The Elements Of Cooking
One of my biggest complaints about recipes is that they may inspire but they rarely teach. Just like any other craft, cooking requires core skills, and few cookbooks explain them to the novice.
There are counterexamples. In Judy Rodgers’ Zuni Cafe Cookbook, the recipes are garnishes on long essays about quality and technique. To this day, it sits atop my list of recommended cookbooks. But those kinds of books come around only a little more often than moon landings.
And then there’s Michael Ruhlman’s The Elements of Cooking, which abandons recipes and glossy pictures altogether. Instead, Elements leverages Ruhlman’s time in culinary school and famous restaurants, and gives readers the building blocks to step above recipes and learn how to actually cook.
Give Elements to a friend who’s expressed an interest in preparing good food, and buy a copy for yourself. Even accomplished cooks will enjoy the essays at the beginning of the book that lay out the fundamentals of kitchen savvy. If you think of sauce as the liquid that pools on a plate around your dinner, read his long discussion of it and think again. He writes, “The mayonnaise that enriches and binds a tuna salad is its sauce; a quenelle of olive tapenade on a grilled duck breast can serve as its sauce.” Even if you already think this way, the book’s early chapters provide a good review of cooking fundamentals, much as its spiritual ancestor, The Elements of Style, reminds writers about the basics of their craft. Like that classic guide, you’ll want to revisit this book every so often to hone your culinary mind.
But if the essays are the soul of the book, the glossary is its body. Page after page gives concise definitions and short essays about common cooking terms and ingredients — at least the ones you’ll find in a French-influenced kitchen. I consider myself a knowledgeable cook, but I found a few terms that I had forgotten over time, if I ever knew them (à la ficelle, for instance). Though these definitions exist elsewhere, most notably in Harold McGee’s On Food And Cooking, Elements collects them into a small tome that can sit close at hand even in a crowded kitchen.
My conversations with friends about this book show me how useful such a reference can be. I spoke with one about Ruhlman’s admirable choice to use proportions instead of quantities. “For instance,” I said, “he writes that equal parts butter and flour in a roux thickens some amount of liquid.” But I couldn’t remember that amount (10 times the amount of roux, by weight). I spoke with another about how the book answers those little questions you sometimes have: I said, “Quatre épices is three parts pepper, 1 part cloves and cinnamon and whatever.” I couldn’t remember the fourth spice (nutmeg). Maybe your memory is better than mine; I’ll just use the book.
At times, though, I wish the entries offered more. For foam, Ruhlman writes, “While foam does have its uses (foamed milk in coffee is a good example), it can feel affected or gimmicky when used for the sake of itself rather than as an integral part of the dish.” What is it about the foam on coffee that makes it useful as opposed to gimmicky? And how would I as a cook know when a dish could benefit from foam? He never says. And inevitably, there are the questions about how one ingredient made it into the book while another didn’t: There was room for bladder but not for brisket?
If you’re as pedantic as I, you may find some nits to pick in this book. Under the entry for balsamic vinegar, for example, Ruhlman writes, “All true balsamics come from Italy, most notably Modena … and will say so on the bottle.” Unfortunately, so will all the industrial versions bottled in the same area; look for aceto balsamico tradizionale instead. Under the entry for generic vinegar, he blithely mentions that you can add wine to a starter without noting that most modern wine has too much alcohol for the vinegar-producing bacteria; dilute your wine to at most ten percent to keep your population alive. He describes cooking with wine, but fails to mention that oh-so-useful safety tip: Add the wine to the pan away from the roaring flame on the oven.
Only a few of you will probably care about the occasional muddled sentence — Does the description for quatre-épices, “A working ratio is three parts pepper to one part nutmeg, cinnamon, and clove,” mean that you should use 3 parts pepper and 1 part each of the others, or 1 part of the others combined? (The former, according to his previous book Charcuterie.) And probably even fewer of you will care about the inconsistent layout of the glossary items. I feel like the publisher should have set forth a style guide specific to that section and then double-checked each entry against it. For stock, you find “a flavorful liquid made by gently heating vegetables, aromatics, bones, and meat …”. For spider, you find “A large flat mesh ladle used for retrieving fried items from hot fat is called a spider”. For beurre manié, you find “butter into which an equal volume of flour has been rubbed and kneaded becomes ….” Capitalize sentences and not fragments, okay; but what of beurre manié’s full sentence? Variety in a reference text keeps the pace lively, but the stylistic inconsistencies kept snagging my eyes.
I’m hoping they stop bugging me, though; I intend to flip through this book often.
This book was sent to me for review.
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