Books: Shorts
By Edward Behr
Diana Henry’s parents had lively, informal parties, with dancing, never sit-down dinners, but always there was her mother’s cooking: “I got the idea that having people over wasn’t just about food, but about creating an event, an atmosphere,” she writes in her latest cookbook, How to Eat a Peach (Mitchell Beazley, hardcover, $34.99). It’s a book of menus, often very simple. Her cookbooks, now ten of them, constitute a tour de force. (Caveat coquus: She has written for AoE, and although we’ve never met I consider her a friend.) Henry’s recipes are fresh, not wildly innovative but open and current, with flavors from the many parts of the world she has visited. She writes carefully and well, and in such a conversational, warm, and genuine way that you feel you’re enjoying the company of someone you’ve always known. Her loyalty in these recipes, as in her previous ones, is to the idea of deliciousness and to no sort of purism. (She’s drawn here to white balsamic vinegar; both her aioli and allioli contain Dijon mustard, which might horrify a true Provençal or Catalan cook.) She centers her work on pleasure and doesn’t overthink. In one recipe, she writes, “Use a good extra virgin olive oil, a bottle that you really love.” From straightforward pumpkin soup with sage butter to the flavor complexities of roast tomatoes, fennel, and chickpeas with preserved lemons and honey, nothing is burdensome, so the cook can join the party.
Reading Marie Viljoen has the same effect on me that reading Euell Gibbons did long ago: she conveys a sense that there is an unforeseen wealth of exciting edible wild plants and that her book will lead me to them. Forage, Harvest, Feast (Chelsea Green, hardcover, $40) is a useful tool for finding and preparing more and largely different species than her groundbreaking predecessor did. Primarily, they are plants that grow in the northeastern United States, a region I know well, but most I’ve never tried before. She’s up to date about the danger of harvesting certain popular items (notably ramps) into extinction and about the advantage to harvesting edible invasive plants. Although the book functions as a practical guide, she intends it mainly as a cookbook. The recipes can be complicated, often calling for preparations previously made (pickled field-garlic buds, ground-elder salt, bayberry oil), which is not a shortcoming but requires commitment. Between those and uncommon choices, such as mugwort, there’s a Noma-esque quality to the book. My favorite discovery was sweetfern (Comptonia peregrina), with its curious strong aroma not quite like anything else.
The beatnik-ish artist, gallery owner, clock repairer, and professional cook Howard Mitcham was an enthusiastic lover of seafood, starting with quahogs, as recorded in The Provincetown Seafood Cookbook (Seven Stories Press/Tim’s Books, softcover, $22.95), published in 1975 and just reissued. With his friends the historian Shelby Foote and the novelist Walker Percy, Mitcham graduated from high school in Greenville, Mississippi. He is not a bad writer (and when he calls for “country ham,” he means it). His Provincetown book has a powerful sense of place, much stronger than a visitor feels today, and also a sense of a particular time. Certain recipes calling for Worcestershire sauce, sherry, and evaporated milk evoke the 1950s and before, and his intimacy with fish reflects an abundance we’ll never see again. Mitcham has an appreciation for the Native Americans who were Cape Cod’s original residents and especially for the Portuguese who brought to Provincetown their ways of cooking with sausage and spice: “To me, garlic is the happiest member of the whole vegetable family.” For fish filets or steaks, 30 minutes in his marinade is “enough to make them zoom.” Along with the expected Cape species, he celebrates squid, skate, goosefish, and butterfish. You’ll wish such lusty food was standard fare in P-town restaurants now.
The great pleasure of jam is that it captures the deliciousness of ripe fruit at its peak and holds it through the year. Jam Session (Lorena Jones Books, hardcover, $24.99) by Joyce Goldstein, a disciplined former chef and a longtime jam maker, is, with one large caution, a solid work that presents all the important information clearly and simply. Goldstein likes white sugar for reasons of color, texture, and preservation. She’s on the mark on texture: “If in doubt, opt for a bit runny rather than a stiff set.” She tells you to cook whole strawberries in two stages, so they “plump up.” Not liking commercial pectin, she tells you, if you need more jelling power, how to make your own from apples. The significant problem with her method, though, is that she doesn’t stress minimal cooking, achieved by boiling a shallow layer of fruit in a wide pot for less than ten minutes. Anything else kills the high notes of ripe fruit, particularly berries. And then Goldstein follows the current standard recommendation (although the sugar and acidity of jam place it among the safest of foods) and further boils the filled jars of jam for another ten minutes or more. I wish she had instead pointed to implications of this instruction: “Once open, store in the refrigerator for up to 3 months.” Why not skip the extra boiling and just refrigerate the jars from the start, to have at least three months of great flavor? The novice buyer of this book isn’t likely to make cases of jam. The recipes, arranged by season, run from strawberry preserves with black pepper and pomegranate to Morrocan candied eggplant, Sicilian fig marmalade, Mediterranean-style pumpkin preserves with orange-flower water, and Satsuma mandarin marmalade (the last two belonging to winter). ●
