What are you cookbooks/ food related books are you reading these days?

Starting my foray into Heston Blumenthal's Fat Duck cookbook. Absorbing his style and technique. I love Ruhlmans stuff from Charcuterie.Maple smoked bacon and his cured sauerkraut.Getting ready for choucroute season. My favorite rag is food arts, great new issue, the first after the death of M. Batterberry.

 

the first after the death of M. Batterberry.

And did you pick up on that great descriptive line in the eulogy: He could show up at a pig pickin' in a three piece suit, and not be out of place.

Anyway, right now I'm reading The Turkish Cookbook by Nur Ilkin and Sheilah Kaufman. It's a greatly expanded and revised version of their A Taste of Turkish Cooking.

Simulataneously, I'm rereading Twain's Feast, by Andrew Beahrs; an interesting treatise in which he makes the case for Mark Twain being the first locovore.

 

I did KYH, It really is amazing what this man did in his life.

 

Those Pepin books are on my list, Phil. Loved the PBS series---at least those episodes I was able to view.

 

Currently reading Ad Hoc at Home and hoping to try a couple of his recipes this weekend. 

 

I am picking and choosing parts of On Food and Cooking.  Again! 

Also keeping Culinary Boot Camp for some lighter reading.

 

I'm reading parts of several of Rose Levy Beranbaum's books (The Cake Bible, Rose's Heavenly Cakes, The Bread Bible and The Pie And Pastry Bible).  I find myself applying some of her techniques to other author's recipes with positive results.

 

I just got the Culinary Institutes Frozen Deserts and so far I'm really enjoying it. Also enjoyed their Garde Manger book.

 

On Food and Cooking by Harold McGee and Dessert Fourplay by Johnny Iuzzini. I've got a thing for desserts these days.

 

'setting the table' by danny meyers, 'kitchen mysteries' by herve this, and, not really reading as much as thumbing,'cooks canon...101 classic recipes everyone should know', by raymond sokolov...has anyone heard of the memoir from craig claiborne?..i think its called a feast made of laughter, but can't seem to find it or any information about it either....it might have been an author writing about claiborne, but i thought it was a memoir.... he was in my opinion, just wonderful....

joey

 

Craig Claiborne's autobiography was called A Feast Made For Laughter, Joey.

There have been several biographies written about him as well.

Claiborne was, in my opinion, the last of the great food writers to work for the NY Times. Everyone since him as fallen short. When he's good, Ruhlman is very good indeed. But he's inconsistent. And nobody else even approaches Ruhlman's talent. Mark Bittman isn't even in the running.

 

though full of hard to source ingredients........

It's strange to hear you say that, Phil. I recently reviewed The Book of Tapas here at Cheftalk, http://www.cheftalk.com/products/the-book-of-tapas  and found just the opposite. I was pleasantly surprised as the small percentage (there are, after all, 250 recipes) of the entries that called for hard to find ingredients. Frankly, I had expected more of them, considering this book is merely a translation from the Spanish, not one designed for the American marketplace.

Proportionately, I'd say a book like Batali's Molto Gusto, supposedly aimed at American home cooks, calls for many more hard to source and impossible to find ingredients.

Like you, I'm in an area where "available in any supermarket" just doesn't apply. Most "specialty" ingredients have to be either ordered on line or substitutes found.

Because you used baby eels as an example, I just checked the entire cold-fish section. There are 35 recipes found there. Below is the total list of what I would consider hard to source ingredients. By that I mean not locally available (all of them are available on line). And some of them actually are available where I live, but I recognize that they might be difficult elsewhere. I've marked those with an asterisk:

Salmon roe, canned smoked eel*, elvers, salt cod*, crayfish*, mullet roe, octopus*, fresh sardines, smoked trout*.

So, in 35 "foreign" recipes we're talking about only 9 hard to find ingredients, many of which might actually be locally available if you search hard enough. Personally, I don't consider that to be a particularly high quantity.

 

I understand fully what you're saying, and generally agree with it. Far too many cookbooks and cooking shows call for "readily available" ingredients that aren't in much of the country. I just didn't find that to be overly so in The Book of Tapas.

What surprises me are the "offbeat" ingredients that you can find in many supermarkets. I mean, I just don't expect the local markets to carry things like smoked trout. And don't find it at the fish counter. Then it turns out it's available in cans, and is sitting right there, next to the tuna. Go figure.

There is only one Spanish restaurant to speak of in SLC area and even they have struggled ingredient-wise.

Now this is something I can't relate to. Unlike you and me, who need retail sized quantities, a restaurant should be able to order anything it needs; either on line or from its suppliers. Sure, there may be a handful of ingredients that just aren't available unless you import them yourself. But the vast majority of necessaries can be found. Take fresh sardines as an example. I don't know anywhere in the Lexington, KY, area where fresh sardines are available at the retail level. Yet there are several restaurants that carry them on their menus.

I suspect your local restaurant's struggle isn't so much in finding ingredients as in paying for them. But that's a totally different issue.

 

Now you've probably uncovered the "crux" of the matter, though one can "order" virtually anything, the "distribution cost" may be too high, especially if there is a "limited demand" for a product in a specific geographic locale.