Dorie’s Anytime Cakes review, take 1. And … action! Flipping through book, writer dashes off opening line: Conversational, sometimes whimsical, eminently doable recipes from a beloved cookbook author—even before testing any recipes, you know this book will be a winner. Cut!

Dorie’s Anytime Cakes review, take 2. And … action! Cookbook reviewer tests six recipes in a day, tasting them all late at night. Reviewer stares at the plate, underwhelmed. Is it possible she will have to write a negative review of this lovely book, with fool-your-eye illustrations instead of photos and Dorie Greenspan’s usual confidence-inspiring recipe style? Reviewer heads to bed, with the first lyrical draft dashed. Cut!

Dorie’s Anytime Cakes review, take 3. And…action! Cookbook reviewer drags herself from bed following a restless night of half-formed lines drifting through her dreams, cuts new slices of cakes, and begins (in a very Greenspanish word) nibbling. First bite, shakes her head no. Second and third cakes, a slow nod. Fourth cake, a slight smile. Fifth cake, slight smile plus a nod—and a flashback to the savory muffins of the previous evening, with a full smile forthcoming. Cut!

Crew, take a break—we’re going with take 3.

Here’s the good and great: Reading Dorie Greenspan’s writing brings simple joy—her enthusiasm, warmth, straightforward instructions, and options for playing around with recipes will keep readers turning the pages.

Recipes come together quickly, often without special equipment (stand mixers, processors) and with ingredients bakers will have on hand. While many have glazes and some have frostings, these are generally true to “anytime”—cakes for casual get-togethers and snacking, not high celebrations.

Realizing the photos are in fact illustrations will make readers linger over them, trying to figure out how they were done.

The not-so-great: Too many of the tested recipes were simply so-so.

They were, to be sure, better after sitting overnight, allowing the flavors to settle in. But did any scream “bake me again, share me with friends, and dogear this page”? No.

Breton buckwheat butter cake: Dry and overly salty (even when the saltiness is supposed to be the point), this was also the least-liked of the tested recipes—one-dimensional and, aside from the salt, bland, with its tinge of nutmeg overwhelmed by the salt. Greenspan says to go with under-baking if in doubt about whether it’s done, and significant under-doing it may have helped here (and elsewhere—several recipes came out too much on the dry side, even for this inveterate under-baker).

Olive oil and orange grab-and-go cake: Flavored simply with the zest and juice of one orange and a splash of Campari or Aperol for a bitter edge, this oil and yogurt cake was fine, but bland. The “playing around” suggestions to frost it or split and spread it with orange marmalade plus frosting might go a long way to improve matters, but the simple version should be stronger on its own.

Bourbon brown-butter cake: More like a quick bread, this loaf cake comes together quickly and bumps up the flavor with its combination of browned butter, toasted pecans, and a dash of bourbon. Greenspan describes it as a “quiet flavor of bourbon-tinged caramel”—while there’s no actual caramel here, the flavor does approach something both quiet and a bit more complex.

Moko cake-o: A takeoff of a cookie from a Paris restaurant, this loaf cake combines a bit of rye flour, poppy seeds, chopped chocolate, and dried cranberries for a happier result. The crunch of the seeds with the tang of cranberries and pools of chocolate, plus yogurt, oil, and butter to keep things moist, edged this recipe closer to the “make me again” category.

Olive oil dunking Bundt: Flavored with orange zest, rosemary, orange-blossom water, and olive oil, plus the suggested addition of candied peel, slices of this cake, Greenspan says, stretch and pull like pannetone. That didn’t seem to be the case with the test recipe, but the cake was moist enough (though less so than the illustration would suggest) and relatively flavorful. Because Greenspan included a glaze only as an option, the recipe was tested without it, but the orange juice-powdered sugar topping may have been a better bet for both flavor and texture.

Pop-the-cork nibblets: For an alternative to the gougères she usually greets dinner guests with, Greenspan devised mini muffins with salty blue cheese and sweet prunes, plus a touch of Parmesan. These were the best recipe of the bunch, mixing up quickly and pairing nicely with a chilled white wine. While better after cooling for 15 minutes, these were the only cakes that didn’t need overnight improvement.

Greenspan is generally specific in measurements, but where she isn’t leads to frustration. Despite saying in her introduction “I can’t emphasize enough how important measuring is in baking and how easy your baking life will be once you make a habit of using a scale,” she gives no quantities when she calls for sprinkling fleur de sel over cakes—easily leading to oversalted sweets.

And while she gives weights for most ingredients, she annoyingly uses milliliters for some wet ingredients that would be so much better given in grams. Why make a baker measure out oil or honey into a cup or tablespoon rather than pouring straight into a bowl set on a scale?

Chapters fit her whimsical style, divided by round, loaf, Bundt, baby (cupcakes and their ilk), and salty cakes, plus “cakes with corners” (square cakes and bars).

Sweet recipes include a brownie cake, a pudding puff cake (scoops of pâte à choux baked into a round, halved and filled with chocolate pudding like a large eclair), banana cappucino cake, cocoa-cherry thyme loaf cake, chocolate orange drizzle cake, Brazilian carrot cake, coffee-chocolate chunk Bundt, black sesame bars, coffee-crunch coffee cake, Greek orange cake, caramel-nut chocolate upside-down cake, buttermilk cupcakes, variations on vanilla madeleines, and bran-berry muffins.

Savory cakes were often the more intriguing recipes, including “fauxcaccia” squares, apple-cheddar corn cake, miso-cheddar scone cake, and seaweed and furikake muffins.

Quick takes:

Dorie’s Anytime Cakes, by Dorie Greenspan. 320 pages. Published by Harvest, 2025.

Organization: Chapters for round cakes, loaf cakes, Bundt cakes, cakes with corners, baby cakes, salty cakes, and frostings/fillings.

Ingredients measurement methods: Generally listed by both volume and weight, with the exception of some liquids.

Photos: No photos, but nicely done photo-like illustrations for each recipe.

Index: Appears generally comprehensive (though a spot check for ginger zucchini cakes showed no listing under zucchini).

Disclosure: I am an affiliate of Bookshop.org, which supports independent booksellers, and I will earn a commission if you click through and make a purchase on this title.

Subscribe now

How’s your freezer space looking? Does it have room for about 400 batches of jams, pickles, chile crisps, chutneys, kimchi, and relish? Because while the concept of Cold Canning is not new—simply freezing or refrigerating your preserves rather than hot-water processing—this compilation of 425 recipes will have you headed to the kitchen.

Of course, some of us love traditional water-bath canning; The warm feeling you get from bejeweled jars stacked tall on pantry shelves outweighs the sweaty-hot feeling of standing over a steaming stockpot. But to make that worth the time often means canning large batches, which fits fewer households’ needs with every passing year.

Most of the recipes in Cold Canning instead yield just several cups and take little prep time. That means it’s even more fun—though with caveats—to experiment with many recipes here, so long as your freezer can hold out.

Start with the basics: jams, jellies, preserves, and marmalades. Authors Bruce Weinstein and Mark Scarbrough don’t spend time fretting over whether jams should be made without commercial pectin; they just go for it, for less sugar, shorter cooking and fresher taste, and consistent results. Most of their jam and preserve recipes follow a simple outline: Stir together granulated sugar and a few tablespoons of less-sugar pectin powder, mix with fruit in a saucepan, boil for a minute, fill half-pint jars, freeze.

So within a short afternoon in the kitchen, you might jar up three to five half-pints each of raspberry jam, blueberry jam, cherry preserves, three-berry jam (blueberries, blackberries, raspberries), and a blueberry chia seed jam for good measure. And how about using more blueberries for a thick blueberry-onion jam to dollop onto tonight’s bratwurst?

With frozen fruit an option for many of the recipes, these make quick delights year-round. In that afternoon of testing, all those jams came out well—thick but not rubbery, and easy to play with by adding herbs, spices, extracts, and citrus zest. Keep going with strawberry preserves, apple cardamom jam, sweet or sour orange marmalade, blood orange marmalade, and triple-citrus marmalade; without much work, you could throw a scone party for a crowd with jar upon jar of toppings.

Then move to the savory side—try the spicy, lemon-tinged ginger jam to go with biscuits and with—or in—a cup of tea, or the onion-bourbon jam to spread on a burger or add to a cheese plate. Both of these also came out well in tests.

But that’s just the beginning. Move on to salsa macha (coconut-pecan! cherry-pistachio!), chutney, pickles, relishes—possibly pause at the fennel relish or carrot-ginger relish—preserved vegetables, sauerkraut, kimchi, infused oils, sweet sauces, and chile crisps. Tests of three chile crisps—one with star anise and smoked paprika, another with sumac and cinnamon, and a third with gochugaru and hefty doses of scallions, garlic, and ginger came out well, to make a rice bowl or fried eggs happy; also try the authors’ suggestion to mix the sumac-cinnamon crisp with honey and spread it on rye crackers.

But—the caveats: First, look out for issues with ingredient amounts. That gochugaru crisp called for ½ cup gochugaru flakes—but said that equaled 136 grams. (More like 36.) And while one recipe called for “¼ cup (20 grams)” Aleppo pepper flakes, another called for “½ cup (60 grams)” of the same flakes. One typo I understand. But when I hit more than one in a random sampling of recipes, it makes me wary of all the recipes. So cooks should judge before jamming.

Another issue: The recipe for persimmon jam calls for “vaguely soft” Fuyu persimmons; the headnote calls for “a firm texture but with some give in the skin.” Go for more than vague, though, and move past a firm texture; tested with persimmons that were apparently on the wrong side of firm, this never became a luscious jam, even with extremely extended simmering in extra liquid. It ended up as something approaching a meh-flavored preserve that could be used over yogurt.

Keeping those warnings in mind, if you get a canning hankering, you’ll surely find something here to fit your mood and pantry. While often not cutting-edge recipes, the variety of standards plus some more unusual flavors makes Cold Canning worth your shelf and freezer space.

Quick takes:

Cold Canning: The Easy Way to Preserve the Seasons Without Hot Water Processing, by Bruce Weinstein and Mark Scarbrough. 448 pages. Published by Voracious, 2025.

Organization: By type of recipe (such as sweet jams, savory jams and chutneys, pickles).

Ingredients measurement methods: Ounces and grams for dry/solid ingredients, cups and milliliters for liquids.

Photos: Photos of some recipes or the recipes in use.

Index: Comprehensive.

Disclosure: I am an affiliate of Bookshop.org, which supports independent booksellers, and I will earn a commission if you click through and make a purchase on the title above.

The Spice of Life

Everything is better with Pepper

Pepper’s advice: Stay cool, lay low, and everything will be fine.

Subscribe now

Without going into detail, Nosrat explains that she dealt with the deaths of several people close to her; pandemic isolation right after settling into a new home, coming off long years of work travel; and depression, all pointing her to a calmer existence focused on time with others. So she figured out what recipes and casual cooking guidelines qualified to her as “good things” worth putting into a cookbook.

In so doing, Nosrat has written a warm, colorful book that may give cooks, especially newer ones, the kitchen confidence she envisions for themselves and friends.

Good Things seems best suited for readers who are advanced beginners. Nosrat gives them a nice runway, from simple explanations of how to boil, roast, or sauté vegetables, to slightly more challenging pita, to full-on homemade lasagna noodles.

Experienced cooks will find fewer wholly unexpected recipes, but they will still find plenty of tips tucked in amid the familiar. One example stood out on a first skim of the book: It seems to have become a rule that every new book must include a cacio e pepe pasta, but Nosrat has picked up the method of whizzing up a cheese paste in a food processor to toss with noodles and some of their cooking water—a more foolproof method than the frantic stirring most recipes require.

