Cookbook Survivor: Diane Rossen Worthington, The New California Cook, Round 2
Saturday's Child Works Hard for a Living
I’ve spent the week looking at recipes in the book. It really is, from the perspective of 2021, a collection of good recipes for cooks who are just learning (though not as informative as something like J. Lopez Kenji-Alt’s cookbook) and recipes that feel curiously old-fashioned in a funny kind of way. Either there’s some instruction that makes it clear that the prep was seen as unfamiliar to some home cooks at the time (say, needing to ask a butcher to butterfly a leg of lamb, which in 1991 was true enough but today you frequently can buy a smaller portion of a leg of lamb already butterflied in many supermarkets) or there’s a kind of hang-over of pre-Chez Panisse approaches to a particular dish designed (I think) to make the connection between “California cuisine” and older ideas about fine dining.
I thought about doing some of the recipes in the book that would just never occur to me to make normally—there’s a chicken liver, pear and pistachio mousse, for example—but that seems the opposite of last week, which is setting the book up to fail. (I like chicken liver mousse, but the version that’s become popular in our household is from the Zahav cookbook.)
Overall, though, I’ve ended up with a basically benevolent view of The New California Cook after leafing through it so much this week—I might not cook the recipes much in the future but it’s pretty good for making me think “oh yeah, I should make a black bean, corn and tomato salad, I like that basic prep a lot”.
Way to kill the suspense, right? But hey, the day is long and the food has yet to be made. Could end up hating it. I settled on an avocado-cucumber gazpacho, an orange-hoisin glazed chicken and a rice pilaf with peanuts (recommended by Worthington as an accompaniment to the chicken). Tune in tonight to see how it went.
Photo by Ahmet Yalçınkaya on Unsplash