Cookbook Survivor: Tom Colicchio, 'Wichcraft

Saturday's Child Works Hard for a Living

What will I be doing with cookbooks each Saturday?

Though I’m some years away from retiring, I know one thing already about that future day. I want to have less stuff to move to my next home than when I moved into the house I’m in now. That means perhaps most of all culling out some of our books, difficult as we find that to do.

So this regular feature is sort of a very very slow-motion Marie Kondo-ing of my cookbooks. It’s mostly just a chance to cook and to talk about cooking and food, though.

I started cooking the way I started photography, through self-learning. I first learned to cook from The Silver Palate books and from Pierre Franey’s Sixty-Minute Gourmet. (Also from growing up in a household where cooking and food were valued and talked about.) I had the great fortune to work for a year after graduating college in a lovely little restaurant/food store in Connecticut where I prepped for the head chef, baked bread, sold cheeses, made the chili and the baked hams on the weekend, and sometimes proposed and made the main dish of the day myself. (We did a lunch business with a menu that changed every day, usually three to four dishes that included a cheese and charcuterie plate.) My (just retired this last spring) boss and the head chef were very patient with me and I learned a lot over the year. (Including that restaurants are exhausting work!)

So since that time I’ve been the family cook. Over the years, I’ve mostly stopped cooking from recipes. Now I keep the staples I use regularly and just buy what looks good, seasonal or interesting to me when I go to market and work it up into something. That became even more the basis of our meals during the pandemic, when I started getting most of our weekly food from Philly Foodworks and kept a weekly planning menu that would minimize the need to ever go out for specific ingredients or staples.

I’m a little bored with my own repertoire at the moment, so I’d probably be hitting the cookbooks a little right now anyway to shake it up.

When do I look at cookbooks in normal times, and what makes a cookbook valuable to me? (From time to time, I’ll showcase a cookbook here that has immunity—a book that I’m never ever getting rid of because I use it and love it.)

I look at and use a cookbook when I’m trying to learn a new cuisine whose techniques and flavors I only know from restaurants. If that’s why I bought a book, I get attached to it if it clearly pulls me into the cuisine—if it teaches, if it’s usable. I want it to help me get to the point where I’m comfortable with how food gets assembled in that cuisine, so I can add it to my mental calculations when I’m out buying produce and meat. I get very annoyed with cookbooks that are obsessed with authenticity, usually by authors who are not from the culture that they’re presenting as such.

I don’t care for cookbooks that are mostly travelogues or autobiographies. This is a familiar and sometimes vicious online debate about whether cookbooks should tell stories or not. I’m mostly in the “not very much” camp. There are exceptions, as always. But the recipes are what I’m there for, most of the time.

I find cookbooks that are encyclopedic in scope to be overwhelming and not very useful. Thousands of recipes of a particular kind gives me a sense of repeated flavor profiles, common ingredients, etc., but it makes it hard for me to fixate on something and decide to cook it.

I don’t much care for cookbooks that are organized by ingredients, though I have quite a few of them. (Guess what’s going to be struggling to survive.) They’re useful on the occasion that I came home with too much of something or when I impulsively bought a cut of meat I haven’t really worked with before. But I find often that the recipes in ingredient-organized cookbooks are boring or that the really good recipes are hard to find (because they’re hidden away under the heading of one ingredient when they’re really a more complicated or integrated dish).

I tend to get attached most to cookbooks that have some recipes where I can see very clearly why something’s going to be delicious and distinctive, something my family and I haven’t had before, or a new variation on a familiar dish.

I get wary if the prep seems ridiculously complex, but also if it’s so simple that it’s more a suggestion about some ingredients than a recipe. (Important exception: I love Sam Sifton’s approach in the New York Times that builds up a kind of grammar of ingredients that can be assembled to make certain kinds of dishes rather than offering step-by-step recipes—that approach really inspires me when I go food shopping.)

I’m of two minds about cookbooks connected to restaurants. Basically that they’re great when they’re great and depressing when they’re not. Because I don’t buy a cookbook for a restaurant or chef I don’t know at all, usually. So a bad cookbook for a great restaurant? It happens. A great cookbook from an otherwise so-so chef? Pretty rare, though there are some odd exceptions.

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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. Authors are free to write me and tell me I’m incompetent or a jerk.

Also HERE’s THE DEAL: 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. Guess which is going to be for subscribers once I monetize this sucker.

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COOKBOOK SURVIVOR #1: Tom Colicchio, ‘Wichcraft

Why am I doing this first? I have a desperate man-crush on Colicchio himself, I love Top Chef, I like his restaurants. But this is a cookbook that has always baffled me: I pick it up hoping to get some ideas or wanting to make these sandwiches, and I always feel as I leaf through it either well of course, I don’t need a book for that or nah, that just doesn’t grab me. This is gonna take more than a week to decide whether it goes in the cull box.

FIRST TEST: Roast Beef With Grilled Red Onions, Radish Slaw, and Black Pepper Mayonnaise AND Fried Squid Po-Boy With Avocado and Black Chile Oil.

WHY? They sound good but also, I happen to have the following that need to be used: a beef tongue, some radishes, some squid, and some avocado.

BUT WAIT: The beef sandwich calls for eye round boneless beef. Sue me, I have some tongue and I’m gonna use it.

YOU ARE HOPELESSLY BOUGIE: I have beef tongue and squid in my freezer, yeah. I have a ton of radishes, yeah. I have avocados that are just ripe, yeah. Sorry, Jacobin is that way.

The more important thing is that both of those sandwiches seem kind of appealing, if not all that oh-my-god-I-must-have-this.

WHAT ABOUT BREAD? HUH? So, like every person with a blog, I’ve been baking a lot this last year. But I’m probably not going to bake today in addition to everything else. I might, but otherwise, it’s store-bought bread for better or worse. Video games don’t play themselves on a Saturday, you know. If the cookbook survives to next week, maybe I’ll do Colicchio a solid and bake my own bread to give it a leg up.