Cookbook Survivor: Diane Rossen Worthington, The New California Cook
Saturday's Child Works Hard for a Living
I picked this book off the shelf thinking “I am not sure if I’ve ever cooked from this book.”
I immediately recognized that was not accurate: it had the characteristic splatters on it of a cookbook that I’ve used at least a few times. So what for?
As I leafed through it, I finally remembered the recipe I’d used: a very good crabcake with a genius sauce that was based on emulsified butter and grapefruit juice. I’ve cooked that at least five or six times. It’s a memorably good and unfussy recipe and just specifically inventive enough that I felt the need to stick to the recipe each time. Is that enough for a cookbook to earn immunity?
Nope! Because as I look at the rest of the recipes, I see why I don’t cook from it otherwise. This is pretty much food I grew up with, using flavor profiles and techniques that I just tend to employ without thinking much about it. That’s not a knock on the author—it’s just that the New California cooking became the Old California cooking pretty quickly. I can also see that this is a book that I might have used heavily in my first Silver Palate-inflected era of learning to cook from cookbooks—it reads well, it’s easy to envision how the recipes will turn out, and it introduces newer cooks to ingredients that might in the 1990s have been unfamiliar to some of them. I just ended up getting this well past the point where I would have leaned on it heavily.
I did scratch my head a bit at what was being described in the 1990s as “California cuisine”, when this book first came out—at least some of it involved taking very simple versions of techniques and preparations from US Southwestern, East Asian and Southeast Asian cuisines and applying them to the ingredients and presentation styling of post-Chez Panisse food in California, the kind of process of borrowing and relabelling that got us stuff like “Asian salad” being slaw with a soy sauce-sesame-ginger dressing and crunchy noodles on top. There’s quite a number of recipes in the book that are called “Asian This or That” that don’t seem to me from the perspective of 2021 to be notably Asian in some fashion.
I consulted with my fussiest co-eater for this weekend, who vetoed at least some of my potential choices. (These preferences are going to have an outside influence in some future Cookbook Survivor testings, at least until this particular co-eater goes back to college in the fall.) We settled on a kind of old-fashioned tuna tartare, an “Indonesian leg of lamb” that has a marinade that’s pretty nearly the same as the house marinade we use for flank steak and an olive oil cake. That’s sort of loading it in favor of the cookbook in the sense that I’m absolutely sure we’re going to like eating all of that.
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THE RULES FOR COOKBOOK SURVIVOR
There are no rules. I’ll substitute ingredients if I want or if I have to, I’ll pick recipes capriciously, I’ll keep a book in contention for weeks or toss it after a single week. If I decide I can still use the book, I’ll keep it. If I decide after I’m just not going to cook from it ever even if I think the recipes are fine, it’s gone. Authors are free to write me and tell me I’m incompetent or a jerk.
You get Cookbook Survivor in TWO INSTALLMENTS. One on Saturday morning telling you what I’m gonna do, and one on Saturday evening telling you how it went.
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