The book is organized by chapters with uninformative names (“Good Things Come in Small Packages” turns out to be condiments and building blocks for other recipes; “Good Things to Keep Up Your Sleeve” is recipes from pantry staples). Given that, it’s frustrating not to have a list of recipes at the start of every chapter, a now-common format that would be especially appreciated in a book with chapters that can run to 50 pages.

Noting her distaste for traditional recipes, Nosrat flips between many full, standard-format recipes and shorter, paragraph-style ones. Both work; the more-casual paragraph format easily walks a cook through a recipe without breaking everything out into sometimes-stilted steps. (The Joy of Cooking owners will recognize the style.) It would have been better, though, to boldface not just the ingredient but the amount as well (6 garlic cloves, not 6 garlic cloves).

But there are multiple irritations in here. Maybe they trace back to her antipathy toward traditional recipes, but they felt sloppy at best and disrespectful of readers at worst:

• Recipe writers usually try to signal to readers when an ingredient is used in multiple ways, either by listing its uses separately (putting butter amounts under both “batter” and “frosting”), or saying “4 tablespoons butter, divided.” Nosrat does neither, making it far too easy to miss the amount within the instructions and plop in all of an ingredient at once.

• Her inconsistency in calling for an ingredient by weight is so consistent that it becomes almost comical—to wit, a recipe for whipped tahini that calls only for “½ cup tahini,” but “1 teaspoon (3g) kosher salt.”

• Sometimes recipe instructions lack clarity or seem to require more steps than necessary. A chicken recipe calls for the bird to be salted in advance, pointing readers to another page, but that offers only the general concept, with few details (how much salt? Refrigerate? Uncovered or not? Wipe off the salt before cooking?). A spicy tuna pasta’s instructions for cooking the sauce get interrupted by instructions to add the pasta to the boiling water, cook for 7 to 12 minutes, reserve some cooking water, and drain the pasta. But there’s no “meanwhile” anywhere in that paragraph or the next one—and the next begins with adding a can of tomatoes to the sauce and ladling a little of the cooking water into the can to rinse it. So, are cooks supposed to just stand around for 7 to 12 minutes—while the interrupted sauce continues to cook?

• And readers may wonder if the page designer had any cooking experience. Presumably not, or they would have understood how exceptionally annoying it is to have a headnote take up an entire page—alongside which runs the ingredient list, forcing cooks to continually turn back a page from the instructions to the ingredients. This happens mercifully less often than the other annoyances, at least.

Overcome those obstacles, though, and some delicious creations will emerge.

Take a morning to put together some of Nosrat’s simple building blocks; your future self will thank you. Prep that whipped tahini, fluffy and light, alongside some whipped ricotta, and spread on a serving platter for an excellent, quick base for roasted vegetables (the tahini was even better with not just the lemon juice called for, but the zest of the lemons as well).

Marinated feta cubes—bright with lemon (or kumquats if you’re lucky enough to have a supply), chile, bay, and peppercorns—perk up any simple green salad. Dark-roasted, roll-cut carrots became a full-flavored side dish when tossed in a creamy lemon-miso dressing thickened with aquafaba and flecked with poppyseeds. (That dressing led to questions about unnecessary steps; in a moment of recipe-testing distraction, all the ingredients went into the immersion blender cup, instead of Nosrat’s two-step process of mixing up an aquafaba “mayonnaise” first and then drizzling in a lemon juice-miso mixture. Maybe her longer method would have produced something even smoother or fluffier, but hey, it’s just dressing—and it was still one of the best of the tested recipes.)

Nosrat’s Roquefort dressing took advantage of an often-underused ingredient: water. To get the dressing—thick with cheese, sour cream and olive oil—to your desired runniness, simply add water. It’s easy to imagine many newer cooks trying to thin it with more oil or vinegar instead of this simplicity.

The tuna pasta, meant to be assembled from pantry staples, boosted a sauce of onion, garlic, and canned cherry tomatoes with the oomph of anchovies and Calabrian chile paste. Here, too, the instructions may frustrate a cook—it’s an early step in the saucemaking that calls for chile paste “to taste” with zero quantities suggested. How should a cook know at that point even where to begin? Parmesan, lemon, and canned tuna round out the flavor, though tasters wished for one more can of tuna to balance all the pasta.

A short chapter of basic breads includes focaccia, pita, and sesame flatbreads. Honey-oat dinner rolls kept moist with a cooked porridge of ground oats plus sour cream worked fine; take note of how dark the rolls are in the accompanying photos—necessary for fullest flavor.

In a chapter devoted to chicken recipes, a Dutch oven braise of a whole chicken over pearl couscous flavored with torn Medjool dates and preserved lemon paste proved a real standout. With garlic, onion, and a hefty dose of cumin as well, the dish took on layers of sweet-salty goodness. While not a weeknight meal given the long cooking time, this packed a bunch of punch for relatively little effort.

About that preserved lemon paste: It’s still a relatively uncommon ingredient, so making the paste may be one of the book’s best takeaways, pureeing preserved lemons (both peel and flesh) with optional turmeric for a sunny condiment that’s even easier to use than whole preserved lemons. It proved its worth in both the chicken and a lemon cake, where the paste combined with labneh to create a tangy, tender cake with complexity.

Despite some interesting recipes like that, the dessert chapter was the weakest overall (honestly, did you really need another banana bread recipe?). Also good, though, were tender-crisp cardamom shortbread rounds, despite looking at first glance far too heavy on the powdered sugar—until a reread of the weird yield revealed that it makes 120 cookies (“Makes 40 little cookies plus enough dough for 80 more”).

Quick takes:

Good Things: Recipes and Rituals to Share with People You Love, by Samin Nosrat. 464 pages. Published by Random House, 2025.

Organization: Chapters on building blocks, appetizers and drinks, salad dressings, pantry dishes, vegetables, dishes for dinners with friends, breads, and desserts.

Ingredients measurement methods: Comically inconsistent.

Photos: Most recipes have accompanying photos.

Index: Decent, could have been better; for example, Burnt Honey Hot Fudge, despite the recipe page being labeled as “sauces and preserves,” gets no index listing under “sauces.”

Disclosure: I am an affiliate of Bookshop.org, which supports independent booksellers, and I will earn a commission if you click through and make a purchase on the title above.

The Spice of Life

Everything is better with Pepper

Pepper thinks sharing your food is a lip-smacking good thing.

.

Aiming to make cooks better, instead of a hard-to-define “good,” Australian author Alice Zaslavsky’s latest book is part of a trend (see: Good Enough) to reassure readers they are, in fact, good enough.

In Better Cooking: Life-changing skills & recipes to tempt & teach, she offers 70 recipes written with verve, plus a “bonus bits” section following each recipe. This vibrant book often succeeds, but when it falls short, cooks striving to be better may blame themselves, rather than pointing a finger, deservedly, at the recipe.

The bonus bits provide a mix of tips, recipe riffs and substitutions, shortcuts, ideas for using up every bit of an ingredient, details about an ingredient, skill, or kitchen gadget, and ways to use up a less-common ingredient. For experienced cooks—and cookbook authors—this is where things get fun, and riffing will make cooks “better.” The opening recipe for avocado toast with black garlic and poached egg, for example, provides several substitutions, ideas for spicing up the poaching liquid, and an explanation of black garlic.

Recipes run a gamut of cuisines with a tilt toward Italian. So risotto follows broccoli cassoulet, followed by shrimp, macadamia, and asparagus stir-fry, then loaded potato latkes, then pantry puttanesca. In another chapter, “not quite niçoise” follows five-spice tempura follows fried green falafels follows garden focaccia.

The book follows the annoying style of cutesy but unhelpfully named chapters for cooks who need to find something specific quickly (all chicken recipes) or grasp the point of a chapter. What is “on autopilot” to one cook may feel to another like a complicated “loosen your shoulders” recipe.

Deviled tuna egg sandwiches feature in the slapdash chapter, but they’re not especially quick (mince celery, mince shallot, boil and peel eggs, mince cilantro or dill), and several things seem off. Take seriously Zaslavsky’s “or to taste” on the Kewpie mayo; you will want far less than she calls for, because with runny eggs and canned tuna, the full amount makes this simply soggy. A bigger issue is with the egg timing; these eggs are truly runny in an unappealing, soft-boiled goo that contributed to the sog despite the hefty dose of celery. The underlying concept, though—spiking the salad with a punch of curry powder—could work with adjustments.

Share

Meatball soup lacked punch despite the mix of Italian sausage, raw rice, Parmesan, currants, and pine nuts in meatballs poached in tomato broth. The recipe needs enough liquid to cook the pound-plus of meatballs, but the paltry amounts of onion, red bell pepper, paprika, and black pepper lost the flavor fight against 14 ounces of canned tomatoes, 2 tablespoons of tomato paste, 2 cups of chicken stock, and 6 cups of water. A small bouquet garni of a few basil stalks, oregano, and bay leaves stayed in the pot only long enough to bring all the liquid to a boil, leaving barely a whisper of itself. Zaslavsky warns against adding salt to the soup, but it desperately needed more—even to this cook, who generally undersalts food.

A plum muffin recipe produced better results, but not without frustration. Made with a mixture of almond meal and flour, these were tested with a suggested substitute of blueberries for plums. In the original, a plum half is nestled, cut side up, into each cup of muffin batter. In the “recipe riffs,” Zaslavsky calls for frozen berries because they hold their shape “under the duress of folding and baking.” Wait, who said anything about folding? With no more instruction than that, it’s unclear how many berries to aim for; 10 small berries atop the center of the batter seemed to mimic the plum halves. With that, these muffins were light, delicate, and cinnamon-spiced—but they needed more berries, either nestled or folded. It’s great to try for a breezy tone that suggests a “trust yourself” approach for new cooks, but an editor should have watched for it to go awry.

With both good directions and spicing, cacio e pepe risotto proved more successful. This basic risotto gets spiked with crème fraîche and a healthy helping of “CP butter” made by mashing together butter, Parmesan, garlic, pepper, salt, and parsley. There’s no good reason for the recipe to make more of the butter than needed for the risotto, but it does; the extra provided a pleasant result in a recipe for roasted zucchini heaped with buttered breadcrumbs, set over a sauteed mixture of the scooped-out zucchini innards, currants, lemon, and parsley. It would have been nice, though, if either the index or the risotto recipe referred cooks to to the zucchini recipe to use up the butter.

In a final recipe test, taco rice succeeded in creating what it promised—taco-spiced ground beef plus shredded cheddar and corn chips over sushi rice—but cooks might think twice about whether their mouths really want this Hawaiian combo of spicy meat over sugary, vinegary rice.

Quick takes:

Better Cooking: Life-changing skills & recipes to tempt & teach, by Alice Zaslavsky. 319 pages. Published by Appetite by Random House, 2024.

Organization: Chapters are intended to go from easy to more complex, titled Slapdash, On Autopilot, Making the Most of It, Loosen Your Shoulders, and Seriously Good Sweeties. Each of the 70 recipes is followed by a “bonus bits” section of tips, tricks, and recipe riffs.

Ingredients measurement methods: A mix—sometimes by ounces as well as grams and volume measurements; other times lacking helpful weights (such as calling for 2–3 bunches of bok choy but failing to give even a range of weight for it). And for a book aimed at less-confident cooks, sometimes measurements are ignored entirely, such as calling just for steamed rice under “To serve” in a fish recipe. Giving at least a range (“2 to 4 cups steamed rice”) would have been simple even if there wasn’t space to give cooking instructions.

