This Cook’s Plugged In to Taste, Not Electricity

The food that tastes best, insists Viana La Place, does not come from a gleaming, stainless-steel kitchen where white-coated lab technicians carefully calibrate precise measurements.

La Place favors a more organic “pinch-of-salt” approach to cooking, one inspired by the sensuality of color and taste and touch. The important thing is to enjoy the physical aspects of cooking, she explains in her cookbook “Unplugged Kitchen” (William Morrow, 1996), which she describes as a personal journey.

“In a sense I’ve stripped myself bare in these pages,” she writes, “by presenting food I love without any barriers or filters, and sharing with you my life, growing up in Southern California but also within the bosom of an Italian family--living a life that is close to that experienced every day in Italy.”

That means closing your eyes and inhaling a pasta sauce cooking on a Sunday afternoon, or tasting a fresh salad of green beans, tomato and potato pungent with vinegar.

It means shopping for the freshest organic fruits, vegetables and herbs (“Like a pilgrim, I visit towns in Italy famous for the quality of their lemons”) to prepare such dishes as mashed potatoes with watercress, fava and spring onion pasta, raw vegetable carpaccio with almonds, or rice pudding cake.

And, most importantly, it means an “unplugged kitchen,” free of technology. La Place is not impressed by today’s growing parade of blenders, food processors and bread-makers.

Most kitchen machines that are considered time-savers really aren’t, she says, since they must be assembled, disassembled, scraped out, cleaned and generally fussed with.

Before embarking on her 350 pages of recipes, shopping tips and philosophical reflections, La Place offers this rationale for returning to the simple, authentic joys of cooking:

“Kneading bread dough is a form of mild exercise as well as pure sensate pleasure: You can feel the dough, alive and metamorphosing, beneath your hand; bask in the rich, fecund smell of the yeast; see and feel the results of your efforts.

“Soup put through a food mill is infinitely more interesting in texture than the dense pap that comes from processors. A few simple cranks of the mill handle will give you a light, finely textured soup.

“Chopping and slicing by hand will result in more tender and flavorful foods, both when eaten raw and cooked, since the juices remain inside rather than being expelled by the speed and centrifugal force of the machine. Don’t worry about getting those machine-perfect julienne strips. Who wants them anyway!”

Her own kitchen equipment consists mainly of a few good knives, cutting board, cheese grater, hand-cranked food mill, assortment of mortars and pestles and vegetable peeler, she says.

“All of them are inexpensive, easy to use, lovely to look at, quiet, take just a moment to clean and produce superior results. So, unplug your kitchen and enjoy the process.”

* Viana La Place is among the more than 200 authors scheduled to appear at the Los Angeles Times Festival of Books on Saturday and Sunday at UCLA. Admission is free. For information, call (800) LA-TIMES, Ext. 7BOOK.