BOOK REVIEWS : Annual Cookbook Issue : The Year’s Tastiest Page-Turners

Cookbooks tend to to pour out of publishing houses much like water from a spigot, and this year, in particular, was a deluge. There were texts devoted to fusion, meat-free, gluten-free and “nurturing” cooking--and heaven only knows how many more pasta recipes have been added to the drink.

The following selection includes some of the year’s best books. Although the range of these books is representative, the list is far from comprehensive; I chose these books simply because once I started reading them, I couldn’t put them down. There are two memoirs, one of a cloistered Sicilian girlhood, the other from a year spent with a famous stepmother in Coyocan, Mexico. There’s an encyclopedic book of home desserts, and a gorgeous picture-book guide to Paris bakeries. Two regional cookbooks cover the Eastern Mediterranean and the Northern U.S. heartland.

You could read any one of these books and learn a great deal that you probably didn’t already know--about cooking, foodstuffs, history and people in general. I now know that sugar used to come in loaves that were cut with special knives; I know that orphan girls in Sicilian lay convents had to march in every funeral procession as a kind of public service whether they knew the deceased or not. I know that the Chippewa had their own names for the months and that December was “Spirit Month” and that January was “Big Spirit Month.” I know that Frida Kahlo read Freud. I know that the man who owns La Maison du Chocolat in Paris, a Mr. Linxe, eats 10 to 15 chocolates a day and makes 35 tons of chocolate a year. I also now know how to make kibbeh.

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CLASSIC HOME DESSERTS: A Treasury of Heirloom and Contemporary Recipes From Around the World By Richard Sax (Chapters: 1994; $29.95; 688 pp.)

After spending years poring over cooks’ handwritten notebooks in the Rare Books and Manuscript Collection at the New York Public Library, after gathering everybody’s great-aunt’s favorite cobbler recipe, and after resuscitating, refining and/or reinventing any number of long-loved or forgotten desserts in the kitchen, Richard Sax now gives us a big wonderful “treasury of heirloom and contemporary recipes from around the world.”

“Classic Home Desserts” has a practical design, with clearly presented recipes and pink margins for anecdotal material, but it’s not beautiful. Anne Disrude’s food styling has a certain homey charm and photographs by Alan Richardson are adequate, but the photographs are poorly reproduced on bad stock, and wind up looking like those old, discolored recipe pamphlets from the ‘50s.

The book deserves a classier and costlier presentation, for it is an amazing and useful encyclopedia of food history, cooking knowledge and amusing arcana. Sax is a good, feisty, honest writer, an impressive researcher and lover of odd facts. The book contains, he says, only the best example in each category of home dessert. Still, it seems exhaustive: there are four chapters on pies alone (five if you include the chapter on tarts) and four chapters on cakes; the first, “Plain Cakes and Cakes with Fruit,” includes sub-sections on gingerbreads and apple cakes.

“Classic Home Desserts” was written with the home cook in mind, which means there is nothing too professional--too time consuming, too technically demanding. No Napoleons. No Danish pastries. “Home bakers,” writes Sax, “are not likely to make three different fillings for a cake.”

In formulating his recipes for contemporary tastes, Sax has cut down, when feasible, on sugar and fat, although he pointedly states, “I do not believe in making low-calorie imitations of old-fashioned desserts.” His recipe for panna cotta did seem to have the least amount of cream possible for an alleged “cream custard,” but the final result was marvelous, redolent of vanilla bean and fresh lemon and just rich enough.

The margins are full of old recipes, asides and literary tidbits. There are quotes from “Mary Poppins Comes Back,” from Thoreau’s “Walden,” from Dorothy Alison’s “Bastard Out of Carolina.” There’s a recipe for spelt or farina pudding from the late 4th Century, and, printed in full, Alice B. Toklas’ recipe for hashish fudge (Toklas suggests, “ . . . it might provide an entertaining refreshment for a Ladies’ Bridge Club or chapter meeting of the DAR”).

In short, the book is a joy to cook from; instructions are clear, easy to read, the results dependable: It’s the book I’ll be giving this Christmas.

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BITTER ALMONDS: By Maria Grammatico and Mary Taylor Simeti (William Morrow and Co.: 1994; $20; 200 pp.)

