BookBravo.com - Getting Fat in Style: My Favorite Cookbooks, 0-89480-204-6, ISBN: 089480-392-1, ISBN: 0-517-88122-5

Getting Fat in Style: My Favorite Cookbooks
Week 10 (September 9, 2002)

I heard recently on the news that supermarkets are losing market share in the U.S. and industrialized countries abroad to businesses that sell prepared meals, packaged foods which one can pop into the microwave. In the very busy world in which we live, people simply don't have the time to cook.

Personally, I believe that cooking is one of the great relaxing pleasures of life and that this trend of culinary convenience is nothing short of tragic. Like most people these days, I spend my working life in front of a computer -- I am a novelist, you may be an accountant or a scientist, but it boils down to the same thing. Heavy sitting, hour after hour, staring at a video display, to end up with a fried brain -- to feel cooked, in short, in the worst possible meaning of the term. How splendid it is therefore to stand from my desk, stretch, and wander into my kitchen to pull onions and vegetables out of the bin, sharpen my chef's knife, perhaps pour myself a glass of wine, put some Brahms or Beethoven on the stereo . . . mindlessly mince, mix, and simmer, and throw together a few calories to repair my tattered body and soul.

I enjoy improvising, but when inspiration flags, it's nice to have a really decadent cookbook or two. My favorite cookbooks these days remain the groundbreaking work from Julee Rosso and Sheila Lukins, the owners of The Silver Palate, a gourmet delicattessen on Amersterdam Avenue in New York City, who popularized "nouvelle" cuisine in the late 1970s, altering the American diet. The first book they put out was The Silver Palate Cookbook, from Workman Publishing in 1979 (ISBN: 0-89480-204-6), an intriguing collection of menus, tips, and food lore -- a book that will make your chloresterol level jump simply to hold it in your hands.

Take this, for example, an intimate "English grill breakfast," as they call it, for a few special friends: Fresh apricot nectar followed by biscuits, breads with preserves, marmalade, and sweet butter. Then, in an orgy of succeeding courses: Smoked trout with Apple Horeseradish Mayonnaise; baked ham; sauteed chicken livers with Blueberry Vinegar; Danish bacon; boiled, poached, fried, scrambled, or shirred eggs. All served a with a choice of American coffee, English tea, or hot chocolate.

Do you have room for more? Good, because Ms. Rosso and Ms. Lukins' main opus, The New Basics Cookbook, came out in 1989, also from Workman Publishing (ISBN: 089480-392-1), and it is truly the essential cookbook for the new gourmet, thicker and broader in scope than their earlier work. One of the real breakthroughs is their use of fruit in cooking -- game hens stuffed with apricots, for instance, then torched with brandy just before serving. Probably you will not dine in this fashion every night, but it's hugely fun to do so every now and then, as a special treat. I always do my Thanksgiving turkey straight out of the New Basics. The stuffing is fabulous, starting with bread cubes and then adding onions, celery, a pound of country pork sausage, two tart apples, a cup of hazelnuts, a cup of dried cherries, thyme, sage, chicken stock, and a cup of tawny port just so none of your guests suffer from the culinary blahs.

You get the idea. All the recipes are elaborate but easy to follow and emphasize fresh, natural ingredients. You will get fat, certainly, if you dip into these books too often -- but at least you can tell yourself that it is healthy fat, of the very highest quality. One of the author's, Julle Rosso, tried to come up with a healthier volume in 1993, Great Good Food: Luscious Lower-Fat Cooking, this one published by Crown (ISBN: 0-517-88122-5. Most people I know, however, have found this volume something of a letdown, anticlimactic after the caloric splurge of the earlier books -- antipasto too, most likely -- and not even entirely dietetic.

Better to go whole-hog, I say. Every civilized person should have The New Basics Cookbook lurking somewhere on their kitchen shelf. You can always join a health club next week. Meanwhile, oink-oink.