I’d hate to de-accession this book in purely visual terms: everything in it looks so lovely. Not just the food, the people and the plates and the parties they’re having. Though the top-notch food photography is sometimes (as in many cookbooks) about putting completed dishes near ingredients that aren’t in the dishes because the ingredients are photogenic, like garlic scapes and patty-pans next to a green soup that doesn’t have either. (It’s got spring garlic, which isn’t quite the same.)
But that’s also part of the reason why I pick it up sometimes, look through it to find something to cook and then decide “meh” and go get another cookbook from the shelf. The book often feels like I’d be a party-crasher rather than a party-giver at most of its imagined gatherings, like it’s only proper to cook some of this if I’m going to host a very beautiful dinner party for extremely tasteful and stylishly casual people where we will be looking off my deck at the sunset over the Pacific and then afterwards swim forty laps in the Olympic-regulation pool on the other deck.
More seriously though, the centerpiece dishes of many of the suggested menus are dishes where there’s another version that I cook that I like better. I’m certainly game to have a dinner where fried chicken is at the center of the meal, but after cooking about fifty different variations of fried chicken (and experimenting with it on my own), I’ve come to rest for good on Edward Lee’s version in his book Smoke and Pickles. I’m not saying I won’t try yet another recipe for fried chicken ever, but I have to be able to see that there’s some really new move or good idea in it that I want to put to the test. The Sunday Suppers version is just good old standard buttermilk fried chicken. There are a lot of dishes in Sunday Suppers where I can’t see a move that justifies cooking from the recipe as opposed to what I would do without a recipe. Fish tacos and accompaniments? I got that one covered. Shakshuka? Also got it covered plus I’m kind of sick of it being in every cookbook published in the last decade. Chili? I do my own thing there.
(I’ll also note that some user reviews of this book at Amazon and elsewhere complain of recipes that aren’t well-tested. I have to say that I’m really bad at judging this kind of issue in a cookbook unless it’s flamingly obvious because I just tend to unconsciously correct an amount of an ingredient or a step in a recipe that doesn’t make sense. Unless it’s baking, where I’ll obey even if I think it’s not quite right and probably blame myself for an outcome that is actually the cookbook’s fault. Or if it’s a kind of recipe or ingredient or technical process that I’m unfamiliar or unpracticed with. But there is a dough in what I’m going to make today, so we will see.)
I’ve done a few things from the book in the past that I liked well enough: pickled hardboiled eggs with some beets in the pickling liquid, very nice looking and fun at a dinner party. The cured sea bass with tea and ginger in the curing liquid is excellent. I feel like I’ve got those ideas in my repertoire now, though.
For this round of Cookbook Survivor, I’m going to put the book fully to the test with one of its full “gathering menus”, the City Picnic that includes Nigella Chicken Pies (pies with nigella seeds, not pies by Nigella Lawson), a rice and feta fritatta, a burrata salad, fennel slaw, and a melon and tomato salad. It sounds good and it’s a combination of things I don’t repeatedly make. We’ll go on a picnic, weather permitting, if not in the city. I’ll stick closely to the recipes except for the black nigella seeds in the pies—I have a big spice drawer but nigella seeds just aren’t found hereabouts in stores and I don’t feel like ordering them. As the recipe points out, they basically taste the same as cumin, they’re just cosmetically distinctive.
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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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