Tattered, torn and terrific

There’s a lot of inspiring stuff flying off the presses lately, and we’re thrilled to make room on our bookshelves -- but not at the expense of that one old favorite. You know, the cookbook whose jacket has gone missing, whose pages are stained with gravy, whose splitting spine is taped together. It’s the one we can always count on for great ideas and practical advice. In that spirit, here are the all-time favorite cookbooks of Times Food staff writers:

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Russ Parsons, columnist

WANT to know why Richard Olney’s “Simple French Food” is my favorite cookbook? Read the recipes -- the one for onion panade, for example. In fact, just read the first sentence: “Cook the onions, lightly salted, in the butter over a very low heat, stirring occasionally, for about 1 hour, keeping them covered for the first 40 minutes.”

In that one brief passage, we get three cooking lessons: Salt the onions from the start to help draw out the moisture so the onions wilt faster. Start them in a cold pan so they melt without scorching. And cover the pan early on to trap the heat, helping retain moisture and keeping the onions from browning.

Even better, the dish is a total knockout. It’s like a transcendent French onion soup -- deeply aromatic, nearly custardy, with a stunning gratineed cap. All this comes from only the humblest ingredients. No fancy foodstuffs, no expensive equipment and no tricky techniques. With Olney’s cuisine, time and care are all that are required to work miracles. There is no more important lesson for a cook to learn than that.

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Donna Deane,

Test Kitchen director

I love poring over cookbooks, but in truth, I rarely follow a recipe to the letter when I’m cooking at home. Unless, that is, it’s from Julia Child’s “Mastering the Art of French Cooking” (co-written with Louisette Bertholle and Simone Beck). I first opened this book in the early 1970s, and it hasn’t let me down since. The instructions are clear and thorough, the simple line drawings extremely helpful in illustrating cooking tips. Even what might seem like a fancy dish (a charlotte, say) feels doable. One of my all-time favorites is the blender hollandaise sauce; it’s so deliciously foolproof, you can’t help but feel confident that you’re really mastering the art.

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S. Irene Virbila,

restaurant critic

JUDY RODGERS is a consummate chef, and “The Zuni Cafe Cookbook” reflects the sensibility behind the intelligent and sensual food at her long-running restaurant in San Francisco.

The writing is wonderful, the selection of recipes smashing. I get hungry just thumbing through it. I’ve cooked from it so much that the pages just naturally fall open at certain recipes, such as the peach crostata, the world’s greatest roast chicken with Tuscan bread salad, or, standing rib roast of pork. The pork has become my fallback for entertaining when I don’t want to spend the whole day in the kitchen. It’s incredibly easy and incredibly satisfying, and a great dish for a beautiful Chianti or Sangiovese.

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Barbara Hansen, staff writer

ON my first trip to Mexico a couple of decades ago, I discovered a bilingual book that became my bible to Mexican food. “Mexican Cook Book Devoted to American Homes,” by Josefina Velazquez de Leon, first came out in 1956, but nearly half a century (and many reprints) later, it remains a valuable guide.

Velazquez de Leon, the Mexican equivalent of Fannie Farmer, provides practical cooking instructions but also makes her country’s vibrant cuisine come to life. Leafing through the pages, I can practically taste the mole de olla (a fragrant and spicy beef stew and stuffed squash blossoms as they would have been prepared in a traditional kitchen, where clay pots simmer over a wood fire.

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Charles Perry, staff writer

IN 1968, I was a romantic in the kitchen. All ingredients taste great, I figured, so you could just mix and match. Whee! Some would call this California cuisine before its time. Back then, I thought of French food as a lot of bland, pretentious fripperies. But one night, an old college friend cooked cotelettes de porc au cidre from Elizabeth David’s “French Country Cooking,” and I was awestruck. The unexpected combination -- of browned pork, rosemary, cider, garlic and capers -- really worked.

There was nothing improvisational about it. The dish was as perfect as a Doric column -- despite David’s disdain for giving exact measurements. Today I have hundreds of cookbooks from around the world, but I still find myself going back to David’s rock-solid recipes.

