2019 | Issue 103

Books: Shorts

By Edward Behr and Tom Mylan

Let’s just start here: Brooks Headley is a freaky-weird-genius-monster-man. In his Superiority Burger Cookbook (W.W. Norton, hardcover, $29.95), from his cult vegetarian restaurant in New York City, his ability to combine disparate ingredients into a mouthwatering whole borders on alchemy or perhaps black magic. All this comes at a price, however. His headnotes are terse and poetic. And the recipes for the flagship sandwiches can be best described as busy, with the Superiority Burger patty requiring four separate cooking steps and the Hippy Wrap being made up of four sub-recipes that take up two and a half pages and call for 32 ingredients. These are unabashed restaurant recipes, not fare for your casual Tuesday night dinner. The most useful bits are hidden in the back, where you will find simple gelato recipes that actually work in the real world and a pantry recipe section that is chock-a-block with vegan gems like pump cheese and spicy chickpea mayo. But if you do make Headley’s genuinely superior veggie burgers, make sure to double or triple the recipe. They’re so good and they freeze well. — Tom Mylan

In The Sommelier’s Atlas of Taste (Ten Speed, hardcover, $40) Rajat Parr, a long-experienced sommelier and now a winemaker, and Jordan Mackay, who writes about food and wine, have produced an essential work. (Both are AoE contributors — beware that I’m not unbiased.) They focus on eight regions of France, spending much less time in Italy, Spain, Austria, and Germany. Their confident presentation is the culmination of Parr’s years of reflection. They visit important producers, but really the book is about encounters with place. Their views are their own, not recapitulations of what has gone before, and yet written with full awareness of it. They name Parr’s top producers, so you can taste what he means. They offer some especially useful descriptions of wines and grapes, such as how to tell Savagnin from the related varieties Gruner Veltliner, Sauvignon, and Chenin. (“The one thing Savagnin lacks that its offspring have is a signature flavor.”) You might wish Parr and Mackay had spent more time in more places, but that would have made a different book. The classic regions, especially French, represent the cumulative knowledge of the past. They form an architecture of taste. They’re the points of reference for understanding everything else. — Edward Behr

“75 perfect pairings,” tilted toward the United States — 25 for each kind of drink plus two or three alternatives for each cheese and drink, so really many more — make up Cheese, Beer, Wine, Cider (W.W. Norton, flexible cover, $24.95). Whatever biases Steve Jones and Adam Lindsley once had are long gone: their proposals are based on logic and awareness of what others have recommended, but they push the thinking of anyone drawn to received knowledge. Often that’s me; here I’m only appalled that the authors don’t place more importance on the facilitating role of bread. The book is full of energy, highly accessible, with bursts of concise basics, mostly one paragraph long, about cheese and drinks. (This isn’t, however, a book to rely on for facts. A drum of Roquefort is not “stabbed repeatedly” in what is “surely a great release for the individual doing the impaling”; it’s machine-pierced by 32 needles at once.) The proposed matches may be specific, based on years of experiements, but your experience will depend on the state and character of the particular example of a cheese you buy. Turning to beer, the five combinations I tried made some sense, and it didn’t work at all to shuffle them around. The revelation to me was fresh goat’s-milk cheese with wheat beer, which drew out a rich butteriness in the cheese. But a mature example of Kirkham’s Lancashire with smoked beer (classic Aecht Schlenkerla Rauchbier), for instance, wasn’t convincing. The ideas are nonetheless exciting for a novice and useful for professionals. — Edward Behr

If you ever doubted the energy, variety, and fun of French food, then Let’s Eat France (Artisan, hardcover, $50) is your book. Maybe there’s an organizational principle to the 400-plus large, colorful, multifarious pages, but if so I don’t know what it is — surprise is intrinsic to the concept. François-Régis Gaudry and 125 “friends” speak with a confident voice that comes perhaps from having written originally in French. (The book was first published in France in 2017.) Among the countless short entries are hollandaise and its derivatives, tarte Bourdaloue (pear and almond), chicory, the chef Raymond Oliver, the “junk food of yesteryear,” rice desserts, quenelles, forgotten and now revived apéritifs, coq au vin, cassoulet, carbonade, Corsican soup, andouillettes, panisses, various feet, cornichons, pink pralines, lobster bisque, the French West Indies, nougat, natural wine, and Marcel Pagnol. This quote from the 20th-century chef Alain Chapel appears: “I grew up in the same terroir as my vegetables. For a chef, that means something.” To be reminded of it all is a pleasure, if you already know French food. It might be a little overwhelming to a novice, but also fun, in a different way. — Edward Behr

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