For a few years I published an annual cookbook roundup. You can find the 2000 through 2002 editions at my old web site. Then I got lazy, and we had a baby and stuff.
But now I am, as they say in France, *rentré en noir.* I was all set to pretend the last couple of years never happened, but I was looking over the 2005s and found little I could heartily recommend. Maybe it was a bad year, but more likely I had other things on my plate. If I did a 2005 review, it would end up looking something like this:
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Mexican Everyday, Rick Bayless. I flipped through this book and it seems solid. Bayless is a great cook. Probably a good gift.
I was on the verge of despair. I promised you cookbook reviews. For weeks you have been compulsively refreshing your RSS feeds, waiting for mamster’s cookbook reviews. Then Laurie suggested the obvious: review the 2003 and 2004 cookbooks. They’re road-tested, still make great gifts, and I can even tell you which of them have survived being gnawed by Iris.
Rather than go radio silent for days and resurface with enough cookbooks to flatten you (that was my favorite *Alias* episode), I’m going to post one review a day until I’m out of books.
Jamie’s Dinners (2004)
Jamie Oliver
321 pages, $35
On page xiii of this book, there’s a photo of Jamie with his posse of young chefs, looking ready to fricassee whatever crosses their path. For months, Iris would ask us to pull the book down from the shelf and open it to that page so she could gawk at them and say, “Guyguy!” She also liked the page with the ham and the one with the kids eating noodles.
I like the page with the corn, which basically describes how I’ve made sauteed corn all summer; the page with the Concertina Squid, which look like a good way to scare people; and the page with the Chicken and Sweet Leek Pie with Flaky Pastry, which looked like mush but was delicious.
It’s a beginner cookbook, but one with some pretty out-there recipes (like the squid), and it never talks down to the reader. This from a guy not exactly known for subtlety. It seeks to guide the new cook toward the kind of hedonism-with-ethics that I aspire to. Try to get some organic produce and humanely-raised meat, Jamie tells us, and then enjoy the hell out of it.