Additions to the Bookshelf

There are a few cookbooks I’ve introduced into regular circulation in the kitchen over the past year or so. They are all listed in The Bookshelf, but I like them so much I wanted to go a little deeper in depth.

My first favorite is Joshua McFadden’s Six Seasons: A New Way with Vegetables. It was one of Amazon’s top selling books from a couple of years ago and I bought mine last summer. It’s basically organized around a thesis of using fresh, seasonal vegetables and the SIX seasons part comes form splitting spring and summer into multiple seasons.

What I admire most about this book though is how McFadden is focused on making incredibly favorable vegetable dishes – not necessarily vegetarian or vegan dishes. I’ve bought a couple of cookbooks over the years that have elaborate preparations for vegetarian/vegan main dishes, but I use vegetables as way of completing a fish or occasionally meat main course. McFadden’s recipes are for side dishes but they are amazing. McFadden taught me how to cook radishes, how to pickle, and just how many different ways there are to make delicious brussels sprouts. There are no special techniques, but each dish probably has more ingredients and takes more care than most vegetable dishes you might be used to. I can’t recommend this book highly enough.

The same thing is true for Vanessa Seder’s [Secret] Sauces. It’s my kind of book. Each of the eight chapters is based on a “mother” recipe with a dozen or so variations. I’m not much on the confectionary chapter, but, for example, the “Tangy” chapter begins with a basic vinaigrette recipe and from there leads to parmesan-almond vinaigrette, Bengali spiced yogurt, black vinegar dipping sauce, ginger carrot sauce, and loads more. Like many of my favorite cookbooks, it starts with a foundation and then shows how to improvise to create something new.

This also plays into my approach that the cooking process is usually simple but the flavor comes from a combination of the fresh natural ingredient and a sauce. So far, my favorites are the Bengali spiced yogurt, the “mother” tahini sauce, the miso-lime dressing, the horseradish crème fraiche, the eggplant zhoug, and the grilled artichoke tapenade but I have to say that nothing I’ve made from this book has disappointed.

The World Sauces Cookbook  by Mark C. Stevens occupies a different place in my kitchen. I go to [Secret] Sauces all the time and use and adapt those recipes at least once a week. Dipping into World Sauces is a little more of a special event, but when it connects it connects in a big way. Like many of the other spice/sauce cookbooks, it starts with an introduction that covers basics but then it offers chapters on India and Asia, the Americas, the Middle East and North Africa, and Europe. The descriptions of the recipes are always interesting but two or three of these sauces have become absolute staples of my kitchen. The Ponzu recipe is the best ponzu recipe I’ve yet encountered and I nearly always have some in my fridge.

The Ajika recipe, though, has become something I absolutely cannot do without. It’s from Belarusse, and is essentially a mix of shredded zucchini, tomato sauce, vinegar, and lots of garlic. I use it on vegetables, fish, pork, chicken, and I can even imagine it as a stand-alone salad (although I haven’t gone that route yet). I’d reproduce it here but I’d be afraid of infringing on Steven’s intellectual property rights – all I can do is urge you in the strongest terms to buy World Sauces just to get the recipe for Ajika. It could change your life.