Photos: Photos accompany each recipe, sometimes showing details of a recipe instead of the finished dish.

Index: Thorough in many ways, but with some frustrating omissions. As noted above, it leaves out some obvious entries, such as another main use for the cacio e pepe butter. There’s no listing for “gadgets” despite many recipes having a “gadget spotlight.” And while it lists many recipes by ingredient (such as a long list under lemons), others that seem like obvious inclusions don’t make the cut—for example, no listing at all for the Italian sausage that is the main ingredient in the meatball soup.

Disclosure: I am an affiliate of Bookshop.org, which supports independent booksellers, and I will earn a commission if you click through and make a purchase on any linked titles.

“For me, cooking for one is all about joy,” Wilkinson writes. “The joy of choosing what you fancy, the joy of taking the time to make something only you need to find delicious and the joy of eating alone, finding a moment for yourself and your food.”

By restricting each recipe to cooking in one vessel, Wilkinson also restrains her ingredient lists, keeping a sense of ease and joy while fitting in vegetables, carbs, meat (sometimes), and seasonings. The recipes don’t aim to be groundbreakingly unusual (and are often frankly inauthentic versions of international recipes), but Wilkinson thoughtfully pulls flavor and texture from the few components. While many recipes are mildly seasoned—maybe too much so—she calls on ingredients that punch above their weight, such as chili crisp, jerk seasoning, preserved lemon, and masala curry paste.

So a baked dish mixes gnocchi, cherry tomatoes, an ear of corn, broccoli, masala curry, and cashews, topped with coconut yogurt and cilantro—11 ingredients, five or 10 minutes of chopping, and 20 minutes under the broiler. That’s on par for the effort most of her recipes demand. (Note, though, that some call for ingredients that may be a challenge to find at an average supermarket in the U.S., such as small amounts of fresh pasta.)

Chapter titles, somewhat arbitrarily, divide recipes by “comfort,” “fresh,” “simple,” “special,” and “sweet.” Comfort goes heavy on pasta, curries, and classics such as cottage pie and mac and cheese topped with fried onions. Fresh recipes lean into salads, including a fresh peach and burrata orzo salad sparked with cherry tomatoes, mint, and basil, perfect for steamy days that need a barely-on stove. Simple includes a green linguine that incorporates the creaminess of an egg and cheese with broccoli and spinach.

A zucchini “carpaccio” layers ricotta, thin slices of zucchini, lemon juice and zest, and olive oil-crisped capers, butter beans, and panko. Five main ingredients take the punch of pancetta and silkiness of egg yolk and butter to create a rich bowl of risotto carbonara. Creamy scrambled eggs fold in tangy cottage cheese; take Wilkinson up on her suggestion to top these with chili crisp and scallion.

A straightforward sheet-pan supper of sausages and potatoes gets a lift from cherry tomatoes, red bell pepper, and leeks turned in a marmalade-mustard mix; an orzo dish of bell peppers, cherry tomatoes, green olives, basil, and preserved lemon pulls together these strong flavors nicely with a drizzle of balsamic vinegar and olive oil.

A puff pastry croque madame proved less successful; the pastry is coated with a cream cheese and Dijon mixture, topped with ham, and sprinkled with Cheddar, with—supposedly—a small gap left for the egg to nestle. But the gap proved elusive, and the egg ran off the tart; the time required to cook the egg overcooked the cheese.

And a gyoza stir-fry requires an especially deft touch to toss and cook the the broccoli, pepper, and onion adequately without overcooking and breaking up the already-cooked gyoza in the pan. Nevertheless, this is a simple, filling dish with an appreciated sprinkling of chopped peanuts; many dishes have garnishes that make a big difference in the final flavor.

Wilkinson’s “special” chapter at first glance doesn’t seem much different from recipes in other chapters, but they may take a bit more time or splurging on ingredients. A straightforward mortadella and mozzarella sandwich goes up a notch with a one-portion homemade focaccia. Lobster spaghetti calls for two lobster tails, with lemon, tomatoes, cream, basil, and Parmesan. Salami and hot honey frying pan pizza uses homemade dough, while pork and kimchi steamed buns make the buns from scratch.

Sweets include puddings, a spoonable chocolate brownie, a skillet chocolate chip cookie, and several parfaits. A single cinnamon bun comes together in just a few minutes from a strip of puff pastry coated with butter, sugar, and cinnamon, braided and tucked into a ramekin or muffin cup.

Wilkinson suggests a few sizes of cooking vessels, though more specificity here would have been helpful. While she advises getting a small cast-iron skillet or two of 6.5 to 8 inches and a small pie dish, she offers no sizes for other items such as a saucepan or baking dish. The photo accompanying her sheet-pan marmalade sausage offers no clues to whether this is a regular half-sheet pan or (presumably) a quarter-sheet—potentially making a dramatic difference in results.

Wilkinson does try to help solo cooks avoid waste, by noting with each recipe another recipe that will use up a leftover ingredient—so if she calls for an egg yolk, she points you to a use for one egg white. She also structures her index by ingredient, to help with using up leftovers.

That seems especially important for ingredients such as puff pastry, when so little of a box may be used per recipe, but is difficult to divide while frozen and then can’t be refrozen. This takes readers only so far, though; after you’ve used 3 ounces of your fennel bulb, there are no other options for the rest in the index.

Of course, most solo cooks are not solo all the time, and the U.S. has 45 million two-person households. Happily for all of them, most of these recipes should double easily, either using a bigger pan or keeping the ingredients divided between individual dishes.

Quick takes:

One Pot, One Portion: 100 Simple Recipes Just for You, by Eleanor Wilkinson. 223 pages. Published by Clarkson Potter, 2025.

Organization: Chapter titles are Comfort, Fresh, Simple, Special, and Sweet; it was hard to tell what the difference is for the “simple” chapter, as many of the recipes are no quicker than in other chapters nor have shorter ingredient lists.

Ingredients measurement methods: A mix of ounces, cups, grams, and milliliters, all in one recipe—though frustratingly sometimes ingredients have no weight given, even an approximate one (such as just “2 pork sausages.”)

Photos: Every recipe has an accompanying, straightforward photo that nevertheless makes the point of plating food attractively even when it’s “for just myself.”

Index: Structured only by ingredient, excluding recipe titles.

Disclosure: I am an affiliate of Bookshop.org, which supports independent booksellers, and I will earn a commission if you click through and make a purchase on the title above.

The Spice of Life

Everything is better with Pepper

She may be happily single, but don’t even think about leaving Pepper home alone.

Martha: The Cookbook promises readers 100 of Stewart’s most-loved recipes, with brief anecdotes behind them plus photo collections showing her at favorite points throughout her life. Many of the recipes feel classic but slightly outdated—or maybe just classic, because even if you know should label some of these as passé, they still hold much appeal.

And while Stewart includes many old favorites, she shows herself to fit the label (and groan-inducing phrase for word nerds) of “lifelong learner,” happy to update what she’s always done with new techniques that others discover. That’s true from the first recipe, in which she credits J. Kenji Lopez-Alt for showing us the better way to boil an egg—which is, skip the boiling and steam it instead.

Stewart inspires strong feelings in others, positive and negative, as demonstrated in the reactions to a Netflix documentary about her. But what keeps coming through, in that show and this book, is her consistency: her exacting expectations of herself and others, her love of gardening, her belief in the power of a beautiful home and table, her not-small ego (though knowing what she has accomplished—the first female self-made billionaire—makes it hard to argue her right to that ego), and those classic recipes, all alongside a flexibility to adapt to any situation. That includes, of course, her time in prison, which goes unmentioned here, or a seemingly unlikely friendship and collaboration with Snoop Dogg.

So this book, like most of her others, is worth a read if:

• you love photos of colorful eggs;

• you are a relatively confident and somewhat experienced cook;

• you want recipes that work, aren’t too difficult, and are proven winners, but have tweaks you may not have come across;

• and/or photos of a glowing table with classic New England, old-money-ish silver serving trays (which might have come from Stewart’s Macy’s or Kmart lines) with champagne flutes filled with golden nectar, surrounded by a tin of caviar on a footed tray and gold-tinted plates of caviar-topped crepes, bring you joy.

To wit:

For lovers of pastel eggs and dreamers of their own country-manor-cute, perfectly clean, never-attacked-by-foxes-or-creepy-snakes chicken coops, Stewart has you covered with just enough satisfying photos. And her egg recipes cover some classics, such as a simple spinach and Gruyère omelet, or coddled eggs (steamed in coddlers or ramekins with mushrooms and a nice addition of Dijon and honey; these seem more consistently reliable than shirred eggs, and if you don’t have coddlers, try steaming in 4-ounce Mason jars instead of ramekins, using their lids instead of parchment paper rounds). Or try artichokes with poached eggs, smoked salmon, and hollandaise (for which she gives both classic and quick sauce recipes, with no explanation of why you’d choose one over the other). “Custard egg sandwiches” look frankly unappealing in the photo, a chunky square of egg custard plopped between two thick, barely toasted slices of milk bread with just a bit of watercress barely touched by rice vinegar. The baked custard, though, was creamy and souffle-light, with only about five minutes of prep time. If the full sandwich doesn’t appeal, a custard square atop just one piece of toast with a garnish of watercress makes a great alternative.

Well-written recipes that are best for cooks with a little experience and confidence: Stewart’s recipes generally fit on one page with enough detail to promise success. But some things are assumed, so this is still better for somewhat confident and experienced cooks. For example, a garlic confit recipe omits any instructions on getting the baked garlic out of the skins.

Classic recipes that work, with tweaks: These are exemplified in a gougères recipe, in which Stewart takes this hors d’oeuvres, amped up with Comté, Gruyère, and Parmesan, to another level through her recent discovery that the classic recipe is much better when you as much as double the eggs—no four eggs here, but eight, for especially light, open, airy crisp puffs. Other examples include orange-scented currant scones that boost the typical cream scone with Grand Marnier-soaked currants and a hefty dose of orange zest, or crisp vegetable flatbreads that take the typical Martha approach of turning a basic cracker into an Instagram-ready one, with an almost stained-glass design of sage leaves and onion, tomatillo, and cherry tomato slices. (Though not given as an option, if you have a pasta machine, try putting the dough through it for ease in getting these very flat.)

Among other tested recipes, none bombed or even came close to disappointing. Buttermilk sorbet was a classic lemon-scented Southern scoop, made easier to scoop with its touch of corn syrup. Lemon sugar cookies were perfect alongside (or outside, as a sorbet sandwich), though more lemon zest would never hurt. Onion rings, which employ both instant flour (Wondra) and beer, came out supremely light, crisp, and gently lager-flavored.

Photos evoking old-money New England: Ah, to be a billionaire.

Quick takes:

Martha: The Cookbook, by Martha Stewart. 303 pages. Published by Clarkson Potter, 2024.

Organization: Chapters on breakfast/brunch, soups/salads, cocktails, hors d’oeuvres, dinner, garden sides, and desserts, interspersed with photos and memories.

Ingredients measurement methods: C’mon, Martha. Here we say you are both consistent but open to change, learning, tweaking … and yet you still give measurements by volume only. We know you want your readers to succeed, and we know from your cocktail recipes that you know how to measure some things in ounces, so why won’t you evolve here?

Photos: It’s a Martha Stewart book. Need we say more?

Index: Fine, but note that it is only recipes—no references to the anecdotes.

Disclosure: I am an affiliate of Bookshop.org, which supports independent booksellers, and I will earn a commission if you click through and make a purchase on the title above.

The Spice of Life

Everything is better with Pepper

Only Pepper knows her age, but she’s pretty sure she’s a classic.