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Leslie Brenner, Food editor

PASTRY making is not my forte, nor do I have a sweet tooth. That’s why when Lindsey Remolif Shere’s “Chez Panisse Desserts” was published in 1985, I flipped over it. Shere was Chez Panisse’s first pastry chef, and a thread of sophistication runs through her desserts, which are more about flavor than they are about sugar. No one can look into the soul of a fruit the way Shere can: She has an innate sense of what to do with a tangerine (use it to flavor oeufs a la neige). She even coaxes flavor out of cherry or apricot pits to make noyau ice cream. And she pairs figs dipped in caramel with anise or Chartreuse creams. “The herbal flavors complement perfectly the sweet muskiness of the fig,” she writes. What could be more inspired than using Chartreuse (or Calvados or Bourbon or late-harvest Riesling) to finish a meal with an elegant, easy flourish?

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Chicken from the garden of St. Marcos

Total time: 1 hour, 15 minutes

Servings: 4 to 6

Note: From “Mexican Cook Book Devoted to American Homes” by Josefina Velazquez de Leon. Be sure to make the sauce and fry the chorizo first. For the chicken, cut the poultry into eight pieces and the onion into quarters; you can also use oil instead of lard. For the sauce, you may not need all 3 onions (about 1 cup of finely chopped onions works well).

1 chicken

Salt

1 onion

1 clove garlic

1 pound potatoes

1/2 cup lard

3 chorizo sausages

1 head lettuce

18 pickled serrano chiles

Clean the chicken, cut into sections, and cook in water to cover with salt, 1 onion and 1 clove garlic. Boil the potatoes separately and slice. When the chicken is tender, drain, dip in the sauce (below) and brown in hot lard together with the potatoes. On each serving plate place a portion of chicken, some slices of potato, a little sauce and a slice chorizo or crumbled chorizo. Garnish with lettuce leaves and pickled chiles.

Sauce

1 1/2 pounds tomatoes

2 cups chicken broth

1 stick cinnamon

1 clove

2 peppercorns

1/4 teaspoon dried oregano

4 tablespoons vinegar

3 onions

Salt

Cook the tomatoes in the broth until tender. Mash with the broth in which they were cooked, then grind together with the cinnamon stick, clove and peppercorns. Add the finely chopped onion, vinegar and salt.

Each of 6 servings: 686 calories; 42 grams protein; 29 grams carbohydrates; 6 grams fiber; 44 grams fat; 15 grams saturated fat; 164 mg. cholesterol; 1,182 mg. sodium.

*

Standing rib roast of pork

From “Zuni Cafe Cookbook” by Judy Rodgers

Total time: 1 hour, 55 minutes, plus seasoning and chilling 3 to 4 days ahead

Servings: 4 to 6

Note: From “The Zuni Cafe Cookbook” by Judy Rodgers. We found that pulling the roast out of the oven at 130 degrees rather than the specified 135 degrees yielded a better result.

1 (4-pound) standing rib roast of pork (about 4 ribs; if desired, have the butcher crack the chine)

Salt

4 garlic cloves, peeled

2 teaspoons fennel seeds

2 teaspoons coriander seeds

About 1/2 cup rich pork stock, chicken stock or water plus a splash of dry white wine

Seasoning and tying up the roast, 3 to 4 days in advance:

Place the roast, bone side up, on a cutting board and locate the rubbery seams between the vertebrae. Crack through each one by easing the blade of a heavy cleaver or the bolster of a heavy chef’s knife into each joint and then tapping firmly with a rubber mallet (or a hammer wrapped in a towel). It may take a few taps to go all the way through the seam and joint, but take care not to cut deeply into the meat itself. The blade of your knife ought to sink no more than 1 1/2 inches into the seam.

Flip the roast over and trim away all but 1/4 -inch-thick layer of fat. Begin boning the loin, starting with the thin layer of meat and fat near the end of the rib bones. Resting the tip of your knife flat against the curved rack of bones, make a series of smooth cuts between the loin and bones until you reach the “elbow” of each rib bone. Leave the loin attached to the other angle of the “elbow,” so you can open and close the roast like a book.

Season the whole roast, including the rack of bones, literally inside and out with salt (we use about 1 tablespoon sea salt for 3 pounds of roast); target the thickest sections most heavily, and the two end faces of the loin most lightly. Roughly chop the garlic, then crush in a mortar. Smear on the inside face of the loin. Slightly crush the fennel and coriander seeds. Scatter about two-thirds of them on the inside of the loin and the facing bones, then close the loin back up and sprinkle the remainder evenly over all of the other surfaces.

Truss the roast, looping and knotting a string between every two ribs. Cover loosely and refrigerate. (Remove the pork from the refrigerator about 3 hours before roasting.)

Roasting the pork and letting it rest:

Preheat the oven to 400 degrees.

