How do you use cookbooks?

Once upon a time I used cookbooks like an instruction manual.  Obtain exactly the right ingredients listed in the recipe, measure them precisely, and then follow the instructions to the letter.  That didn’t always lead to optimum results.  I remember once searching in dozens of shops for asafetida (an Indian spice) for the 1/4 teaspoon I needed in a recipe for a particular type of chicken curry.

Or there was this time I was working through a recipe for a steak sauce (this is a great story I’ll tell you about some day) and encountering the phrase in the directions (not the ingredients, mind you) to add a large bunch of thyme.  What does that mean?  Is that a large sprig, a bunch of large sprigs, or what?  And am I supposed to add the whole sprig, or do I trim the leaves, or chop them, or what?

That was in the old days, though.  There were a couple of cookbooks that changed how I used cookbooks and I have to say I’m better off for it.  One was Sally Schneider’s A New Way to Cook and the other Michael Ruhlman’s Twenty.  Schneider’s book I’ve already talked about.  Her basic tenet is that each dish you learn provides a framework for something new, either by extending the dish or switching out ingredients. That it was not only OK but highly desirable to improvise off a recipe was something I hadn’t really considered until then.  

Around the same time, I bought Michael Ruhlman’s book.  The Twenty in the title refers to twenty ingredients or techniques that are the building blocks of nearly everything else.  He starts pretty basically.  For example, he has a chapter dedicated to water – how important water is, what is can do if used correctly, and so on.  I’ve seen dozens of references by some of the world’s most admired chefs about the importance of salt, but Ruhlman includes a group of recipes that demonstrate the effect that salt has on food in a controlled and instructive way.  Don’t get me started on his chapter on onions or I’ll never stop.

Encountering Schneider’s take on recipe construction and improvisation and Ruhlman’s guide to basic technique, I approach my kitchen very, very differently and I’m glad I did.  I no longer panic when I encounter imprecise definitions in recipes, I taste my food during the cooking process and trust my ability to add, delete, and adjust.  I feel free to substitute mace for nutmeg because I’ve just finished a book that mentioned mace and I wanted to try it, and I feel free to use fish sauce instead of sauce to add a little saltiness to an Italian dish.

There are some other books in this vein I’d recommend. They are all included on the Bookshelf.  One is Tom Colicchio‘s Think Like a Chef.  Colicchio, of course, is a head judge of Bravo TV’s Top Chef and the founder/chef behind several of America’s finest restaurants.  Some of his material is a little beyond my skill set (or my wallet) but he takes a similar approach to Schneider in a book that is brilliantly designed and constructed.  I’ve seldom seen an instruction book as effective as Think Like a Chef.

Another is Mark Bittman’s Kitchen Matrix.  Bittman is a famous food writer with a resume longer than I can summarize here but his book is another marvelously arranged instruction manual that presents a starting point and then demonstrates how that starting point can lead to 9 (or 6 or 12 or whatever) additional dishes by switching altering sauces, switching proteins, or changing one or two basic techniques.

Finally, I have to mention the dirtiest, most stained book in my kitchen library – Karen Page and Andrew Dornenburg’s The Flavor Bible, a book that takes improvisation to an entirely new level.  They have catalogued flavor relationships that work together and how to apply certain flavors or flavor combinations.  For example, let’s say that I have some brussels sprouts in the fridge but I’m bored with plain steamed or roasted brussels sprouts.  I look up brussels sprouts in The Flavor Bible and it tells me dozens of other foods, condiments, spices, and herbs that work well with brussels sprouts.  I wound up cooking up a couple slices of bacon while roasting the brussels sprouts, then sautéed some garlic in the fat rendered by the bacon.  Sauteed the brussels sprouts in the bacon fat/garlic, added some cider vinegar and then crumbled the bacon on top. It was brilliant and all suggested by the relationships in the Flavor Bible.

It also helps you figure out how to deal with things that may be unfamiliar.  I’d been passing up on buying chayote at the market for a long time, but eventually I checked The Flavor Bible to look for complements to chayote and produced a delicious chayote/corn succotash with chiles and garlic.

So how do you use your cookbooks?