In 1952, in impoverished, post-war Sicily, Maria Grammatico’s father dropped dead of a heart attack leaving 12-year-old Maria, her four siblings and her pregnant mother with virtually no means of support. So, five days before Christmas, she and a sister were dropped off at the Convent of San Carlo in Erice. Maria would not see her mother again for almost a year--the nuns forbade the pregnant woman to visit, lest the girls glimpse her “big belly.”

The cloistered Franciscan convent may have kept the Grammatico girls fed, but life there was one of unrelenting poverty and deprivation. As Grammatico tells Mary Taylor Simeti, “The food was always the same: beans, cauliflower, beans, cauliflower, and then sometimes they’d give us peas. You know the kind? The dried split peas? They always stuck to the pot and burned. The stink was enough to kill you. Down the toilet! Baah! We managed to survive, though, that’s for sure.”

To generate income, the nuns and orphans made almond pastries and cakes that were sold to the general public through an iron grate. These were simple items: cookies, biscuits, marzipan fruit, Paschal lambs for Easter, the occasional quince or cream tart by special order. Nothing went to waste. Even burnt pastries were ground up with an orange, sugar and spices and recycled into another sort of pastry.

After 10 years at San Carlo, Maria Grammatico, thinking she had a vocation for the religious life, went to take a look at a cloistered Carmelite convent. There she suffered from a nervous collapse and was brought home, paralyzed and comatose. Back in her mother’s house, she recovered and soon, at age 24, found her true vocation: With a wood-burning oven, a hand-cranked nut grinder and a rolling pin, she opened her own pastry shop. Today Pasticceria Maria Grammatico is a large, successful enterprise and mecca for tourists. Simeti wrote about Grammatico’s pastries for Gourmet magazine several years ago and decided then that Grammatico’s life and recipes deserved a book. “Bitter Almonds’ ” text comes from transcribed, edited tapes and reads like the rough draft of a novella by someone like Alice Munro.

Recipes are adapted for the home cook, but The Times Test Kitchen had problems with the simple almond cookies called “Suspiri,” or “Sighs,” made from the basic almond pastry dough: The cookies kept spreading out into thin lacy wafers instead of the plump rounds pictured in the book. At home, I got a slightly rounded cookie if I ground the almonds quite fine (directions read medium-fine) and found the cookies held their shape even better if the dough sat for a couple of days in the refrigerator. Still, even the flattest cookies were quite delicious.

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PARIS BOULANGERIE PATISSERIE: By Linda Dannenberg (Clarkson Potter: 1994; $35; 160 pp.)

The prettiest book of the season is a lavish picture book of Parisian bakeries, “Paris Boulangerie and Patisserie,” by Linda Dannenberg, who last gave us the equally gorgeous “Paris Bistro Cooking.” While the text is written in a serviceable, pedestrian journalistic prose, the bakeries are so beautifully photographed by Guy Bouchet, this book soon had me down on the kitchen floor poring over a large map of Paris, plotting a bread and pastry tour. (Is it true you can go round-trip for $799?)

The Parisian boulangers Dannenberg profiles are, she writes, “committed to the concept of old-fashioned handmade breads, pain d’autrefois. “ The patissier, on the other hand, “is an artist who wants his creations to be as individual as he is--which is the reason there are so many variations on a theme in the pastry shops of Paris.”

The book’s design, by Louise Fili, was not created with the cook in mind: Recipes are run continuously in the text in a typeface that’s difficult to read. (Fractions, in particular, are so teeny they’re almost illegible.) Best copy out any recipe you want to try (and you’ll also spare the book butter spots). Boulangers and patissiers have adapted their recipes for the home cook, though some of these adaptations are approximations and may cause disappointment, especially when it comes to the bread: All the bread recipes use packaged yeast, whereas the unforgettable flavor of so many Parisian artisanal breads comes from a process of fermentation with starters not familiar to most home cooks.

Some of these bakers also overestimate the ambition and abilities of the home cook: I, for one, won’t ever make patisserie Dalloyau’s coulibiac de la mer , an elaborate brioche filled with layers of fish mousse, langoustine, scallops, leeks and brill. Other recipes send one scurrying to the supermarket: Boulanger Bernard Ganachaud submits a recipe that puts stale croissants to lavish use, La Maison du Chocolat provides Le Pleyel , a simple, almost flourless chocolate loaf cake. Easy orange-and-raisin sables from Jean-Luc Poujauran are well worth a try.

