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Books : Appetite |
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Books : Appetite |
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by: Nigel Slater
Dewey Decimal Number: 641.5 EAN: 9780609610787 ISBN: 0609610783 Label: Clarkson Potter Manufacturer: Clarkson Potter Number Of Items: 1 Number Of Pages: 448 Publication Date: September 24, 2002 Publisher: Clarkson Potter Release Date: September 24, 2002 Sales Rank: 667091 Studio: Clarkson Potter Editorial Review: Related Items:
Average Rating:
 Rating:  - Genius is an understatement.This book has surprised me to no end. At first I wasn't sure what to make of it, but now I'm completely sold. The writing is superb, and the ideas and basic recipes with tons of modifications are amazing. It's an excellent book for even the novice cook with an open mind. Rating: - Master Class on Cooking for the Family. Buy It!`Appetite' by the eminent English culinary writer, Nigel Slater is one of those rare cookbooks on whose every page you get a new insight into the craft of cooking. Nigel is to wunderkind Jamie Oliver what Tom Colicchio is to Emeril Lagasse on this side of the pond. And, Slater's publishers take every opportunity they can to trumpet Sir Jamie's blurb on Slater that `Nigel is a Genius' on Slater's books. I think I can safely say that Slater is not a `genius', but he is hands down one of the most thoughtful and eloquent writers on food preparation I have read in my 2 ½ years of reviewing almost 500 cookbooks. I know from Jamie Oliver's series, `Jamie's Kitchen' on training his 15 young chefs and from his books that Oliver is every bit as good and as inventive in his recipes as is Slater. It's just that Oliver is not nearly as reflective and as literate about expressing his ideas. Slater's objective in this book is to promote the great pleasure of cooking without a recipe. He states this objective, eloquently as usual, in the very first sentence of his introduction, viz. `I want to tell you about the pleasure, the sheer unbridled joy, of cooking without a recipe'. And, I believe that Slater succeeds in this objective far better than the well-intentioned book `How to Cook Without a Book' by Pam Anderson. In order to make this objective a reality for the amateurs among his readers, it is not surprising that Slater must present us with almost 190 pages of introductory material to bring us all up to speed. This is not unlike the situation with the talented Jazz musician, who must be a master of the mechanics of both his instrument and of the way musical notes blend harmoniously from two or more different instruments. The irony and great pleasure in these introductory chapters is in the fact that Slater is a real minimalist when it comes to kitchen equipment. He is perfectly happy with two or three very good knives, a grill pan, a saute pan, a skillet, and a large casserole which can double as a stock pot or pasta pot or braising pot. Slater is also very fond of his genuine Chinese thin steel wok, but there are very few stir frying recipes in the book, as Slater is quite candid with the fact that the home kitchen simply cannot reproduce the high heat under a wok in a professional Chinese restaurant kitchen. While I was very pleased with everything I read up to page 61, it is there, on the section on cooking with steam, that I realized that Slater was on to something important. Here, and in most other sections, Slater demonstrates that he is from the school which teaches us to buy the best ingredients and do as little as possible to screw them up. In this vein, he is probably very much one with the writings of Richard Olney of `Simple French Food'. In his lecture on steaming, for example, we are taught to not waste the cooking juices from a piece of steamed food. And, even though there have been many implements made to do steaming, Slater is a minimalist even here, when he says he commonly steams using a simple colander placed in a large pot holding the boiling water. Slater's chapter on `Eating for the Season' is so good it easily outshines the written efforts of other great local / seasonal messiahs such as Alice Waters and Deborah Madison. Here, again, it is not that Slater is so much brighter than these others, it is just that he is so much better at putting across the point! When, on page 211 we finally get to Slater's first true recipe, we find a collection of remarkably simple dishes, very similar to the sort of thing we are familiar with from Jamie Oliver and the River Café gals, Rose Gray and Ruth Rogers. These are exactly the sort of recipes that are easy to memorize and serve as a basis of improvisation. The very first recipe in the pasta chapter calls for nothing more than a handful of pasta per person, 5 or 6 florets of broccoli, and a few ounces of gorgonzola. Given the range of pasta shapes, blue cheeses, and sturdy vegetables that could be substituted into this schema, you have the model for many different recipes here. Every basic recipe is followed by an `...and more' section where a typical range of substitutions or elaborations are provided. Sort of like John Coltrane's guidance to his sidemen before launching into a performance of `My Favorite Things', except that Coltrane's sidemen are such accomplished musicians that they have no need to be told what cheeses sub well for gorgonzola! Other chapters give us the same style of basic recipes for soups, rice, vegetables, fish, meat, fruit, pastry, dessert, and cake. And, after the remarkable discovery of baking recipes on which you can improvise, there is the cozy little ode to the joys of washing dishes. I really appreciate his take on this humble chore, as, like weeding in the garden, I always sort of liked washing dishes by hand. Just like Colicchio's `How to Think Like a Chef' and John Ash's `cooking one on one', this book is a master class on home cooking. Therefore, the person who is quite comfortable with getting their recipes from `The Joy of Cooking' may loose patience with all the background information and the loose (improvisational) style of recipe writing. On the other hand, for those of us who are determined to turn a necessary task into a skill with which we are proud, this book is a MUST READ! Rating:  - Nigel takes a step furtherI love Nigel's cookbooks, not the least for his elegant prose. WHile I was not particularly impressed with actual recipes in this book (so far), I find it to be an exceptional educational resource on how to create your own recipes. Nigel encourages his readers to find their own way of cooking, their own favorite ingredients, and create their own favorite recipes. I love cooking, but I hate cooking the same thing twice, and I frequently regret not having "variations" paragraph in the end of my favorite recipes in various cookbooks I use at home. Nigel does exactly that! But I agree that this book is not for everyone. If you have no time or desire to be creative in the kitchen, and would rather follow precise instructions as to how to concoct a dinner, then probably you'd better skip this book. It is more about art of cooking, not craft. Rating: - One of the best reads there is in a cookbookNigel Slater is a descriptive demon. His words make the food come alive and he makes the simplest ingredients sound chock full of richness and taste. This is much more a cookbook to buy to read than one to buy to make the recipes - even though the recipes are also really good! Owen Linderholm Press For Change Publishing (...)
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