In late 1990s, my father and I had dinner together at Bishop’s, the famous Vancouver restaurant, which I think has just closed with the retirement of the owner at the end of 2020 (though I can’t find a definitive story confirming that).
It was a great meal. Not long after, I was browsing in a bookstore and I spotted this cookbook. I bought it as a mark of my enthusiasm for the dinner we’d had. Over the years since I’ve picked it up to think about cooking from it and about fifteen minutes later I’ve resignedly decided there’s nothing in it that I feel like cooking. So in fact I’ve never used it in the twenty or so years that I’ve owned it.
It’s actually not a cookbook based on the restaurant’s menu nor on a particular focused culinary concept (there are other cookbooks by John Bishop like that). It’s Bishop’s vision of accessible home cooking and at least to me it seems kind of weird.
The restaurant itself was especially known for its seafood, particularly crab, and there’s a number of good fish recipes and recipes featuring Dungeness crab in this cookbook. Those are usually the ones I think most seriously about making, but there I run into the preferences of one member of my household who is really not fond of fish. For example, there’s a recipe for halibut roasted with fresh corn that sometimes catches my eye when I leaf through the book.
But beyond that, the recipes come from some palpably divergent sources. I don’t doubt they’re mostly what Bishop himself regards as home food, and I would wager that some of the mix reads as “home cooking” to some in British Columbia in a way it doesn’t to me, or at least it did when the cookbook first came out in the late 1990s. What I see as I read the recipes are: 1) updated versions of somewhat old-fashioned British cooking; 2) home-cook friendly versions of “fine dining”; 3) “Asian”-inflected dishes of the same kind that some “California cooking” became known for (essentially “Asian” in these contexts usually means a vaguely Japanese prep or a vaguely diasporic-Chinese prep; if the prep is drawn more from Thai cuisine, it’s called that); 4) a few dishes that are from the restaurant, more or less. Including a fair number of recipes with a crab component.
If you want a sense of how weirdly heterogenous the book can be at times, I think the two successive pages that have a recipe for marinated ostrich and children’s-menu-ready baby-back ribs provide the best example.
To build a menu with some coherence (we have some guests coming, so I need enough food for the occasion), I felt I had to decide either on “Asian” inspired dishes or the more “fine dining/British” kinds of food. I ended up going with the latter, so we’re going to have a brie baked in puff pastry with carmelized onions and thin apple slices inside the puff pastry with the brie (supposed to be pear, but I couldn’t find pears yesterday, which is no surprise, it’s really not the season for them); a pork tenderloin with a mushroom-and-wine sauce, a potato salad with a buttermilk dressing, and a salad of grapefruit, avocado, crab and red leaf lettuce. I haven’t had brie in puff pastry for fifteen years or so—it’s not that it isn’t delicious but it’s kind of a cliche. The pork tenderloin feels a bit boring but it should be fine. We’ll see if it all holds together, but at the moment, the book doesn’t leave me wanting to go back and use it more often even now that I’m giving it a try—just settling on four things I actually wanted to cook that seemed as if they’d go well together took me a long time.
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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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If it's delicious, how is it a cliché? I make brie in puff pastry about twice a year for family parties and we all look forward to it. Is that what makes it a cliché, that people like it?