Better yet, book a flight to Paris and eat the real thing.

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FRIDA’S FIESTAS: Recipes and Reminiscences of Life With Frida Kahlo By Guadalupe Rivera andMarie-Pierre Colle (Clarkson Potter: 1994; $35; 224 pp.)

The other visual knock-out of this season is “Frida’s Fiestas,” a memoir with recipes written by Kahlo’s stepdaughter, Guadalupe Rivera, and Marie-Pierre Colle. Photographs by Ignacio Urquiza are one dreamy, colorful feast-scape after another. Archival photographs of Kahlo and Rivera and reproductions of Kahlo’s paintings are also liberally seeded throughout the book.

Guadalupe Rivera describes her stepmother Frida as affectionate, intelligent, and spirited: “Everything about her, from her hairstyle to the hem of her dress, breathed a kind of roguish glee . . .” Kahlo apparently could not pass up a special occasion. “She celebrated saints’ days, birthdays, baptisms, and most of the popular holidays, both religious and secular. She got everyone involved . . .”

Structured around the months of the year, the book has 12 chapters and presents menus for 12 celebratory feasts. Many of these feasts took place in 1942-3, the year Guadalupe Rivera lived with her father and stepmother, although the first month in the book, August, commemorates the Rivera-Kahlo marriage in 1929. Kahlo’s life may have been an ongoing series of celebrations, but not all of these celebrations were strictly joyous. When buying a cake for the Epiphany dinner, Kahlo, in “extravagantly ornate Tehuana attire and pre-Hispanic jewelry,” is taunted in a public coffee house. At another dinner, Diego Rivera taunts his daughter’s suitor. Having heard of her husband’s affair with a beautiful Hungarian painter, Kahlo “disappears” for a few days in March to Teotihuacan, where she consults her friend and seer, don Tomas, and eats a Lenten meal (recipes given). At the public Feast of the Holy Cross in May, Kahlo sings a song for all to hear about “the pain and contempt” a wife feels for her adulterous husband. “Instead of angering Diego Rivera,” the author writes, “the song made him nearly die of laughter.”

Recipes are simply written and require a certain basic knowledge and competence with Mexican ingredients. The photographs provide some guidance--it helps to see what the finished product is supposed to look like--but how the almond macaroons, which are dropped by the tablespoon onto baking sheets in the recipe, end up inexplicably square in the photograph is a mystery. The Times Test Kitchen had a problem with the otherwise easy Enchiladas Tapatias: the recipe says to puree the chiles with two cups of water and “drain,” but the correct command is to puree the chiles and strain --otherwise you’ll end up with a mound of ground chiles and no sauce at all.

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SAVORING THE SEASON OF THE NORTHERN HEARTLAND By Beth Dooley and Lucia Watson (Alfred Knopf: 1994; $25; 394 pp.)

This latest addition to the handsome Knopf Cooks America Series of heritage cookbooks is by food writer Beth Dooley and chef Lucia Watson, who owns the highly acclaimed Lucia’s restaurant in Minneapolis.

Besides 200 recipes, this fetching and thoughtful book presents amusing historical photographs and graphics, apt literary snippets, cooking tips, and other food lore from the Ojibwa, Chippewas, Italians, Norwegians, Swedes, Germans, Hmong and other settlers in the nation’s heartland.

I went through “Savoring the Seasons” looking at all the photographs the same way I sit down to read cartoons in the New Yorker--they’re that amusing. There’s an old coot in a visor with a beautiful white turkey on his lap, and the dazed champions of the 1933 Ortonville, Minnesota corn-eating contest. A bespectacled, bobbed woman holds an enormous mushroom like an umbrella over her head, and two men pass a bottle behind a winched-up 95-pound sturgeon (two more bottles lie empty on the ground). Best of all: 72-year-old Arthur Schlegal of Blakely, Minnesota, wearing a pretty apron over his overalls, sifts flour while preparing to compete for the 1952 spice cake prize at the county fair.

Writer Meridel Le Sueur is quoted throughout the book and in such highly edited form, her normally purple prose is actually quite palatable: “I was always surprised,” she writes, “to see my gentle grandmother put her foot on the neck of her favorite hen and behead her with a single stroke of a long-handled ax.”