Nathan’s charmed, mostly well-off youth reads as both a delight and protected from reality. While she was brought up with a moral code and expectations of a Reform Jewish family to lead an ethical life, much of what was happening around her seemed to make little dent. There’s a reference to segregation in one diary entry (she and a friend decided they didn’t like it), but the adult Nathan gives herself an easy pass as a 17-year-old visiting relatives in France in 1960, seemingly oblivious to their war-induced trauma.

Generally, the book skips past too many weighty thoughts. Names and juicy tidbits seem baked into every page, with Nathan in the thick of things. On one page she’s escorting Elie Wiesel around Jerusalem; on another she’s recounting the chance to meet Marilyn Monroe as a teenager.

The name-dropping begins in earnest by page 13—her father shares a sleeping compartment with Albert Einstein on a train from New York to Atlanta and suggests they are connected through grandfathers who were business partners—setting the reader up for all the names to follow. Nathan simply knew everyone who was anyone in the food world through her long, impactful career of food tomes (and these are tomes: this latest weighs nearly four pounds).

Barbra Streisand floats quickly in and out of a long paragraph about spending several days with David Ben-Gurion during Nathan’s time as the Jerusalem mayor’s foreign press attaché. Or there’s her close friendship formed at camp as a teenager with Kathy Boudin, the future Weather Underground driver of the getaway car from the Brink’s armored car robbery that killed three people, with whom Nathan reconnects after Boudin is released from prison.

She takes readers through her extensive travels, often but not always focused on finding Jewish food and cooks wherever she goes, as well as her books, experiences, and the people she encountered through other writing, such as time she spent interviewing M.F.K. Fisher as Fisher dealt with Parkinson’s near the end of her life.

The names, and the stories, just keep on coming; this is a book to take on in fits and starts, or it can feel like too much—especially when a life seems as charmed as hers, with so much seeming to work out so easily. That ease lasts until page 204—a one-page entry on “my first real encounter with sadness.” Even here, as Nathan recounts a pregnancy with twin daughters, one born stillborn and another who apparently lived only a short time, she does not allow herself to dwell—now or at the time. While never stating so outright, Nathan seems not to be a woman who wallows. “Nothing was really easy,” she says, somewhat unconvincingly while describing one of the many times her career leapt forward with solid support from others.

Her writing skips lightly through it all, with stories rarely taking more than two or three pages—making it easy for readers to dip in and out. She intersperses recipes throughout, opening with a chicken soup with matzo balls, progressing through many recipes from her German and Eastern European ancestors, then roaming through largely Jewish foods of the Middle East and well beyond, from Cuba to Vietnam—foods she encountered during her travels and jobs before and after she became a full-time food writer.

Nathan has much to be proud of in how she elevated awareness through her 10 cookbooks on Jewish and Israeli food, her magazine and newspaper food writing and interviews with famous chefs and food writers, her PBS television series, and the ways she gave back to her communities. That includes starting the now 50-year-old Ninth Avenue International Food Festival with a colleague in the mayor’s office (one of many jobs she seemed to simply fall into with the help of her many friends), garnering support from James Beard, Craig Claiborne, Edna Lewis, Madhur Jaffrey, Diana Kennedy, and George Lang along the way.

So many other marquee names appear, from Julia Child to Rick Bayless to Lidia Bastianich. Tom Colicchio stops her from choking with a deft Heimlich maneuver. Hugh Hefner gets a mention as the major financial backer of Food & Wine magazine when it launched; Nathan was invited to pitch articles to the magazine thanks to a friendship formed when she returned to New York after grad school with its founders, Ariane and Michael Batterberry, whose offices were for a while the former Playboy offices.

Through all the name-dropping, Nathan is generally kind about nearly everyone she mentions (making it oddly stand out when she mentions inviting Paul Prudhomme to an event and points out she had to borrow a chair large enough to fit him from a hotel. While his weight was hardly a secret, why did it feel necessary to point that out?).

Among the enticing recipes, many of which no longer sound exotic but surely did when first she encountered them: white gazpacho with almond and grapes, crispy potato onion bread; eggplant rounds topped with tahini, yogurt, and pomegranates; chicken with sumac; spanakopita (one recipe that lacked clarity—if you use frozen spinach, should you cook it first?); and of course, challah—for which she includes two recipes and delightfully real photos that illustrate braiding techniques, in which her ropes are not all perfectly, evenly formed. Like those braids, her recipes are replicable for home cooks, with the second challah version producing a fluffy loaf redolent of anise seeds and tarragon. Potatoes add moisture, fluffiness, and keeping qualities to this worth-the-effort bread.

It's important to use wild mushrooms in her polenta with fricassee of wild mushrooms—wild being important given the lack of many other strong flavors. Just a touch of Gruyere in the polenta and a bit of garlic and a sprinkling of parsley make the mushrooms’ quality paramount.

A Persian cucumber salad with yogurt and walnuts is delicious and easy; dried fruit plumps during the chill time, producing a great balance of savory and sweet with the mint and dill, crunch from walnuts and radish, and juiciness from the cucumbers.

Nathan’s orange marmalade will make this jam feel doable even for novice preservers, and her cashew tapenade offers a simple, balanced mixture of pulsed cashews, thyme, garlic, honey, and olive oil to serve with crackers.

On the other hand, salmon with preserved lemon was tasty enough, but the lemon overpowers the salmon and seemed quite salty (consider reducing or omitting the brine, or rinse the lemon first).

As is often the case with memoirs like this, the most engaging writing and stories comes at the beginning and the end—learning how the author came to adulthood, to be the famous person we think we know. The early stories then often morph into a litany-checklist of the people met, travels taken, fame-building accomplishments met—interesting enough, especially in a memoir stuffed with famous people. But the book’s midsection, while providing an interesting one-woman history of the rise of restaurants and food writers in our culture, offers just gentle bits with little spice.

The ending, however, turns back to a graceful, quietly emotional telling of her final trips with her husband of 45 years, Allan, and his sudden death near the end of 2019. She describes her passage out of mourning in the midst of Covid lockdowns—first in New Orleans when a planned five-day trip to help her daughter post-surgery turns into 53 days of lockdown, and later in Los Angeles. She closes gently on a note of hope with, true to her nature, a visit to a date farm sparking her desire to write others’ food stories again.

Quick takes:

My Life in Recipes: Food, Family, and Memories, by Joan Nathan. 450 pages. Published by Alfred A. Knopf, 2024.

Organization: 35 chapters take readers chronologically through Nathan’s life, with recipes interspersed.

Ingredients measurement methods: Volume always, with grams for many ingredients, but inconsistently (a stick of butter will be given in grams, but not 2 tablespoons’ worth; a recipe for “risotto” from ancient grains calls for freekeh, bulgur, and wheat berries only as 1 cup, no grams given).

Photos: Family photos throughout; color photos of some recipes.

Index: Comprehensive—for both name-drops and recipes.

Disclosure: I am an affiliate of Bookshop.org, which supports independent booksellers, and I will earn a commission if you click through and make a purchase on the title above.

The Spice of Life

Everything is better with Pepper

Fame underwhelms Pepper.

Too often, food people proclaim that to bake requires scientific precision plus at least some understanding of the underlying science, but the legion of lazy and slightly haphazard cooks who nevertheless bake successfully know that’s bunk.

Of course, some recipes really do require precision, and the science is often pretty cool, but most recipes are flexible to some extent in both ingredients and amounts. While many bakers love using a scale to weigh their ingredients for speed and, yes, precision—and it’s deeply annoying that Tosi acts as though she’s doing readers a favor by not bothering to give weights—most of us have ancestors who baked successfully using just a coffee cup and a spoon.

Helping new and experienced bakers to adopt a give-it-a-whirl attitude seems like a gift in a world where blog commenters get so nervous about making any substitution that they’ll ask things like “will the recipe still work if I use pecans instead of walnuts?” In keeping with the Covid theme of bare grocery shelves that forced improvisation, Tosi leans toward fairly short ingredient lists, with tips and substitutions for most recipes.

So she notes for a skillet cake that bakers can use any vegetable that shreds—reassuring them that a standard carrot cake recipe works just as well with beets, parsnips, zucchini, sweet potato, or butternut squash. Or a mint filling for sandwich cookies can be replaced with caramel sauce, fruit curd, jam, fudge sauce, or frosting—and of course each of those recipes comes complete with its own variation.

Recipes run the gamut from building blocks such as flavored whipped cream, jams, lemon curd, and basic wafer cookies, to cakes, breakfast treats, breads, and snacks. These are not high-concept desserts, for the most part. Rather, sticking with breezy fun, Tosi offers up recipes such as gummy bears, pop rocks, graham cracker toffee, whipped cream flavored with cereal, pretzels, or doughnuts, and bar cookies made from store-bought cookie dough, Ritz crackers, crunchy cookies, mini marshmallows, Bugles, and sweetened condensed milk.

Recipes often take advantage of the inherent qualities of an ingredient to up the flavor ante, such as cookies that swirl together a chocolate chip brownie batter with a ground-pretzel blondie batter, for a classic salty-sweet combination.

The gummy bears aren’t, really—just fruit juice heavily set with gelatin—but it’s a nice change to know what’s in your candy and control the flavors. Some of her simplest recipes offer deep pleasure with that flavor control, such as very adaptable, four-ingredient brown sugar wafers. Crisp chocolate wafers, which could stand in for the late, lamented Famous Chocolate Wafers necessary for icebox cakes and crumb crusts, last for weeks in a cookie jar and could take experimentation with a variety of extracts or spices. (But one more weight complaint—this is the sort of spot where providing weights, for bakers who own scales, would have been so appreciated. The ability to drizzle honey straight into a bowl on a scale versus scooping it out of a tablespoon measure—twice—just shouldn’t be too much to ask.)

Sometimes, though, necessary details waft away with the easy-breezy. A citrus jam calls for using entire oranges, lemons, or grapefruits cut into chunks, but she fails to note the need to remove seeds before running them through the food processor. This isn’t OK in any recipe, but especially not a book like this whose aim is to give bakers confidence. Though the headnote says this is also a great way to use up squeezed citrus shells, she gives no hints at whether anything should be adjusted to make up for the missing juice or weight. And because of her attitude about weights, she leaves fruit amounts too wide-open to interpretation, calling for 3 large oranges or 5 lemons. Lemons vary widely, and what counts as a large orange? Probably the recipe works fine regardless, but would a mention like “about one pound” have been so painful? (She also notes it scales up “like a dream,” but with no mention of how much might be too much.)

To a lesser extent, details disappear when recipes don’t seem to match their accompanying photos, such as a chocolate jellyroll cake filled with ice cream. The photo shows a distinctive green swirl in the middle of the ice cream, but the recipe provides precisely zero hints about its provenance. (Admittedly, photos that include elements never mentioned in a recipe make this reviewer nearly as nuts as failing to give ingredient weights.)

One standout recipe among those tested: basic English muffins. Follow Tosi’s suggestion to refrigerate the dough up to two days for maximum flavor; the tested muffins got a 24-hour chill before shaping and baking. The dough seems like far too little for a dozen muffins, and they do come out on the smaller side, but these light, tender, craggy, crunchy (from the dusting of cornmeal) will stay fresh for days—if eaters can resist that long.

Quick takes:

Bake Club: 101 Must-Have Moves for Your Kitchen, by Christina Tosi and Shannon Salzano. 308 pages. Published by Alfred A. Knopf, 2024.

Organization: Chapters include pantry basics; “dropoffable” desserts; breakfast baking; bread; cake; “snack aisle;” and “tabletop desserts.”

