I like cookbooks, but I rarely use them. I find it entertaining to page through the recipes, imagining what this or that may taste like, but after that initial page-through I never seem to open them again. My wife on the other hand, she loves cookbooks. They give her a rigid system in which she can produce a delicious treat.
The inherent problem with most cookbooks though is this: The recipes are in control. So what happens if you don’t have that recipe anymore? Or what happens if your recipe calls for white wine and you’ve only got red? Then what?
Well, in my wife’s case, she usually throws up her hands and says she can’t do it. She has to have that recipe because it’s safe for her. What she really needs though is confidence that she is the one in control, not the recipe.
In Mark Bittman’s book How to Cook Everything, he puts the person in control of the meal, the recipe is simply one of the many tools at their disposal.
I’ve been a fan of Mark Bittman with his Minimalist column in the New York Times and I’ve enjoyed his shows on PBS. His straightforward, no B.S. style really appeals to my tastes and I like the fact he can have a good laugh in the kitchen. There are way too many people who take cooking too damn seriously.
How to Cook Everything celebrated its 10th anniversary last October with its 15th reprint and the addition of some new material. It’s almost unbelievable how big this book is with over 1000 pages! The book covers subjects from meats to sweets, and everything in between.
While the book does have over 2000 recipes in it, it is far from a recipe book. Each chapter is filled tons of useful information so even a kitchen novice can cook like a pro. For instance the chapter on chicken shows how to safely and easily remove the bones from a chicken leg and thigh and the bread chapter explains how yeasts work to make bread rise. It’s all there amongst the great recipes.
Bittman’s true genius is evident in the way he addresses recipes. Instead of a long complicated list of ingredients followed by detailed tasks, his recipes are relatively short and simple creatures aimed at providing a culinary base in the cook’s mind.
Take for example risotto. A normal recipe book might have a 2-page “Mushroom Risotto with Seared Scallops” recipe that would contain 50 ingredients and almost as many steps. Bittman grinds his recipes down to the most basic incarnation, in the case of risotto it’s a short and sweet recipe for a plain risotto, taking up less than half a page.
The benefit of this is that might actually remember how to make it without having the book in front of you. A real bonus as I see it.
Bittman also encourages creativity by offering suggestions on how to make variations of the dish after each recipe. After risotto he offers tips on how you can make risotto with lemon, risotto with herbs, risotto with 3 cheeses and risotto with seafood. It doesn’t take much imagination to move beyond those variations and make something truly unique, because you’ve now got a solid foundation.
And guess what, that means you’re cooking!
Mark Bittman’s How to Cook Everything is truly a cook book, because his simple techniques and foundational recipes will allow you to be in control when you cook. He provides a straightforward way to gain a great deal of confidence in the kitchen, something anyone from a novice to a pro can always use.
This is truly a great book, I have it in my library and you should have it in yours.
Tagged with: bittman recipes • how to cook everything bittman • mark bittman
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April 6th, 2009 at 11:52 am
I’m in complete agreement. Our copy of _Everything_ is over ten years old. Risotto is actually a really good example – I had to teach myself to make it by looking for common features in several different recipes.
Here’s another: I learned to roast a chicken from _Roasting_ by Barbara Kafka. She presents it as a super-simple, adaptible recipe; she tells you what parts are essential and what can be changed. That alone was worth the price of the book.
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April 26th, 2010 at 8:16 am
[...] is a fantastically simple recipe from Mark Bittman. There’s only 5 minutes of real work on your part, the rest of the time lively little yeasts are [...]