Historical, sociological and/or culinary asides, set apart graphically in ochre-colored boxes, include two 1925 recipes for lutefisk (dried, reconstituted cod), the history of flour milling, a good tip for skimming scum off soups, and a description of contemporary ice fishing. (On large open lakes in northern Minnesota, “entire ice-fishing communities are erected, with named streets as well as garbage collection and delivery services. Some huts have color TVs, refrigerators, heating units and running water.”)

Recipe notes are also full of curious information: “The woodcock, or ‘timberdoodle,’ with its mottled brown-and-black speckled feathers, often escapes hunters simply by staying perfectly still. It also has such keen hearing that it can locate worms by listening to them underground.”

Clearly written recipes range from the Italian-inspired porchetta to spaetzle to “Hmong Market Soup.” While I’d add a bit more spice to the poultry stuffing, a bit more cinnamon to the cinnamon roll, the basic directions are sound. There are the usual cookbook chapter divisions (bread, poultry, meat and fish) as well as other chapters that reflect the region’s individual character: a chapter each on game and on pickling and preserving. “Come for Coffee” reflects the region’s passion for coffee klatching; “The Communal Pot” gives recipes for the regional one-dish dinners often called “hot dishes” which, the authors insist, are not to be confused with those “dinners bound in canned cream soup and topped with potato chips” associated with other schools of Midwestern cooking.

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THE COOKING OF THE EASTERN MEDITERRANEAN: 215 Healthy, Vibrant and Inspired Recipes By Paula Wolfert (Harper Collins: 1994; $30; 429 pp.)

Paula Wolfert recently spent five years traveling, eating, cooking and shopping in Slavic Macedonia, Northern Greece, Turkey, the Levant and the Republic of Georgia and this book is the result of that journey--jam-packed with firsthand experience, lore and invaluable instruction for cooking these regional cuisines.

The four appendixes alone (on pepper pastes, home-prepared spice mixtures, stocking the larder, and yogurts) amount to a graduate seminar in Middle Eastern kitchen sensibility. Recipe notes provide colorful facts: Black lentil soup from Gaziantep is made with long, droopy tarragon leaves and therefore called “soup with a mustache.” In Turkey, anchovies are so well loved they are baked in bread and in fig leaves and made into pancakes. In Northern Greece, there’s a genre of food called “hidden meats”--dishes devised by Greek guerrillas that are cooked in sealed containers amid embers so no rising smoke could alert enemy Turks to their whereabouts.

But the real way to learn about this food is to cook it, and Wolfert’s 215 recipes are each a course in themselves. She gives clear, undaunting directions for making 11 types of kibbeh, those three-inch long, stuffed footballs she calls “the masterpiece of the Middle Eastern table.” Cooking even a simple dish of okra braised with tomatoes and onions, one learns to soak okra in a vinegar bath (to avoid stringiness and sliminess), to arrange and cook the pods in a pretty spoke-like pattern, and finally the technique Wolfert calls “the flourish”--adding sizzling oil or butter scented with pepper, dried mint or other spices at the last minute to add a blast of flavor.

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This recipe is from Dannenberg’s “Paris Boulangerie Patisserie . “ These sables, best made with chopped candied orange peel, are somewhat subtler and less sweet when made with grated orange zest.

ORANGE AND RAISIN COOKIES (Sables a l’Orange et Raisins)

1/2 cup plus 2 tablespoons unsalted butter, softened

1/3 cup sugar

1 large egg

1 large egg yolk

2 tablespoons ground almonds

1 2/3 cups flour

1 teaspoon baking powder

1/2 cup currants or raisins

1/4 cup chopped candied orange peel or grated zest 1 orange

1 large egg beaten with 1 teaspoon water, for glaze

In large bowl cream butter and sugar with electric mixer until light. Add egg, egg yolk and almonds, mixing after each addition until well blended.

In bowl sift flour with baking powder and add to butter mixture, mixing just until partially incorporated. Add currants and orange peel. Continue mixing dough with large rubber spatula just until blended. Do not overmix. Wrap dough in plastic wrap and refrigerate at least 1 hour.

