Recipes for all seasons and reasons

2010’s high-quality cookbooks make great reads any time

December 22, 2010|T. Susan Chang, Globe Correspondent

There is not a publisher who isn’t wondering whether they ought to just bid farewell to the presses and put their titles out in digital format. But cookbooks — especially this year’s remarkably high-quality crop — offer one of the strongest arguments for maintaining print.

Cooks don’t swoon over leather bindings or the smell of new paper. Instead we use our books in the way a carpenter uses a level, tracing our place on the page with a finger as we shuttle between stove, counter, and fridge. And while there are ways to handle all these tasks on your iPad, laptop, or e-reader, none is really straightforward. And heaven forbid you spill something! As physical objects, cookbooks work.

Here’s a small sampling of this year’s gems.

Madhur Jaffrey’s streamlined style remains accessible and appealing in her newest title, At HomeWith Madhur Jaffrey (Knopf, $35). Jaffrey is a marvelous translator of cultures, sharing morsels of insight into South Asian foodways past and present. Her recipes offer a generous mix of proteins, vegetables, dals, and grains. You’ll want to spend time with the book in a leisurely fashion for the pleasure of her company. Not many photographs, but they are mouthwatering.

Simply Ming One-Pot Meals (Kyle Books, $29.95) is hardly the first one-pot book, but it’s distinctive. It’s organized by technique (“Braise,’’ “Wok,’’ “Saute,’’ “Roast,’’) so you always know what you’re getting into. Every recipe has a large color photograph so you can tell down to the last pixel whether you got it right. Every so often, you have the smiling face of restaurateur and TV chef Ming Tsai himself, in one or another of his immaculate Oxford shirts. Call me sentimental, but I think that’s a plus.

The size and heft of One Big Table, by Molly O’Neill (Simon & Schuster, $50) bespeak abundance. Here are riches from American food: vintage photographs of 19th-century stoves, portraits of present-day cooks, farmers, and bakers. At over 800 pages (and a matching high price tag), it’s a weighty yet lighthearted tribute to our foodways. Recipes have hundreds of sources, so they aren’t always consistent. This book is for your favorite experienced home cook, who will use common sense at the stove.

If you want to account for the phenomenal success of Dorie Greenspan’s first savory cookbook, Around My French Table (HMH $40), look no further than the lamb and dried apricot tagine on Page 284. There is an inescapable pleasure in her food. Like many of these dishes, the tagine arrived in France from somewhere else (Morocco), the recipe originated with a friend, and comes with an explanation as interesting as the dish and photograph.