Tales from the crypt: Ottolenghi’s first cookbook now available

These days it’s hard to have a conversation about cookbooks without someone bringing up British chef and author Yotam Ottolenghi. In fact, in the middle of one such conversation just a couple of weeks ago, a friend — a very good cook with a sizable cookbook collection — confessed that for the last year or so, Ottolenghi has been all she cooks from. “The others are just for research anymore.”

Indeed, it’s hard for anyone who has cooked from 2011’s “Plenty” (has it really only been two years?) or last year’s “Jerusalem” not to feel somewhat messianic about the books. The recipes are so direct and easy to follow, the results so surprising and sublime, that it makes even stumbling cooks feel like ballroom dancers.

But it may come as a surprise to even the most devout of the Ottolenghi following that “Plenty” was not his first book. It is merely the first of his books to be published in the United States. His real first book, simply “Ottolenghi,” came out in England in 2008 but at the time wasn’t deemed worthy of pickup by any American publishers.

Well, you know that with all of his recent success, that wasn’t going to last. Now 10-Speed Press, Ottolenghi’s American home, has gone back and retrieved that first British book for the colonies, with a new cover and the addition of a dozen or so pages of fresh material tacked onto the front (Somewhat haphazardly, it comes before the copyright and title page.)

It’s interesting to read the early work of an author with whom you’ve become so familiar. With “Ottolenghi,” the flavor profiles we have come to love so passionately from “Plenty” and “Jerusalem” are already in place. The recipes read fresh and lively and many dishes have that curious mix of Middle Eastern and Indian cooking that has become his trademark.

But the result seems muted, somehow more — dare I say it — British than Ottolenghian. Paging through “Plenty” for the first time, one was stopped on almost every page by an overwhelming desire to run into the kitchen and cook. That’s not so much the case with “Ottolenghi”; you’re more likely to say to yourself, “Well, that’s kind of interesting”. There is little likelihood that even something as adventurous as seared tuna with pistachio crust and papaya salsa will have the same resonance as his Moroccan carrot salad from “Plenty.”

None of this is to suggest that “Ottolenghi” is not a good book or even an interesting book. It’s simply a first book. A first book by a writer who only five years later has already become one of the most striking food voices we have.

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