Home Cooking?
A recent book review in Cook's Illustrated referred to "the Alice Waters school of idyllic ingredients." You know, those oh-so-precious perfect baby fava beans, or liberal doses of truffle oil long before it was the hip ingredient du jour a couple years back.
I accept this, and even expect it, when the book is presented as the cooking of a four-star restaurant. I'd be let down if The French Laundry Cookbook had a recipe for making pasta salad with packaged ingredients. But a recent trend seems to be having four-star chefs writing books which attempt to rethink home cooking. Two recent examples come to mind: the eponymous Jeremiah Tower Cooks and Eric Ripert's A Return to Cooking.
It's not that these are bad cookbooks. Indeed, I own the Tower book because it ended up on my birthday list after I looked through it a bit. And if I didn't have an advance copy of Ripert's book, it probably would've been on my list as well (see my earlier post for my thoughts about it, however). It's that the authors are trying to inspire home cooks, but have clearly lost all touch with them. They have spent too long as professional chefs, as fantastic and influential professional chefs, to have an even remotely realistic view of what home cooking is really like.
In Ripert's book, he goes off to various parts of the world to do "home cooking." The idea being that he will only cook with local ingredients, in the kitchens of rented houses. Though not without a vast array of professional equipment, and at least two other professionally trained cooks. The book had many goals, but one of them was to "demonstrate" what was possible in the home.
Certainly trusting the kitchens of the rented houses led to some adventures. My favorite is the house in Vermont where the oven didn't work. Ripert's solution: use the giant fireplace. But one of my favorite quotes in the book instructs the reader to set up two large, heavy sauté pans. I love my All-Clad sauté pan, but I've only got one. And I have more gear than the average home cook. Is this a meaningful rethinking of home cooking?
Or the Tower book. Again, a perfectly fine cookbook, but the end flap tell us "...his insight into cooking at home has deepened. The result is a book that is both accessible and ambitious..." Ambitious is right. There are 16 entries for the various kinds of truffles in the index, and only something like 250 recipes. Is the average home cook really cooking with truffles 6.4% of the time? And is it even realistic to imagine they could?
Do the authors really think this is home cooking? It's hard to know. It feels more like a misguided marketing strategy than an honest direction.
Perhaps this is part of why I've found Nancy Silverton's Sandwiches and the Zuni Café Cookbook so inspirational (see my other blog for how I've made more sandwiches recently). They are not shy about frou-frou or expensive ingredients, but they seem more in touch with the realities of home cooking. Judy Rodgers tested many of her recipes on her home stove, which is not a Viking or a Wolf but some generic oven. And Nancy Silverton just seems more in touch with reality overall.
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