On lightly floured surface roll out dough about 1/8-inch thick. Cut cookies into 2-inch squares or use round cookie cutter or any other shapes desired. Place cookies on 2 lightly buttered baking sheets. Brush cookies lightly with egg wash. Bake at 350 degrees until light golden, about 13 minutes. Watch carefully so cookies do not overbake.

Cool pan briefly on wire rack. Carefully transfer cookies from pan to rack with spatula. Cool completely. These cookies keep well, stored in airtight container, up to 2 weeks. Makes about 3 dozen cookies.

Each cookie contains about:

47 calories; 12 mg sodium; 21 mg cholesterol; 3 grams fat; 5 grams carbohydrates; 1 gram protein; 0.03 gram fiber.

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Here is a simple, easy, made-from-scratch recipe for enchiladas from “Frida’s Fiestas” that was included in the February menu for the “Candlemas Baptism.” The dish itself was eaten by the author at a restaurant in Mexico City while she and Kahlo were shopping for baptismal clothes and paper flowers.

ENCHILADAS TAPATIAS

24 small tortillas

Oil

Enchilada Sauce

1 1/2 chicken breasts, cooked and shredded

1 cup sour cream

1/2 pound anejo cheese, crumbled, or grated Parmesan cheese

In large skillet fry tortillas very briefly in hot oil. Dip in sauce, fill with chicken and roll up. Arrange on serving platter. Top with more sauce, then with sour cream. Sprinkle with crumbled cheese. Makes 8 servings.

Each serving contains about:

449 calories; 694 mg sodium; 68 mg cholesterol; 27 grams fat; 24 grams carbohydrates; 27 grams protein; 1.96 grams fiber.

Enchilada Sauce

8 to 10 ancho chiles, roasted and deveined

2 cups boiling water

1/2 large onion, chopped

2 small garlic cloves

2 tablespoons oil

Salt

In pot soak chiles in boiling water about 10 minutes. Puree and strain.

In skillet saute onion and garlic in hot oil until translucent. Add puree. Season to taste with salt. Cook about 10 minutes to blend flavors.

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This a huge, dense, moist, molasass-intense gingerbread was contributed to “Richard Sax’s Classic Home Desserts” by cookbook author and Bon Appetit columnist Marie Simmons.

MARIE’S RICH GINGERBREAD WITH CANDIED GINGER AND LEMON GLAZE

1 cup unsalted butter, softened

1 cup dark-brown sugar, packed

2 large eggs

2 cups dark molasses

3 1/2 cups flour

2 tablespoons ground ginger

2 teaspoons baking soda

1/2 teaspoon ground cloves

1/2 teaspoon salt

1/4 cup minced crystallized ginger

1 cup boiling water

Lemon Glaze

In large bowl beat softened butter with electric mixer at medium-high speed until light and fluffy. Add sugar and beat until smooth. Add eggs singly, beating well after each addition. Gradually beat in molasses in slow, steady stream until blended.

Sift flour, ginger, baking soda, cloves and salt together. Stir in crystallized ginger. Gradually beat dry ingredients into batter just until blended. Turn off mixer. Add boiling water to batter, 1/3 cup at time, stirring gently but thoroughly by hand with large rubber spatula after each addition. Spoon batter into buttered and lightly floured 10-inch Bundt or tube pan.

Bake at 350 degrees until cake pulls away from sides of pan, 55 to 60 minutes.

Cool gingerbread in pan on wire rack until warm, 20 to 30 minutes. Top of cake may fall slightly upon cooling. Run tip of knife around sides of cake to loosen from pan. Invert cake onto platter. Drizzle glaze over top of cooled cake.

Cake is delicious served slightly warm, but for neat cutting, let glaze set before serving. Makes 1 (10-inch) tube cake, about 12 to 16 servings.

Each of 12 servings contains about:

504 calories; 172 mg sodium; 77 mg cholesterol; 17 grams fat; 86 grams carbohydrates; 5 grams protein; 0.18 gram fiber.

Lemon Glaze

1 cup powdered sugar

1 to 2 tablespoons lemon juice

1/2 teaspoon grated lemon zest

In small bowl stir together powdered sugar and lemon juice until smooth. Add lemon zest.

* Paisley background napkin in cookies photo on H14 from Bristol Farms Cook ‘N’ Things, South Pasadena.