Book Report

Summer Reading from Hudson Valley Cookbook Authors

by Peter Barrett, July 26, 2011

In the dog days of summer, no tote bag is properly full without a book. Spies, vampires, and thrones are fun, of course, but some of us prefer cookbooks for our hammock-bound perusal. If “voracious” can modify reading as well as eating, then locavores should be pleased indeed with the current crop of food-related books by local authors, including three very useful cookbooks, a thought-provoking book on butchery, and a memoir about earning a degree at the Culinary Institute in Hyde Park.

Despite the vast number of books on the subject, Italian Cooking at Home (Wiley) by Gianni Scappin, Alberto Vanoli, and Steven Kolpan—all professors at the CIA—is a welcome addition to the genre. Italian cooking is soulful, simple food, and this book does a thorough job of unpacking the alchemy that a few choice ingredients can undergo when handled with love and respect. The authors are to be commended for their work describing authentic, unpretentious food from all over the country and offering detailed instructions on how to achieve it. Some red sauce joints of old are still with us, but a new generation of cooks has gotten us accustomed to eating a much wider variety of Italian dishes, and this book is a fine place to start for people looking to broaden their repertoire at home, where innovation is always a steeper climb.

Any book that provides a recipe for spaghetti cacio e pepe or bucatini alla carbonara is trying earnestly to communicate the humble fundaments of the cuisine and should be celebrated, and it should go without saying that when there are but six ingredients in a dish—as in the carbonara—the quality of those ingredients matters a great deal. Try making it with pastured eggs and homemade guanciale and see if it doesn’t change your life. Francesco Tonelli’s photographs are evocative and tactile, lovingly capturing oil glistening on seductively convoluted pasta and bubbles of brown butter sparkling on sage leaves in a way that inspires both hunger and an urge to conjure them oneself. The wine notes are a bit brief, though, and given Kolpan’s seemingly infinite expertise, more from him fleshing out certain regions or producers would have been most welcome.

Unlike Italian, Indian food can seem dauntingly complicated to the uninitiated. Besides the fact that the subcontinent is a vast geographical area containing dozens of diverse regional cuisines, the food at restaurants doesn’t offer many clues to the curious cook; the sauces are often complex and hard to reverse engineer. With that in mind, and calling upon a lifetime of cooking and travel experience, legendary actor and writer Madhur Jaffrey—who has a home in Columbia County—has published At Home with Madhur Jaffrey (Knopf), which includes recipes from all over the region (including Pakistan, Bangladesh, and Sri Lanka) that don’t require a lot of time to prepare. Understanding how busy we all are, she condenses the multiple steps in traditional South Asian cooking without sacrificing flavor, making for dishes that are as easy to prepare as any weeknight standard. Like Italian Cooking, Jaffrey’s book offers an excellent and accessible tool for home cooks seeking to expand their range beyond the curried chicken or chickpeas that many of us have in regular rotation.