So I pulled down Nigel Slater’s Tender for what must have been the twentieth time with the intention of making it the focus of this column. And I just decided that the book was not a survivor without putting it to the test. Because I’ve pulled it twenty times off the shelf and have never felt inspired to cook anything in it.
I’ve enjoyed looking at it, certainly. It follows a fairly common plan in plant-centered cookbooks, which is organizing around particular vegetables, with attention to seasonality. (In this case, Slater’s own garden.) To me, this is one strike against it. I have vegetables that I love and use often: peas, fennel, summer tomatoes, zucchini, cucumbers, string beans, carrots, cauliflower. My cookbook brain doesn’t work around those, though. Either I want to use them in something that I file differently— risotto, pasta, stir-fry, salad—or I will do something very simple with them by themselves—thin-sliced fennel, roasted cauliflower, blanched string beans with a few fried almonds. I even have a vegetable garden—well, herbs, hot peppers, tomatoes, zucchini and pole beans this year—but I generally know in advance what I’m doing with any of those when the day comes to pick them.
That betrays, I suppose, that I rarely eat a purely vegetarian or vegan meal, but if you read this column, you know that already. Slater’s cookbook Eat is my favorite cookbook in the world—my desert-island cookbook—but something about Tender doesn’t work for me where Eat does. Eat has recipes that are loose and simple, rather in the spirit of Sam Sifton’s cookbook, but they’re for a named dish as such. Tender feels like it is really making me work to find something I’d like to cook—it’s as if you sat down with a rather lovely fellow and asked him what you ought to make for dinner and he just sort of rambles on about peas and oh sometimes I make them with feta and mint you know but sometimes I mash them up a bit and serve them with thin-sliced beets and aleppo pepper and you’re like “no, look, I am thinking of a main dish to build dinner around” and he goes “oh, rhubarb and pancetta can be lovely if you also add some brown sugar, eh?”
I am absolutely sure it’s somebody’s favorite cookbook, and certainly nothing against Slater, but it’s never going to be a book that I can use with the way my chef brain works. Plus it’s thick, and part of the point of this whole exercise is to free up room on the bookshelf.
So tonight I’m going to turn to an old favorite instead, which is Joyce Goldstein’s Enoteca, which is basically a small-plates cookbook based on Italian wine bar cuisine.
We have some cheeses, salami and olives that I’ve been meaning to set out, some really nice summer tomatoes (including a few cherry tomatoes that are ready from the garden), so I thought I’d add some arancini (fried rice-and-mozzarella balls) from Enoteca, which I’ve actually never made, and the chicken-liver spread recipe as well (I usually use the recipe from Zahav but I’m glad to do this one).