scientists might prove that faith works. But their answers aren't what Sir John Templeton wants to hear.
By Lawrence Osborne
[12/24/99]

Tempting fate
Connie Willis' science fiction tackles time travel and chaos theory with Wodehousian wit.
By Polly Shulman
[12/23/99]

Christie for Christmas
Desperate for more Agatha Christie? Now there are two "new" mysteries by the late queen of clues.
By Jacqueline Carey
[12/23/99]

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For years, my fridge contained exactly three staples: a six pack, cat food and a giant tub of low-fat margarine. But once I moved in with my spouse, a guy who actually knew the proper way to season a chicken and how long to boil a potato, I felt the need to get up to speed. A friend who managed a Williams-Sonoma shop offered two simple words of advice --"Silver Palate" -- and I never looked back. With its folksy illustrations and simple, friendly instructions, the seminal volume from caterers-turned-authors Julee Rosso and Sheila Lukins had me whipping up fruits de mer pasta and carpetbaggers steak like a champ in no time.

Today, the pages in my 9-year-old copy of "The New Basics" are obscured in some parts with thick white smudges of dough, rendered translucent in others by big dollops of olive oil and butter. Mostly, however, they're brown. Depending on what section of the book I'm perusing, the brown may be a light, basalmic vinegar hazel, a deep soy sauce auburn, a creamy biscuit gravy chestnut or an unmistakable dark chocolate mahogany. Even the parts of the book that aren't stained have the weather-beaten look of pages that have sopped up more than their share of milk, water, white wine and chicken broth. In short, it's all shot to hell.

While it's admittedly disgusting, the condition of my cookbook is also pretty handy -- the encrusted, wrinkly pages with the recipes for salmon croquettes and Grandma Clark's soda bread practically open themselves when I need them. And they remind me that even though over time I've managed to become a pretty decent chef, I'm still also the same slob my beloved first fell in love with all those years ago.

-- Mary Elizabeth Williams

Buy "The Silver Palate Cookbook" at B&N.com

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Fields of Greens: New Vegetarian Recipes from the Celebrated Greens Restaurant
By Annie Somerville
Bantam, Doubleday, Dell, 437 pages

I'm not a vegetarian, but too many salmonella warnings have left me with an abiding horror of raw meat, especially chicken, which in its uncooked form reminds me of the monsters that come slithering up the cellar steps at the end of H.P. Lovecraft stories. (Besides, I'm not up for the hassles of cleaning up after it -- you practically have to don a decontamination suit and spray down your kitchen with liquid nitrogen.)

So vegetables it is, and Deborah Madison's "The Greens Cookbook" it was, for a year or two, until I got tired of recipes that, even if they turned mere produce into ambrosia, all seemed to take three hours to prepare. Then along came Annie Somerville's "Fields of Greens." (Somerville was, like Madison, a chef at the famous San Francisco vegetarian restaurant.) Somerville has Madison's sorceror's touch, an uncanny knowledge of which little additional ingredients -- diced olives, lemon zest, saffron, chive blossoms -- will punch a pleasant vegetable pasta dish into indisputable scrumptiousness. One of the recipes here can transform stolid, sulfury broccoli into something downright yummy (it's the broccoli and roasted red pepper linguine) and another manages, through the heroic deployment of a whole head of roasted garlic, to make lentil soup taste like something other than clay. But Somerville's recipes, with some exceptions, are less time-consuming and fussily demanding than Madison's.

Somerville has never written another cookbook, and when ordering a copy of "Field of Greens" off the Web for some friends, I noticed several forlorn reader reviews indicating that I'm not the only one dismayed by this. A comeback is definitely in order.

-- Laura Miller

Buy "Fields of Greens" at B&N.com
salon.com | Dec. 27, 1999

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