Ingredients measurement methods: Volume only, unfortunately.

Photos: Photos accompany every recipe, including an inset photo of ingredients that reinforces how few ingredients are needed for most recipes and the reliance on standard grocery-store components.

Index: Well done—comprehensive, listing recipes by main ingredients, name, and category (so English muffins appear under the letter E, and under bread, breakfast, and yeast—but not, appropriately, under muffins).

Disclosure: I am an affiliate of Bookshop.org, which supports independent booksellers, and I will earn a commission if you click through and make a purchase on the title above.

The Spice of Life

Everything is better with Pepper

Supervising cookbook reviewing is no breeze. Pepper needs naps.

Cho grew up in a Chinese family in Cleveland, but went to school with mostly white students, leaving her feeling not Chinese enough with her extended family—lacking fluency in Cantonese and dressing like an American—while not American enough at school. But over time, she shifted an ongoing love of cooking to include more Chinese foods, and career-shifted from architectural design to become a James Beard Award-winning food writer (for her first book, Mooncakes & Milk Bread). Alongside a move to San Francisco, her acceptance of all the facets of herself grew.

In Chinese Enough, Cho intersperses short essays about aspects of cooking and family life throughout the recipes, all coming at the “You are/I am enough” idea. While talking about straddling two cultures and feeling like never being enough in either isn’t new, the essays add weight and texture to her theme.

After including a helpful section on needed tools and knife cuts for her recipes, Cho turns to chapters organized by how she likes to serve a meal, such as recipes for cookouts, for preparing as a group (such as a strong section on dumplings and spring rolls), for banquets, or for dishes best served with rice. So the rice chapter includes orange pepper popcorn chicken, sticky maple tofu sticks, green steamed egg, and miso pork meatballs. Noodle recipes include creamy tomato udon, mushroom chow mein, peanut butter and cheung fun, and Spam and mac soup. Each chapter opens with a recipe list—helpful given this less-than-intuitive organization.

Recipes seem especially appealing to cooks with a multicultural heritage along the lines of Cho’s, seeing how she melds her Chinese, midwestern, and Californian influences, as well as to non-Chinese cooks open to the mix of comfort-food recipes such as “mom’s spaghetti,” which incorporates oyster sauce and ketchup into its ground beef topping, and less-familiar ingredients such as salted egg yolks, used in a batter for fried squash rings.

Red-braised lamb, tea-brined duck breast, wood ear mushroom salad, saucy sesame long beans, and steamed bitter melon stuffed with black bean and garlic pork have a more traditional feel. Other recipes incorporate more influences, such as a white and black bean dip mixing fermented black beans, garlic, and rice vinegar into a white bean puree; hot honey mayo shrimp; curried surimi salad; smashed ranch cucumbers; soy caramel apple cake; malty banana cream pie; and Cleveland-ish cassata cake.

These culture-bridging recipes still require many traditional ingredients; Cho includes a chapter on stocking the pantry, including some brands she prefers. The recommendations seem worth heeding; a recipe test of eggplant scented with a lime and basil sauce would have been better with a less overpoweringly funky fish sauce. She says her recommended brands include a little sweetness, which could have helped.

Typhoon deviled eggs top a sriracha-kissed yolk filling with typhoon breadcrumbs, a popular Hong Kong mixture sprinkled over seafood, Cho says, and Chinese pork floss. Tested minus the pork floss, these eggs were still a hit, with the crunchy mix of panko, scallion, garlic, and ginger offering powerful flavor and pleasing textural contrast to the smooth egg.

And flavorful miso pork meatballs come together quickly, with ground pork spiked with miso, ginger, and scallions. These made a light but flavorful simple entrée served over rice (without, she says, any sauce, though her suggestion of sriracha and Kewpie mayo is a good one for people who really want sauce), or a good addition to a multilayered rice bowl.

Small shrimp patties, despite looking like standard fish cakes in the photo, add a step of boiling the patties before frying, creating, Cho says, a cloudlike interior. These were only half-successful in a recipe test. The shrimp mixture, which includes baking powder, comes together quickly in a food processor, then gets portioned with a small cookie scoop into boiling water. That means each scoop goes into the water in a ball, not a flatter patty, dramatically puffing up and out in an explosion of shrimp paste. From there, it’s to be pan-fried until crisp, but the puffed exteriors were too irregular to make great contact with the hot oil for consistent crispness, though the interior was cloudlike as promised.

Whitefish Rangoon, though, was another hit, mixing smoked mackerel and cream cheese for a fried wonton filling. Reasonably quick to prep (especially with two cooks working together) and served with Cho’s pineapple sweet-and-sour sauce, these sucessfully blended cultures (her husband is Jewish) without feeling forced or gimmicky. The uncooked wontons also froze well, making it useful to prep a full batch or two to have some on hand for last-minute frying once you’ve started the work of filling and shaping these.

Cho closes with a dozen helpful menu suggestions, to serve two, four, six, or eight guests—a nice touch for the many good cooks who nevertheless may feel they are never enough when it comes to putting a menu together.

Quick takes:

Chinese Enough, by Kristina Cho. 367 pages. Published by Hachette Book Group, 2024.

Organization: Organized by how Cho likes to serve a meal.

Ingredients measurement methods: Ingredients are listed by both weight and volume, with Cho encouraging cooking by weight.

Photos: Photos accompany every recipe, and Cho sprinkles in useful photos illustrating techniques such as how to pleat dumplings or form spring rolls.

Index: Reasonably comprehensive.

Disclosure: I am an affiliate of Bookshop.org, which supports independent booksellers, and I will earn a commission if you click through and make a purchase on the title above.

The Spice of Life

Everything is better with Pepper

Don’t let anyone box you in; Pepper doesn’t, and she believes you, too, are enough.

Maybe you’ve joined just one sect—the Jerusalem sect? The Simple sect, the Plenty sect, the Sweet sect?

But if you’re all in, then the newest sect may bring you comfort and joy.

Comfort is the eleventh Ottolenghi/Ottolenghi Test Kitchen book, alongside his Guardian and New York Times columns and the restaurants that started it all (now up to 10 locations), plus streams of public appearances. To say the man is literally everywhere feels like a bare misuse of “literally.” Likewise his favorite ingredients: Supermarkets now regularly stock items he popularized that once were obscure and hard to source, such as sumac, preserved lemon, harissa, and za’atar—often combined in nonobvious and bordering-on-weird ways.

Ottolenghi’s early books prompted comments like this from Geraldine DeRuiter: “Yotam Ottolenghi’s recipes contain forty ingredients and you have to start making them six months ahead because you have to grow the herbs from scratch or leave your spices out until a full moon and then you have to lure virgins to dance around them until they are all so exhausted that they collapse and that is a lot to do for a risotto.”

A gentler route into the cult came with the publication of Simple, which offered recipes with no more than 10 ingredients, making them, by Ottolenghi standards, simple, often doable for a weeknight supper, and often falling into the “comfort” camp.

Now Ottolenghi and his team of recipe developers offer Comfort, with recipes to evoke memories and warm feelings. What that means depends on the authors’ cultural touchpoints, so you might find meatloaf here, but a shawarma meatloaf, or stretchy aligot potatoes with leeks and thyme and garlic instead of plain mashed potatoes. The flavor repertoire branches out from the Ottolenghi classics by encompassing the comfort foods of his co-authors—influenced by China, Malaysia, Australia, Scotland, and London—alongside Ottolenghi’s German and Italian Jewish heritage and his Jerusalem upbringing.

Comfort, of course, doesn’t have to mean quick—think cinnamon buns or multilayered lasagna. But somehow a glance at Ottolenghi recipes, even with lots of less-common ingredients, always suggests the prep will be quicker than the reality. The final products may taste incredible, fresh, and different, but first there’s the finding, chopping, processing, and cooking the ingredients that invariably takes longer than expected, even for accomplished cooks.

And sometimes, despite the strong flavors, Ottolenghi recipes often feel too much the same. For all the ingredients in some of them, the flavors can fall a little flat—maybe because nothing stands out, sometimes because a dish needs acid to brighten it. The varied flavors his co-authors contribute help with the sameness, but there’s still plenty of the classic Ottolenghi hits like preserved lemon, black garlic, Aleppo chile, and curry leaves to go around here.

The book opens with some accessible, familiar breakfast options with a twist: Dutch baby with roasted tomatoes, a sambal-flavored shakshuka, leek, tomato, and turmeric frittata, and an omelet with eggplant (featuring one of the least appealing food photos you’ll see in a while), and crepes. For a flavorful spin on Nutella to fill the crepes, Comfort offers a chocolate spread made with sesame and hazelnut praline. Is the praline worth the effort? Debatable—definitely delicious, but also time-consuming: Toast seeds and nuts in the oven, stir them into just-made caramel, let harden, bash with a rolling pin, grind for 10 minutes in a processor, then add oil and vanilla seeds. Only then do you start to melt chocolate to finish the recipe. This could have benefitted from a touch of salt, and no matter how long the processing, it can’t escape a slight grittiness—not unpleasant, but not silky like Nutella.

In contrast, making the batter for thousand-hole pancakes takes mere minutes, but the flavor payoff isn’t there. Inspired by Moroccan pancakes, these start with a mix of semolina and bread flours, a dash of sugar and salt, yeast, and water, blended til smooth before an hourlong rest. Cooked one at a time in a small nonstick pan, the 12 thin, chewy pancakes, vaguely reminiscent of injera, take around 30 minutes to cook. After cooling a bit, they get spread with a mixture of butter, honey, salt, orange blossom water, and pecans. The butter or another topping is crucial for the nearly flavorless pancakes; possibly following the option to leave the batter overnight in the fridge would develop more flavor and tang. (A quibble in the way these recipes are written: The ingredient list for the honey butter calls for a half-teaspoon of salt, but for the pancakes just says “salt.” The instructions then say to put all the ingredients in a blender plus a half-teaspoon of salt. It’s minor, but, as proven in recipe testing, the inconsistency also makes it more likely a cook will overlook the salt—and this recipe needs every bit of seasoning it can get.)

Far more successful was the roasted eggplant, red pepper, and tomato soup. Again, cooks can’t speed through, with oven-roasting, then peeling those vegetables while onions, spices, and tomato paste get sauteed. But the soup’s deep flavor—even without its fried almond topping—will make cooks wish they’d prepped a double batch, to keep a stash in the freezer.

For another comfort food with a twist, Ottolenghi replaces tahini in hummus with fennel. Tested with canned chickpeas (given the challenge of finding the required “jars of good-quality chickpeas”), the anise seemed surprisingly muted here; the suggestion to use Pernod instead of vermouth could have boosted a mild fennel bulb. Topped with a mixture of roasted bell pepper and cherry tomatoes spiked with garlic and olives, though, this made a pita-worthy alternative to standard hummus.

Rice fritters spiked with feta and mozzarella, with scallions, Greek yogurt, frozen peans, and nigella seeds adding flavor came together quickly, though the 1:1 ratio of rice to water left the rice bordering on crunchy. That made it tricky to hand-form balls and press them into patties that held together; better and quicker was to put a scoop straight from the mixing bowl into the skillet, then flatten it. Served with a quick sweet chile sauce, these crisp cakes hit the comfort mark.

Sometimes the odd choice to make the ingredients list not match the order of preparation feels annoying when trying to move efficiently through a recipe; the first step in a dish of ramen noodles with mushrooms called for making the sauce first, though the sauce ingredients are listed after the mushrooms, noodles, and garnish. And this supposedly 15-minute recipe takes the cook all the way through making the green onion sauce, then cooking the mushrooms for 15 minutes, before telling the cook to put on a pot of water to boil for the ramen. The first step in any noodle recipe should always be that pot of water, as most cooks know. (The dish was fine, though flavor-wise a little underwhelming.)

