Like all chefs past their first restaurant hurdles, Ethan Stowell was ready to write a cookbook. He wanted to call it Anchovies & Olives, but the publisher he'd lined up, Ten Speed Press, balked. Too fishy, they said, too weird. Fine, said Ethan, who used the name for his next restaurant instead. (It was honored last month as one of America's ten best new places by Bon Appetit.) Meantime, Stowell opened yet another restaurant, Ballard's Staple & Fancy Mercantile, and his cookbook, now titled Ethan Stowell's New Italian Kitchen, finally goes on sale today.
Said Ethan's wife, Angela, as she watched a line of fans snake through the restaurant, "All it takes to open a restaurant is money. Almost anybody can do it. A cookbook, on the other hand, is a two-year investment."
Insatiable Americans buy more cookbooks than any other genre; one gets the impression most of them don't get read much, let alone used in the kitchen. Stowell's handsomely produced book is far better than most. First, it's got an engaging, slightly goofy style (that's how Ethan describes his own personality; co-author Leslie Miller captures it perfectly) but it's got a serious message: don't take things so goddamn seriously, it's just dinner. And don't make things so goddamn complicated, less is more, and tastes better, too.
You might say the Italians have known this for years, but Italian recipes all-too-often feel haphazard. Informal doesn't mean imprecise, Stowell tells us. Pasta, for example: wheat's highest calling, as long as you use high-quality semolina or ultralight "00" flour (for egg pasta). "I've retained a strong reverence for pasta, for the delicate taste of the wheat," he writes. (And he started an artisanal pasta company, Lagana Foods, whose fresh products are sold at farmers markets.) Spaghetti with sea urchin, radiatore with rabbit, cannelloni with pork cheeks, pappardelle with tomato sauce: they all earn no-nonsense measurements and luscious photos (by Geoffrey Smith).
I'm partial to the recipe for fried cauliflower with ham hocks; Stowell understands what family cooks of the Italian countryside have known for generations: cauliflower makes things sweet. And that's the genius of this book: it's not about complicated, fussy, time-consuming recipes; it's about simple techniques to create straightforward flavors.
Ethan Stowell's New Italian Kitchen, Ten Speed Press, 228 pages, $35.
Two other cookbooks, just for contrast.
From Hong Kong, two friends, luxury marketing maven Claudia Shaw-d'Auriol and photographer-designer Dominica Yang, teamed up five years ago to publish Delicious (Haven Bookls, $18.95). Now in its third printing and finally available in the US, it's an homage to the Martha Stewart school of pretty recipes and chic urban parties. You leaf through it for something simple (zucchini fritters to start, lamb meatloaf as a main course, apple "parcels" for dessert) and put the book back on the shelf with a sigh.
Far more useful is Williams-Sonoma Cooking at Home, by Chuck Williams and Kirstine Kidd, to be released at the end of October, $34.95. (I received an advance copy from Kidd when she was in town for the International Food Bloggers Conference last month.) Williams, listed as "general editor," has been in the cookware business for over half a century, starting in Sonoma and expanding to more than 260 stores across the country. Over the years, Williams-Sonoma has sold over 30 million copies of its 300 branded cookbooks. For her part, Kidd was food editor of Bon Appetit magazine for more than 20 years.
What they aim for with this is the Irma Rombauer Joy of Cooking mantle, assuming that Mark Bittman (How to Cook Everything) isn't already wearing it. It's a 640-page behemoth, a reference work with 1,000 recipes, meant to live in the kitchen rather than the coffee table. I'd never put milk into a Bolognese sauce (where'd that come from? surely not from Italy), but those zucchini fritters, they're here, on page 354.
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