I usually take the temperature of the roast just before cooking it, looking for 50 degrees at the center of the thickest section. Stand the roast in a shallow roasting pan or in a heavy rimmed baking sheet not much larger than the meat. Place in the center of the oven. For a juicy roast that is cooked through, but with a faintly rosy cast, roast to 135 degrees. (If the eye of your roast is smaller than 4 inches across, cook it to about 140 degrees; it will stop cooking more abruptly when you remove it from the oven.) Start taking its temperature at about 45 minutes, and allow between 1 and 1 1/2 hours for a 4-pound roast. Turn the roast or adjust rack height if it is browning very unevenly.

Set the roast on a platter, tent loosely with foil and leave to rest in a warm, protected spot for about 20 minutes, then take the temperature again. Like any roast, it will continue to cook as it rests, but the rack of bones retains heat particularly well, so the temperature should climb to about 160 degrees. The meat will be cooked through but still moist.

Preparing the sauce:

Pour any fat from the roasting pan, then moisten it with the pork stock, the chicken stock or the water and wine, to capture any fallen aromatics and deglaze the baked-on meat drippings. Pour into a small saucepan and simmer until the sauce has a good flavor. Add any juice from the pork platter. Alternatively, for a more lavish sauce, simply heat up reduced pork stock.

Serving the roast:

The rib roast is easy to serve; just carve between the rib bones, then break into chops. Snip the trussing strings as you go. Alternatively, you can remove all of the strings, bone the loin and slice into medallions. Then break the rack into crusty ribs to eat with your fingers.

Each of 6 servings: 288 calories; 39 grams protein; 1 gram carbohydrates; 1 gram fiber; 13 grams fat; 5 grams saturated fat; 97 mg. cholesterol; 112 mg. sodium.

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Onion panade

Total time: 2 hours, 50 minutes

Servings: 6

Note: From “Simple French Food” by Richard Olney. You’ll need an additional tablespoon of butter to top the dish, plus a teaspoon of Cognac and a little more cheese, if desired. For the bread, use a round loaf and remove the crusts. A 9-inch cast-iron Dutch oven works well for this recipe.

4 large onions, thinly sliced (about 1 1/2 pounds or 6 cups)

Salt

1/4 cup butter

1/2 pound dried bread, thinly sliced (about 1/3 inch)

6 ounces (3 cups) freshly grated Parmesan and Gruyere

Lightly salted boiling water (about 4 cups)

Cook the onions, lightly salted, in one-fourth cup butter over a very low heat, stirring occasionally, for about 1 hour, keeping them covered for the first 40 minutes. If the heat is low enough and the saucepan of a heavy material, there will be no problem of coloration -- they should begin to caramelize lightly toward the end of an hour’s time, at which point the flame may be turned up slightly and they should be stirred regularly until the entire mass is of a uniformly rich caramel color. Should there be signs of coloration too soon, the flame should be lowered even more, or the heat may be dispersed by separating the pan from the flame with an asbestos pad.

Spread slices of bread thickly with the onions, arrange a layer in the bottom of the casserole, sprinkle over a thick layer of cheese, and repeat the process, packing each layer gently and arranging the bread slices as well as possible to avoid empty spaces. The last layer should be sprinkled only with cheese, and the casserole should not be more than two-thirds full at this point.

Bring the salted water to a boil in the same pan in which the onions were cooked. When it comes to a boil, pour it slowly and very carefully, at one single point against the side of the casserole, permitting the bread to swell and the mass to rise about 1 inch, or until obviously just floating, but no more (if you fear an unsteady hand, carefully ease the tip of a funnel down the side of the casserole to the bottom and pour the boiling water into the funnel).

Cook on top of the stove, uncovered, over a very low heat, the surface maintaining a light, slow bubble for one-half hour. Add, as before, just enough boiling water to be certain that the body of the bread is submerged, sprinkle a bit more cheese over the surface (sprinkle over a teaspoon of Cognac now, if you like), shave about 1 tablespoon butter in paper-thin sheets from a firm cold block of butter, distributing them over the surface and transfer the casserole to a medium oven (325 to 350 degrees) for 1 hour, raising or lowering the temperature, if necessary, after about 40 minutes’ time, depending on how the gratin is developing. The soup should be covered with a richly colored crust of gratin and should be served out with a large spoon onto preheated plates.

Each serving: 351 calories; 15 grams protein; 31 grams carbohydrates; 3 grams fiber; 19 grams fat; 11 grams saturated fat; 50 mg. cholesterol; 668 mg. sodium.