Rigatoni with a tomato-less ragu had the interesting addition of a pureed potato paste (again listed midway down the ingredients list, but prepared in the first step), flavored with garlic, sage, rosemary, and anchovies. Added, with chicken stock, to a sauteed mixture of wild mushrooms and ground beef and left to simmer for 90 minutes, the ragu wanted a touch of acid to lift the flavors beyond what a dusting a lemon zest, parsley, and parmesan could provide as a garnish.

Comfort offers a host of vegetarian recipes, making this a great book for a cook putting together a spread for both meat-eaters and not. Think crisp cauliflower and butternut pakoras alongside shrimp fritters; vegan creamed spinach and artichokes; mushroom ragu; coconut rice with peanut sauce and cucumber relish, served with or without sambal spiced chicken and more sauce; green tea noodles with avocado and radish; caramelized onion orecchiette with hazelnuts and fried sage; zucchini and fennel lasagna for eight or sauce ragu lasagna for one; beef, black garlic, and Baharat pie; and leek, cheese, and za’atar rugelach. The book closes with some savory breads and a few sweets, such as a marble cake, cheesecake, vegan Texas sheet cake, and chocolate mousse with orange caramel.

As cults go, joining Ottolenghi’s can give you a sense of community, with rabid followers around the world, joy at successfully completing its required tasks, weariness in following its sometimes arduous tasks, and a push-pull on your wallet (specialty ingredients pull the money out, while often-cheaper vegetarian recipes push some back in). Give the Comfort cult a whirl—but walk back guilt-free if needed to Simple, or away altogether.

Quick takes:

Ottolenghi Comfort, by Yotam Ottolenghi, Helen Goh, Verena Lochmuller, and Tara Wigley. 318 pages. Published by Ten Speed Press, 2024.

Organization: Chapters organized by type of dish, such as “eggs, crepes, pancakes,” “fritters and other fried things,” “roasted chicken and other sheet pan dishes,” “dals, stews, curries,” and “pasta, polenta, potatoes.”

Ingredients measurement methods: A mix—olive oil may be listed as ¼ cup/60 mL, while cilantro is listed just as 2½ ounces/70 grams (no volume measurement given), and honey just as 2 tablespoons (no grams given, annoyingly for something sticky like this that has to be scraped out of the tablespoon).

Photos: Photo illustrates each recipe.

Index: Comprehensive.

Disclosure: I am an affiliate of Bookshop.org, which supports independent booksellers, and I will earn a commission if you click through and make a purchase on the title above.

The Spice of Life

Everything is better with Pepper

Comfort is walking with your best (ahem, only) dog friend.

A recipe sampler: raspberry and lemon eclairs; espresso martini cheesecake; sticky banana cake; cookies and cream cake; sex on the beach cake; prosecco and raspberry cake; black forest cookies; “easy-peasy ‘I do” wedding cake”; banoffee eclairs; giant heart cookie; gin and tonic cheesecake bites; layered pavlova cake; and more variations of eclairs, pavlova, crepes, and tiramisu.

Good vibes means cakes and other desserts get covered with multicolored splatters, chocolate drips, and drizzles—there’s a whole lotta drizzling going on—gold leaf, and real and icing flowers. Crepes get heavy squirts of food coloring to create a rainbow crepe cake; cake gets topped with caramel popcorn; pancakes get filled with sprinkles and topped with whipped cream and glitter.

Recipes run a complexity gamut. A simple one for chocolate truffles—made even simpler by pouring the chocolate mixture into a pan to chill, then cut into cubes instead of painstakingly rolling each truffle into a ball—precedes a chocolate hazelnut cake recipe. That cake requires: roasting hazelnuts; making two layers of hazelnut cake, cleaning the pans, then making two more layers of chocolate cake; making a batch of buttercream; making a hazelnut ganache; making a chocolate ganache; and, if you like, using some of the ganache to make a garnish of chocolate-hazelnut truffles.

Blueberry cinnamon rolls may be the book’s most healthful, easing off the sugar and calling for whole-wheat bread flour. The heartier flavor from the whole wheat nicely complimented the blueberry filling, and the rolls, while best the day they were baked, held well for a second day. The icing felt necessary to keep the rolls interesting and moist, but with just cream cheese, powdered sugar, and butter, it was too thick, sweet, and one-dimensional; bakers should consider boosting it with lemon or lime juice and zest, even a dash of cardamom.

Too often, the book’s breezy vibe—intended to inspire a relaxed, anyone-can-make-these confidence—goes too far, omitting details needed for success. The “Touch the Sky” chapter promises to show “how to make showstopper cakes the easy way.” Farmhouse follows that sentence with a bit of a warning that the chapter is a challenging one, yet reassures readers that “it’s all possible and I know you can do it.”

But his recipe for the “I’ll Bring You Flowers” cake, for example, calls for frosting the cake, then decorating “with sugar roses and [piping] on your favorite petal shapes and flowers all over the cake.” So the crucial part of the cake, according to the title—the flowers—includes essentially no instructions.

The burned honey cake, while good in concept, may also leave a baker feeling slightly roasted.

The batter includes so much leavener—both baking soda and powder—that you can taste it, and too much batter plus that much leavener means the cake nearly overflows in an 8-inch pan; a 9-inch would have been better both for safety and more elegant slices.

But the biggest issue is with the directions for the honey. The recipe starts by boiling 12 ounces of honey until caramelized. The baker is to set aside a bit for the frosting, let the rest cool for 10 minutes, then beat it into a simple cake batter lightly flavored with cinnamon. Farmhouse says to make the frosting while the cake bakes so the reserved honey doesn’t have time to harden, but by that point it already has. (Not to mention that this assumes the baker has read through the whole recipe and remembered to keep going after putting the cake in the oven.) It would have been far better to highlight in the headnote the need to make the frosting quickly, and to move the instructions so bakers make it while the rest of the honey cools for the batter. But, even if a baker adjusts the recipe to overcome those issues, the final product is, again, too one-dimensional and sweet, with a cloying frosting of 1/3 cup of caramelized honey, 10 tablespoons of butter, and 2 cups of powdered sugar.

Although the book provides a recipe for Swiss meringue buttercream, most cakes call for the powdered sugar, butter, and milk frosting often referred to as American buttercream. This type is easy to make and holds up reasonably well, but its cloying, and, yep, one-dimensional sweetness and faint grittiness—so heavy on sugar and light on flavor—should be skipped whenever cooks feel comfortable swapping in the meringue buttercream.

Overall, simpler is often better in these recipes, as the strawberry brownie cookies and Portuguese custard tarts show.

The cookies nicely combine freeze-dried strawberries and dark chocolate for an intense, gooey creation. These, though, would also have benefited from a few more details in the directions, such as telling just how much strawberry to hold back for a garnish. Exuberantly calling for an ice cream scoop to make a dozen or so cookies, Farmhouse holds true to his promises of big, bold baking—but these are rich, so a smaller cookie scoop might be a better bet.

The custard tarts, quickly prepared with puff pastry for shells, makes a classic dessert out of a custard of just a few egg yolks, sugar, cornstarch, milk, and vanilla. Sprinkled with cinnamon at the end (an optional step, but a necessary flavor component…avoid that one dimension!), these also would have benefited from instructions on how to store any uneaten on the first day (refrigerate them). Moreover, they needed to call either for less custard or bigger pastry circles to fit into the muffin cups (Farmhouse calls for a 4-inch round cutter, an uncommon size; use a bowl that measures at least 4 inches, preferably more, across the top as a cutting guide). Taller circles peeking up high from each cup would help avoid custard overflow in the oven; it would also have been good to provide some insurance with a sheet pan underneath. (Try putting the pan in the oven when preheating to help crisp the tart bases as well.) Creamy when warm, these are also tasty cold, though no longer crisp and flaky.

Ultimately, Good Vibes Baking seems best for bakers with at least some experience, who love sugar, love color, and have confidence in their ability to spot pitfalls before they befall them.

Quick takes:

Good Vibes Baking: Bakes to Make Your Soul Shine and Your Taste Buds Sing, by Sandro Farmhouse. 208 pages. Published by DK Publishing, 2024.

Organization: Chapter titles such as “Love Language” and “Touch the Sky” provide essentially no information on what’s in each. The love language chapter description—“recipes to warm up anyone’s heart”—could be said for all the other chapters. At least each chapter opens with a listing of its recipes.

Ingredients measurement methods: Generally listed first by cups, with grams in parentheses except for liquid ingredients, which get put into milliliters.

Photos: A photo accompanies many but not all recipes, with a style that stays true to the bright-colored exuberant vibe.

Index: Reasonably comprehensive, though if you want to look up a recipe by its name, you’re out of luck (look under honey to find the burned honey cake, for example). Given that chapter names are no help—that is, you couldn’t turn to a list of recipes at the beginning of a cake chapter, this is annoying.

Disclosure: I am an affiliate of Bookshop.org, which supports independent booksellers, and I will earn a commission if you click through and make a purchase on the title above.

The Spice of Life

Everything is better with Pepper

Pepper believes in good directions.

Do your bookshelves feature desired but subsequently unloved cookbooks trumpeting quick takes on cuisines that feel foreign to your everyday cooking? Or do your pantry shelves boast a host of “international” ingredients optimistically bought, never used?

If so, Modern Asian Kitchen may hit your sweet spot.

That may not seem to be the case in the early pages, where author Kat Lieu opens with a potentially discouraging list of must-have tools and equipment that includes an air fryer, clay pot, instant pot, rice cooker, stand mixer, steamers, and a wok. That’s a lot for a book whose cover promises essential and easy recipes, and the equipment called for is sometimes overkill; a stand mixer is hardly a must for whipping four egg whites, for example. That list is followed by another long one of pantry needs requiring international/Asian grocers, such as furu, salted egg yolk, curry leaf, ube, pork floss, sago, and calamansi.

But after that somewhat daunting opening, many of the recipes prove to be both full of flavor and straightforward, sometimes suggesting equipment alternatives, such as a Dutch oven for a clay pot. And many label less-common ingredients as optional and offer suggestions to make meat and seafood dishes suitable for vegetarians or vegans.

Take the shrimp dumplings recipe: It lists sesame seeds, tobiko (roe), MSG, ginger, and bamboo shoots all as optional. If readers make an initial grocery run upon buying the book for the basics of Shaoxing wine, sesame oil, soy sauce, and oyster sauce—needed for many of the recipes—the only ingredient they might not have on hand would be rice paper (and adventuresome cooks can try making them by scratch from a recipe Lieu includes).

That holds true as well for the pork and shrimp “100 Dreams of Toronto” wontons. Chinese broccoli or water chestnuts, Chinese yellow chives, and flounder or hondashi powder are all listed as optional filling ingredients; a trip to an Asian grocer might be needed mainly for the thin wrappers. Tested with water chestnuts, hondashi powder, and a substitute of minced scallions for the chives, these were rich and worth the time—and in fact relatively quick to mix and shape, considering how many future meals they provide for, since they freeze well. The recipe test skipped the 1½ teaspoons of sugar (why do dumplings need sugar?!) and substituted a dab of “Not Just Bouillon” paste for bouillon powder—highly recommended. (Looking for something to serve with the wontons? Lieu suggests dipping sauce or chili crisp oil recipes; try also using this tomato salad with the boiled wontons, or pan-fry them per the recipe.)

