BOOK REVIEW : Food You Can Use : What to Cook When You Think There’s Nothing in the House to Eat, By Arthur Schwartz (Harper Perennial paperback: $15; 275 pp.)
Oh, God, another dumb cookbook gimmick.
Only this one turns out to be more fun than an impromptu picnic. It’s also the sort of book that probably will get hauled down from the kitchen bookshelf several times a week while $40 volumes about dinners to die for languish on the coffee table.
There’s nothing much to the idea--just running through an alphabetical list of some 50 ingredients that it would be well to have hanging around the larder even at a low ebb. But it’s tailor-made for a large crew of meal-makers who might not shape up too clearly on a demographics printout but sure are out there.
These people are, on the one hand, “serious” enough about cooking to go out every so often and buy ingredients of loftier lineage than instant mashed potatoes and canned gravy. On the other hand, they are longer on good intentions than good planning, and it makes them miserable. What they have on hand at any given moment tends to be pretty weird or pretty old, and their dinner options tend to revolve around those beautiful words fast and cheap.
The worst thing about membership in this kitchen disorganization club is that you usually know you could put something edible--even fairly spiffy--on the table without too much agony if you could just get your head together. For that purpose, Arthur Schwartz’s offbeat contribution could go a long way. His advice can be summed up as “Think staples!” This does not mean everything that the standard kitchen manuals would call staples, but an extremely personal what-I-couldn’t-do-without list from one survivor on the doubtful life raft of a city apartment kitchen.
The Schwartz pantheon of vital ingredients ranges merrily from the obvious grocery items (flour, oil, etc.) and semi-durable produce (onions, carrots, lemons) to hominy, kasha, dried mushrooms, imported olives, and a few Lowbrow Louies like ketchup and iceberg lettuce. Anchovies and apples lead off the list; tuna and yogurt conclude it. Each entry contains some discussion of how to choose or handle the ingredient in question--look for thin-skinned lemons, use an opened bag of frozen corn within a month--and most are accompanied by one or more recipes.
The attraction of this what-to-stock catalogue is that it is presented not as an official answer to everybody’s problems but an easygoing example, one fairly peaceable bargain among competing priorities. Even if some of the author’s partialities don’t match yours (ginger and scallions, which he doesn’t dwell on, contribute more than celery and capers in my house and I can joyously dispense with bananas, chocolate, canned clams and corn syrup), a general air of practical inspiration surrounds his advice.
Nowhere do you feel you’re dealing with either a junk peddler or one of those dazzling role models whose refrigerators are law, order and artistic precepts incarnate. Mushy, half-sprouted onions and 6-week-old celery are no strangers to Schwartz’s kitchen, nor does he blench at the thought of trimming the mold off a piece of cream cheese old enough to pay taxes and eating it anyway. On the other hand, he is quick to proclaim his own standards of good and bad food.
In fact, the best part of the book is its opinionated comments. Balsamic vinegar, the author firmly notes, “was never meant to be tossed on every salad, stirred into any sauce or sprinkled anywhere a little cachet is needed.” He finds “no excuse for using bottled, reconstituted lemon juice” or any of its relatives. And as he points out, fresh tuna--”unless it is nearly raw”--is “a dry, coarse fish.”
Schwartz’s enthusiasm shows as healthy a sense of proportion as his dislikes and caveats. “A can of beer, a can of sardines, sliced raw onion, some dense bread and a little mustard--I can always scrape them together and be happy for it,” is a good sample of his predilections.
His idea of being prepared for anything is a box of spaghetti: “You have nothing to worry about. You can feed anyone. Let a golden lump of butter melt over it and it’s heaven.” It seems to me that a few doses of this philosophy will do more to put timid or stressed-out cooks on the track to happy, satisfying meals than any six of the “Down-to-Earth Home Cooking Is In” lamps that have shone on our paths since the lifestyle gurus decided glitz wasn’t in.
The recipes give another shove in the right direction. “Think of making something from nothing as a game, an ingredient anagram,” the author suggests early on. Obviously this is not the route to a graduate degree in the culinary arts, but it’s not a bad way to show time-pressed people how to make the larder work for them. And indeed recipes like bean cream (you puree canned cannellini with some garlic and oil), egg noodles tossed with grated carrots, roasted onions with just an oil and vinegar dressing, or macaroni and cheese like a Greek salad (you put feta cheese and the other seasonings on macaroni instead of lettuce) bring the idea to life.
Pundits of food fashion may not know what to make of this collection. It is not ashamed to include supposedly dated fare like thousand island dressing or sardine-cream cheese spread. It pays no attention to some current rages like tofu, roasted red peppers and snazzy homemade chutneys. There is an ethnic bent, but it’s not the kind now grabbing headlines. The ethnic flavors that stand out most here come from things such as sauerkraut-mashed potato cakes accented with dill; cabbage and noodle kugel; or mushroom-barley soup.
Still Schwartz does provide a lively sampling from other cuisines, especially Italian. Needless to say, nothing is offered in a frightfully purist spirit. His spaghetti with onions and yogurt is a transmogrified version of something from an Afghan restaurant; the Oriental lemon sauce is never going to grace any Chinese table; the potatoes and peas with curry are, as he cheerfully acknowledges, “far from an authentic Indian recipe.” The object is not to instruct beginners in all manner of refinements but to get them combining different complexes of ingredients in a basically sound way.
The author defines his target audience as “those who have only elementary cooking skills,” and the selection of dishes is well-matched to this group (though abler cooks could certainly use it with much pleasure, too). At the baby end of things, the truly kitchen-illiterate can tackle tasks as undemanding as a banana shake or pasta tossed with a can of tuna. At the other end, people can work up to preparations like basic pizza dough or choux paste. In between, what’s chiefly emphasized is putting things together--the anagram approach, as Schwartz notes--with simple cooking methods or no cooking at all.
Maybe this isn’t the most polished production on earth--someone really should have caught bloopers such as bristling (sardine) for brisling, or alkylides for alkalis --or the one to present to aspiring food snobs. But in my opinion it homes in, with much good nature and good sense, on a very important wavelength.