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Almond torte

From “Chez Panisse Desserts” by Lindsey Remoulif Shere

Total time: 1 hour, 30 minutes

Servings: 12

Note: From “Chez Panisse Desserts” by Lindsey Remolif Shere. Let the cake cool before removing it from the pan.

1 1/4 cups sugar

7/8 cup (about 8 ounces) soft almond paste

1 cup softened unsalted

butter

1 teaspoon vanilla extract

6 eggs (room temperature)

1 cup flour

1 1/2 teaspoons baking powder

1/4 teaspoon salt

Beat the sugar with the almond paste until the almond paste is in fine pieces. Or, better, pulverize it in a food processor. Beat in the butter and the vanilla, then cream the mixture until it is light and fluffy. Beat in the whole eggs, one at a time -- the eggs should be at room temperature -- beating well after each addition so the eggs are thoroughly mixed in. Mix the flour, baking powder, and salt, and beat in just until thoroughly blended.

Butter and flour a 9-inch springform pan and turn the batter into it, smoothing the top evenly. Bake in a preheated 325-degree oven for 1 to 1 1/4 hours, or until a toothpick inserted in the center comes out clean and the center feels springy when you push it gently.

This cake is for marzipan lovers and is nice just powdered lightly with vanilla powdered sugar and served with a cup of coffee or tea or a glass of sherry, or better, an Italian Aleatico or Passito. It is also good with sliced peaches or nectarines and creme anglaise.

Each serving: 366 calories; 6 grams protein; 37 grams carbohydrates; 1 gram fiber; 22 grams fat; 11 grams saturated fat; 146 mg. cholesterol; 148 mg. sodium.

*

Hollandaise sauce made in the electric blender

Total time: 10 minutes

Servings: Makes about 2/3 cup

Note: From “Mastering the Art of French Cooking” by Julia Child, Louisette Bertholle and Simone Beck.

3 egg yolks

2 tablespoons lemon juice

1/4 teaspoon salt

Pinch of pepper

1 stick (4 ounces) butter

Place the egg yolks, lemon juice and seasonings in the blender jar.

Cut the butter into pieces and let it heat to foaming hot in small saucepan.

Cover the jar and blend the egg yolk mixture at top speed for 2 seconds. Uncover and, still blending at top speed, immediately start pouring on the hot butter in a thin stream of droplets. (You may need to protect yourself with a towel during this operation.) By the time two-thirds of the butter has gone in, the sauce will be a thick cream. Omit the milky residue at the bottom of the butter pan. Taste the sauce, and blend in more seasonings if necessary.

(*) If not used immediately, set the jar in tepid, but not warm, water.

Each tablespoon: 94 calories; 1 gram protein; 0 carbohydrates; 0 fiber; 10 grams fat; 6 grams saturated fat; 79 mg. cholesterol; 55 mg. sodium.

*

Cotelettes de porc au cidre

Total time: 20 minutes

Servings: 4

Note: From “French Country Cooking” by Elizabeth David. The recipe doesn’t give exact amounts. We found it worked well using 2 tablespoons of oil, 4 boneless pork chops (about an inch thick and sprinkled with 1/2 teaspoon salt), 1 tablespoon flour, 1/4 teaspoon black pepper, 1/2 cup cider, 1/4 cup water and 1 teaspoon capers, in addition to the clove of garlic and sprig of rosemary. And by “very slow oven,” she means around 325 degrees. But most likely, given the leanness of pork these days, you won’t need to bake the pork chops for the full 30 minutes (in fact, our cutlets were done in 5 to 10 minutes).

The recipe calls for dry (that is, hard) cider, but this is a perfectly fine dish when made with sweet cider. However, apple juice -- which is, unfortunately, more common in markets than apple cider these days -- will give an insipid result.

Brown the pork cutlets on each side in a very little dripping or pork fat. Take them out, and add to the fat in the pan a tablespoon of flour; let this turn golden, and when it is smooth add a wineglass of dry cider, half as much water, and cook it 2 or 3 minutes.

Put the cutlets back in the sauce, seasoned with salt, ground black pepper, a crushed clove of garlic, and a whole sprig of rosemary, which can be removed later. Cover the pan and put it in a very slow oven for 30 minutes. Five minutes before serving add a few capers to the sauce.

Each serving: 231 calories; 16 grams protein; 6 grams carbohydrates; 0 fiber; 16 grams fat; 4 grams saturated fat; 53 mg. cholesterol; 365 mg. sodium.