Many recipes live up to the “easy” label, such as mottled tea eggs, a quickly made success redolent of their overnight marinade of star anise, bay leaves, and cinnamon. Using soft-boiled eggs versus the traditional hard-boiled, these proved simple, rich, and creamy on their own and as a salad addition, and an intriguing counterpoint on a charcuterie plate.

Sweet and soy salmon provided a last-minute supper, with soy sauce, honey, lemon juice, and sake bathing the fish for 30 minutes while the oven preheats. Generally, the recipes don’t lie when they say an ingredient is optional (no need to run to the store for the teaspoon of furu here), but cooks should include as many as possible, such as the optional sesame oil in the salmon marinade, for more layered flavors.

Lieu does not shy away from including pinches of MSG in many recipes, and she does not generally designate it as optional; including it enhanced the salmon and the wontons.

Salmon reappears in a spin on the sushi bake that went viral during Covid lockdowns. A bed of rice gets topped with a saucy mixture of salmon and imitation crab coated in soy, Japanese mayonnaise, oyster sauce, lemon juice, sesame oil, and the cook’s choice of sriracha, gochujang, or sweet chili sauce (and, again, honey or agave syrup—but added sweetness is unnecessary), then broiled to a slight char. Without adding prep time or hard-to-find ingredients, this combination created more interest in each bite than the usual recipe, especially when topped with all she suggests, including furikake, eel sauce, and avocado.

For a quick pantry supper with a comforting, creamy, and fiber-packed sauce, udon sauced with an interesting mix of canned pumpkin, miso, cardamom, and cinnamon worked well, especially topped with nuts and mint or basil for textural variety. The recipe could have been more precise; instead of simply saying to mix the sauce with the udon, it calls for adding “generous dollops” and gives instructions for “if” there is leftover sauce, without clarifying why there would be. But the thick, chewy noodles will be good either way—whether you take a minimalist approach or believe in a little pasta with your sauce.

Somewhat more time-consuming, but still simple, is chicken smoked in a foil-lined wok (tested in a stovetop smoker). While tasty, this recipe felt like less than the sum of its parts, with somewhat muted flavors despite a soy sauce-based marinade and a smoke blend of barley tea, sugar, rice, star anise, dried orange peel, applewood chips, Sichuan peppercorns, and cocoa powder. (The recipe calls for skin-on, boneless chicken thighs, which is hard to come by unless you bone thighs yourself, but it worked fine with skinless chicken.)

Lieu, who is half Chinese and half Vietnamese, and married to a Filipino man, notes that she has only ever cooked in her Asian American kitchen, so she does not try to claim recipe authenticity beyond that. She includes recipes based in Korean, Japanese, Indian, and other Asian cuisines, often with a short back story about the cooks who shared the recipe with her.

Lieu started a Facebook group in 2020, Subtle Asian Baking, that quickly took off; this is her second book, following Modern Asian Baking at Home in 2023. Sometimes, the recipes read a bit too much like a blog, rather than a cookbook. It’s fine in a blog to say you haven’t tried a variation on a recipe, but annoying in a cookbook to bring it up and say you can’t be bothered—such as when Lieu says she’s been told her recipe for Hong Kong Clay Pot Rice can be made in a Dutch oven instead of a clay pot, but “I just haven’t tried yet.” Why not? Given that more people likely own a Dutch oven, respect the readers who paid for the book by giving it a test run.

The book closes with a few not-too-sweet treats, including a tres leches cake. This sponge cake, tinted pale green from pandan extract* and spiked with a dab of miso, gets soaked in a mixture of more miso and pandan, the trio of whole, evaporated, and sweetened condensed milk, and a dash of coconut extract. Frosted with whipped cream, topped with the baker’s choice of raspberries, coconut flakes, sea salt and/or edible gold flakes, and drizzled with thinned coconut jam, this very moist cake managed the sweet feat of being both rich and light. It keeps the sweetness under control, though the confectioners’ sugar could be omitted from the whipped cream, given the coconut jam.

*The recipe test included a homemade extract, to avoid the artificial flavoring of most commercial versions. The quick homemade extract (blend frozen pandan leaves with water, strain, and let stand overnight), offers light flavor but no green tinge, absent the food coloring of most bottled versions. There are a few naturally flavored commercial extracts, but these also tend to be clear.

Quick takes:

Modern Asian Kitchen: Essential and Easy Recipes for Ramen, Dumplings, Dim Sum, Stir-Fries, Rice Bowls, Pho, Bibimbaps, and More, by Kat Lieu. 208 pages. Published by Harvard Common Press, 2024.

Organization: Chapters on fundamentals such as rice and miso soup, vegetables, dim sum and street food, one-pan dishes, rice dishes, noodle recipes, sauces, and bread and desserts.

Ingredients measurement methods: All over the map—some ingredients in grams, others in ounces; vegetable weights sometimes called for, sometimes not; liquid ingredients never listed in grams, but in tablespoons and milliliters.

Photos: Photo illustrates each recipe.

Index: Frustratingly inconsistent, the index is middling at best. Examples of poor indexing include a recipe for shrimp toast that calls for milk bread (but does not refer to the bread recipe), and the index does not have an entry for the bread at all (not under bread, milk, or the actual recipe name); no listing for eggs or recipe names means the only way to find the “Chinatown Jammy Tea Eggs” is under “tea.”

Disclosure: I am an affiliate of Bookshop.org, which supports independent booksellers, and I will earn a commission if you click through and make a purchase on the title above.

The Spice of Life

Everything is better with Pepper

Is beach sand an optional ingredient? Not if you’re Pepper.

If “dolci” translates as “sweet,” then this new book by the owner of the Ciao, Gloria bakery in Brooklyn qualifies on several levels.

Dolci! is indeed a sweet cookbook, paying homage to author Renato Poliafito’s parents and their immigration story. Its creations are also literally sweet—sometimes overstuffed with sugar. But solid recipes with inventive twists make this a book full of baking inspiration.

Broken into chapters on breakfast foods, cookies, pies, breads and “savories and street snacks,” a few drinks, bakery specialties, cakes, “spoons” (including gelato, semifreddo, tiramisu, puddings), and foundations (including whipped cream, buttercream, ricotta, sourdough starter, pizza dough), the book covers a lot of territory. It easily blends traditional recipes with modern takes, such as a cake based on an Aperol spritz, an Italian version of rice krispie treats that incorporates mascarpone, espresso, cocoa, and rum, and an amaro-spiked chocolate pecan pie.

And (further delighting this reviewer), Poliafito opens with a full-throated defense of baking by weight. Arguing in defense of the scale, he explains why he lists every ingredient by grams first, before including volume measurements (cups/tablespoons/teaspoons). He notes how, in many cookbooks, the opening pages go into detail on all the equipment cooks will need; instead, because Dolci! requires a minimum of specialty items, he uses the space to focus on “the most important piece of equipment any baker, at any level, should own.” Bravo.

Many of the creations went beyond what this reviewer had come to expect of Italian bakery treats—more looks than taste—but shyly so, needing a day to show their full flavor.

Poliafito declares his baking style with the first recipe, a blueberry Bundt cake. Noting that ciambella is a typical citrus breakfast cake in Italian bars, he ups the rich-and-sweet ante, with a full 2 cups of sugar, 1¼ cups of olive oil, 1 cup sour cream, and ½ cup mascarpone—and that’s just in the cake. Add 2 more cups of powdered sugar (ahem, 240 grams) and 2 tablespoons of honey for a thick glaze. Was the test of this delicious? Yes. Over the top? Certainly yes for breakfast, and even for dessert—while bakers can’t just cut sugar willy-nilly, some judicious trimming would do this cake good, such as flipping the drizzle emphasis from sugar to lemon juice, for more of a soak than a glaze. (For solid tips on how to experiment with reducing sugar in cake, see this King Arthur Baking post—one of the best sources for such questions, especially for bakers who want to delve a bit into the science without a full-day rabbit-hole excursion. Search their site for more posts on reducing sugar in cookies, pies, muffins, and more.)

Albi crunch bars likewise pushed sweet to the edge; these blondie-like bars swirled with apricot jam and filled with crunchy hazelnuts were, on the first day, slightly gooey when cut despite extra time in the oven, and gooey-ly cloying. But by day 2, the flavors seemed to meld, with the crisp top and nuts balancing the jam. Still, for a second go-round, it would be worth tarting up the jam with a strong dose of lemon juice and zest.

That day 2 effect also held true for the krispie bars; although the recipe says to let them set for two hours before cutting, they really needed 24. On day 1, they were overly wet; after drying out overnight, they became cookies tasters fought for.

Likewise, a flourless buckwheat chocolate torte, split and filled with raspberry jam, screamed sticky-sweet on the first day, but mellowed by the second as some jam soaked in. This is a good-looking cake, dusted with hot-pink freeze-dried raspberries pulverized to a powder—if you can maneuver the delicate top layer onto the jam with no cracking.

Scones rich with marsala-soaked dried figs, walnuts, cinnamon and cloves, candied orange, and mini chocolate chips proved less successful. The flavors were overwhelmed by the sheer size: The recipe calls for turning the dough slab into just eight scones. With 3 cups of flour, 9 tablespoons of butter, 1 2/3 cup cream, plus all the mix-ins, these are overwhelmingly thick and heavy, requiring up to 40 minutes to bake before being drizzled with a powdered sugar glaze. Far better to divide the dough into 16 or even 24 scones; even then, bakers may wish for something a bit lighter and flakier—briefly cutting the butter in with a food processor instead of a stand mixer could help.

Many recipes, even the more basic ones, may feel like plan-ahead projects, such as cinnamon rolls that start with brioche dough requiring 12 hours of chilling before filling, shaping, and frosting, or a cheesecake in which individual chocolate tart shells are filled with whipped cream, over which is piped chestnut puree mixed with chocolate meringues, or a wreath of 120 honey-glazed fried dough balls.

Often, recipes aim for a twist on a classic, such as mocha whoopie pies with an Italian buttercream and orange marmalade filling, or brioche sticky buns with a caramel topping that incorporates orange, pomegranate molasses, and pistachios, enclosing a filling of dark brown sugar, orange zest, cinnamon, and quiet hits of sumac and cardamom. Or how about a gingerbread version of amaretti, black and whites made with honey and ricotta and a thick cream frosting, or a cannoli-inspired cake?

Dolci! does keep a balance of quicker recipes mixed into the projects. “Torta Caprese” is not, as Americans probably first guess, a savory torte of mozzarella and tomatoes. Instead, it’s a fairly standard flourless chocolate torte, made with almond flour, that was, as Poliafito says, “deceptively rich”—and this time, not too sweet. (And unlike many recipes in the book that say they are best eaten on the day of baking, this can hold for several days.) A banana Nutella snack cake would also be quick, though even this is more elaborate than typical frosting-less snack cake. Here, too, a baker should consider reducing sugar; this recipe was not tested in part because of a weariness with the abundance of sugar: 2 cups for a 9-by-13-inch cake along with 1½ cups of overripe (read: sweet) bananas, plus ¾ cup Nutella and another 2 cups of powdered sugar in the frosting, which also includes a cup of vaguely sweet mascarpone.

A less-sweet, pure-flavored treat could be found in the for di latte gelato—a simple ice cream that’s all about the dairy. With 2 cups of milk and a cup of cream, thickened with nothing more than a cup of sugar and some cornstarch, this gelato offers a great base for a drizzle of chocolate, coffee, or fruit liqueur, or scooped over a pie slice. (Cooks can also speed up the process by cooling the mix quickly in an ice bath; even when not extremely chilled, it churned well a Cuisinart canister machine.)

