One thing that I’d sort of forgotten about this is how weird the look of the book actually is. Each section tries to tell a visual story through a series of staged photographs. In the main dishes section, there’s a series of photos where a man and a woman have been seated next to one another at two separate tables where each of them is waiting for their date to arrive. They have a friendly conversation. They flirt. He gives her the flowers he brought for his date. The dates arrive one after the other and nobody is having any fun. She slips him her number as both sets of people get up from the table. All the little visual stories in the cookbook are a bit much, though none as much as the entree narrative. It just feels like it belongs to some very distant era.
Maybe the recipes do too and that’s why I can’t quite get into them. In one small sign of this, the monkfish recipe opens by asking the cook to char the peppers so you can skin them. That used to be a common step in a lot of recipes—the goal was to get peppers that were textually the same as the kind of roasted peppers you’d buy in a jar. I’ve never cared for that texture, and I’d rather the peppers in this recipe still be somewhat crisp, so right off I knew I was not following the instructions. The basic idea here is to quickly fry the monkfish, then the sausage, then the peppers and mushrooms. Then some chicken broth and tomato sauce, with an assembly of everything at the end. Very Italian.
The broccoli rabe would have been too—I quite like it, despite the bitterness, with garlic, lemon and olive oil—but I made the mistake of buying some chopped up in a plastic container and it was basically rotten when I opened it. I try really hard to avoid this kind of thing in produce sections because it’s sometimes used the way the market I went to used it, to hide something going off. So the bottom and top of the container were packed with unrotten pieces and the middle was black and stinky with rot. Very irritating because of it being that deliberate. I mean, this is broccoli rabe, guys, it’s already something that hardly anybody buys where the unit price is super-low, just take a miniscule loss on it and move on. Fortunately I also had broccoli, no rabe, so that was an easy substitution.
The final plate, with the Italian fries, broccoli and monkfish was a good overall dinner, visually and in terms of taste. I think the downside of the monkfish was textural. What makes it a good pick for this dish—that it tends to stay together and not flake apart even if it’s cooked a while in sauce—also makes it hard to brown, whereas if this was made with chicken, you’d have some nice skin-on thighs that had good browning on them and contributed more of the flavor to the sauce to boot.
I hate to punish a cookbook when a recipe that I am suspicious of turns out fairly well, but I’m still not much interested in most of the recipes. So I’ll give it another round next week and we’ll see.