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Oversexed, talky and inspired | page 1, 2
Seduction and Spice: 130 Recipes for Romance By Rudolf Sodamin
Kitchen Suppers: Good Food to Share With Good Friends By Alison Becker Hurt Doubleday, 308 pages
Essentials of Cooking By James Peterson Artisan, 299 pages
Don't you hate people with opinions? I do. Anyway, many cookbook authors seem to believe that their readers are either four-star chefs or idiots with catchers' mitts instead of hands. Fortunately, James Peterson is able to conceive of a middle ground where readers know the culinary basics but want to learn more: hence his Essentials of Cooking, which contains 250 "core techniques and recipes" and more than a thousand photos. And finally! Photos that aren't beautiful -- that are even ugly when they need to be! I'm through with gorgeous photography that does nothing besides raise the book's price and prove that the publisher could afford a food stylist. Here, instead, is a sort of Field Guide to Culinary Technique, with close-ups of hands doing everything hands need to do in the kitchen -- chopping garlic, poaching seaweed, peeling roasted beets, de-tendoning chicken breasts, butchering a double rack of lamb ... Peterson explains: Because I've wrecked entire afternoons screwing together my own garden furniture and bookcases, it's easy for me to imagine one of my poor readers, string in hand, trying to truss a chicken and after ten minutes, forgetting trussing and moving on to strangling. So I decided to illustrate certain techniques with an almost obsessive number of color photographs. I've tried to make the photographs cheery (see how easy this is!) and life-like -- they were shot under real-life conditions in my cramped Brooklyn apartment -- so that if the going gets rough, things won't seem utterly hopeless. But his work is so clear that it's hard to imagine going astray with this book in front of you. The only concession to art (and I mean this in a nice way) is the page of photos facing the Acknowledgments. Everything else is clean and well-lit, like a Clinique ad, but supremely utilitarian. "Essentials of Cooking" is organized in the same sensible way. It has only six chapters: "Basics," "Vegetables and Fruits," "Fish and Shellfish," "Poultry and Eggs," "Meat" and "Working From Scratch." ("Working From Scratch" shows you how to gut a fish, by the way.) Technique is what's emphasized, not recipes. "Once you've gotten a handle on roasting, poaching, grilling, frying, steaming, sautéing, and braising, you'll know how to cook most food, and if you understand the logic of how these techniques work, you'll be able to improvise intuitively and give your own special style and identity to your cooking." Not necessarily; you can have plenty of technique and still lack the improvising gene. But once you've learned the technique it's a lot easier to go to conventional cookbooks and steal their improvisational skills. I can't imagine saying this about many other cookbooks, but "Essentials of Cooking" really is essential. Even if you think you already know enough about cooking, I command you to buy a copy right now. Ann Hodgman's column on cookbooks runs every month, alternating on Fridays with Melanie Rehak on poetry, Polly Shulman on science fiction and fantasy and Jacqueline Carey on mysteries.
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