Plunked between the pies and “specialties,” a street food chapter feels out of place with all the other sweet treats—the rationale for why these particular recipes included isn’t obvious. But bakers may appreciate the savory break, with recipes including sourdough focaccia, pizette, grissini, and cheddar taralli (all of which make some sense in a book for bakers, but less so the recipes for frittata, arancini, fried tagliolini balls, and four cocktails).

Quick takes:

Dolci! American Baking with an Italian Accent, by Renato Poliafito. 298 pages. Published by Alfred A. Knopf, 2024.

Photos: Simple, appealing shots of some but not all recipes.

Organization: Chapters on breakfast foods, cookies, pies, breads and “savories and street snacks,” a few drinks, bakery specialties, cakes, “spoons” (including gelato, semifreddo, tiramisu, puddings), and foundations (including whipped cream, buttercream, ricotta, sourdough.

Index: Comprehensive.

Disclosure: I am an affiliate of Bookshop.org, which supports independent booksellers, and I will earn a commission if you click through and make a purchase on the title above.

The Spice of Life

Everything is better with Pepper

She’s spicy but oh-so-sweet.

How should a non-native cookbook reviewer approach a book about another country’s cuisine?

That question kept coming up in recipe testing of The Authentic Ukrainian Kitchen: While there was much here to like, was it the fault of the recipe or the reviewer when a dish didn’t appeal?

Author Yevhen Klopotenko is a chef and restaurateur with an impressive history: Winner of MasterChef Ukraine in 2015, he has championed traditional Ukrainian foods—deeply threatened and hidden under years of Soviet control—and led a project to improve school meals, working with Ukraine’s first lady. His commitment to his homeland and its defenders as Russia attacks it yet again will make readers want to love this book.

And for the most part, they will.

Recipes usually stick to one page—often taking up far less—with accommodations made for hard-to-find ingredients, making them feel eminently doable. Each recipe’s headnote provides useful context on its history, plus tweaks Klopotenko has made to traditional recipes or suggestions for variations.

Appealing, simple dishes include handheld meat pies; sausages in deep-fried pastry; quick-pickled apples; Ukrainian sauerkraut; pumpkin porridge with millet; cucumber, mint, and celery salad; borsch with pork ribs and smoked pears; sweet and savory boiled or steamed dumplings; crisp potato pancakes; cherry torte; honey layer cake; and a traditional dried-fruit drink that Klopotenko spikes with honey and smoked pepper.

What readers won’t find, for the most part, are sock-it-to-you flavors. Thus that question—if these are, in fact, truly traditional, barely tweaked versions of authentic Ukrainian food, is bland a fault? Or just a problem of one person’s palate expectations?

The honey layer cake, for example, presents a pretty picture (if you can get it to stand tall—as the hastily taken photos make clear!). Made with a stiff dough rolled into seven thin layers, each baked and stacked with a thin coating of sour cream frosting, the cake lacked a distinctive honey flavor, with just three tablespoons in the batter and none in the frosting. To American tastes, it will seem to be missing vanilla or another spice. And it was somewhat dry even after an overnight chill to allow the cake to absorb some of the frosting—but many European cakes seem dry to American tastes, such as some German and Austrian tortes.

The Lviv cheesecake provoked a similar response—drier than American-style cheesecakes given its filling of farmer cheese and, interestingly, grated or riced cooked potatoes, and lacking a strong central flavor, despite a filling that included some chopped dried apricots and a dark chocolate glaze. The bland cheesecake could have held more interest with a teaspoon or two of vanilla or almond extract or a good soak of the apricots in rum, but, presumably, would then have failed the authenticity test.

An easy cherry torte with walnuts, on the other hand, provided more than it promised: With just eggs, sugar, a whisper of vanilla, a few dry ingredients, and walnuts and cherries, this torte’s crisp, caramelized top crust and juicy cherries offered stronger flavor and pleasing texture.

That felt like an exception, though, as more tepid flavors followed in recipe tests: The simple quick-pickled apple used such a low proportion of vinegar that it would have seemed a typo were it not for the quiet flavors throughout the book. Calling for just ¼ cup apple cider vinegar to ¼ cup sugar and 6 to 8 cups of water, the apples—meant to be eaten alongside meat or in salads—offered at most a mild flavor gently spiked with garlic and whiffs of allspice and pepper. Hand pies made with a simple yeast dough enclosing a minced pork shoulder filling similarly offered muted flavors, with just a touch of bay and allspice.

But, finally, what about borsch? If you think of anything when you think of Ukrainian specialties, this is it—and the pork rib version, one of three borsch offerings, came through with much more flavor and texture than it first appeared.

Unlike many in the book, this recipe didn’t come together in a flash for a weeknight supper. But its strong base of pork ribs, cubes of celery root, carrots, pepper, tomatoes, potatoes, white beans, cabbage, shredded beets, and smoked paprika (Klotopenko’s suggested alternative to smoked pears or prunes) could be—really, should be—cooked well ahead. At the end of cooking, the broth looked and tasted thin, despite all the vegetables and pork. But a day later, the flavors had blended and deepened, with textures to match.

Waffling reviews leave readers wishing for a simple yea or nay—buy/don’t buy? This one waffles more than most, but ultimately, yea. Because the recipes seem generally solid, tweaking to taste—more bay! more pepper! more allspice! some (any) vanilla, cardamom, ginger, or almond!—should be both possible and fun, to personalize flavors while honoring a cuisine, and a country, under unwarranted, undeserved, and unconscionable duress.

Quick takes:

The Authentic Ukrainian Kitchen: Recipes from a Native Chef, by Yevhen Klopotenko. 269 pages. Published by Voracious/Little, Brown and Company.

Photos: Photos with every recipe (this is a niche observation, but if you/your mother/your grandmother had 1980s-era Southern Living magazine annual recipe compilation cookbooks, these photos will look familiar—it’s something about the slightly dark lighting, often very blurred backgrounds, and food styling…which may come as a relief after the sameness of many current cookbooks’ faux rusticity or harsh color saturation.)

Organization: Chapters for breads/dips, appetizers, breakfast, salads, soup/borsch, main dishes, sweets, and drinks.

Index: Comprehensive.

Disclosure: I am an affiliate of Bookshop.org, which supports independent booksellers, and I will earn a commission if you click through and make a purchase on the title above.

The Spice of Life

Everything is better with Pepper

Pepper wards off her own invasion. (Fuzzy pic #3 today!)

.

What would a big night in with friends look like to you? A perfectly clean house, with a fabulous centerpiece on a table set with linen napkins and perfectly matched china, silver, and crystal—and you at the door, likewise fresh and tidy, greeting guests with an ice-cold cocktail?

If so, Big Night: Dinners, Parties, & Dinner Parties is not your book. But if you agree with author Katherine Lewin’s sentiments—“I don’t know how to ‘entertain,’ and I don’t expect you to know either…entertaining is something you do for people. Experiencing is something you do with them”—and Brooklyn hipster vibes grab you, it’s time to get some big nights on the calendar.

This is a book that may leave readers a bit conflicted—the breezy tone plus attractive book design pulls you in. But Big Nights, named after Lewin’s “dinner and party essentials” store opened in Brooklyn in 2021, undercuts its almost-anything-goes message somewhat by page 15, with two pages of Lewin’s suggested brands for various ingredients. No local supermarket canned tomatoes here—to stick with the Brooklyn specialty store vibe, her preferred brand will run you about $5 per 28-ounce can; her recommended olive oil for cooking clocks in around $18 for 25 ounces. It’s true, as she says, that the best ingredients make the best meals and can transform a dish—but that may leave less-wealthy readers wondering whether to bother cooking her recipes with, say, their bottle of Trader Joe’s oil.

Stick around for the recipes, though. Pricey ingredients or not, Lewin’s flavor combinations and pre-planned menus set readers up for doable, delicious dinners for anywhere from six to 12 people (plus one two-person date-night menu).

Organized by season, each chapter opens with a list of several recipes above three “bigger nights” menus. It’s unclear at first glance whether the opening recipes are meant to compose a menu. Turn the page, though, to see that these recipes suggest several “pair with” recipes elsewhere in the book, and will note what elements can be made ahead.

Some of the bigger night menus feel like cop-outs—do you really need to be told to throw a party with a hot dog bar at the center, with no recipes, just instructions to grill the hot dogs and serve them with several types of mustard, ketchup, raw onions and pickles? Likewise, another menu’s main is just a platter of smoked fish, cream cheese, bagels, and a few accompaniments, such as sliced onion and cucumber. Even new cooks don’t need a page just for instructions to serve fresh-squeezed juice (“Any-citrus juice” that here is a mix of orange and grapefruit), or a “recipe” for a platter of BLT ingredients for guests to make their own.

These constitute a minority, though. Holding greater appeal were recipes such as Party Chicken with Feta & Fennel. This sheet-pan recipe combines chicken parts with fennel, cannellini beans, scallions, za’atar, gochugaru or Aleppo pepper, olives, feta, peas, and mint, to be served with bread or rice. Although the directions could use a few tweaks for ease and less mess, this produced a riot of flavors with interest in every bite.

What of those tweaks? A big bowl or roasting pan instead of a low-sided sheet pan would have been great, given the multiple times a cook has to mix the ingredients in the pan. Fennel and chicken (thighs were used in the recipe test) go in first, drizzled with oil and tossed in the pan; after brief roasting, they’re mixed in the pan with the beans and scallions, then “showered” with more oil, za’atar, salt, gochugaru, and pepper. Trying to cover everything well with the oil and herbs felt slow and messy. After further roasting, the pan comes back out again for the cook to add peas, olives, and feta and “carefully toss” with the rendered fat in the very full pan for even coating—no fun when guests are watching or about to arrive.

But served with Lewin’s fluffy focaccia, this was a popular entrée that needed nothing else served with it. The bread had an interesting tweak of its own: No oil goes into the initial dough, but it’s set into a pool of 4 tablespoons of olive oil to rise. Once risen, it gets four folds while still in the bowl—that is, just pull up the dough from underneath and fold it over itself —during which the dough absorbs much of the oil. Scooped onto a sheet pan coated with three more tablespoons of oil, left to rise, then dimpled and drizzled with yet one more tablespoon oil, it bakes into a loaf with a rich, crisp crust encasing a fluffy crumb. While focaccia is always better fresh, these leftovers survived well for another day.

Other tested recipes also pulled disparate flavors together. A tahini and miso sauce mixed in lemon juice, sriracha, soy sauce, and honey, plus optional kimchi, for a pleasantly salty dip for crackers and raw vegetables. More ideas for how to use the sauce would have been nice, as the yield of two cups of somewhat runny sauce goes a long way.

In keeping with the retro look of the book, many of the recipes hearken back, with gentle twists, to the 1960s and ‘70s, including hot spinach-artichoke dip, deviled eggs, Chex mix, and pigs in blankets. The pigs get cozy in puff pastry with a smear of fig or apricot jam and Cheddar or Gruyere; the deviled eggs, while plain on their own, get topped with furikake, za’atar, Baharat, gochujang, roe, kimchi, or other suggestions. Trendy chili crisp spikes the Chex mix.

Lewin proposes the artichoke dip—with the inclusion of trendy tins of smoked trout—for an entrée, served with raw vegetables, bread or tortilla chips, and a simple salad. While dip for dinner should never be shunned, this was a bit too rich for an entrée, with its cream cheese-sour cream base combined with multiple cups of mozzarella and Parmesan. As one element of a casual dinner, though, it shines with the extra dimension of trout.

Dessert recipes generally offer less interesting flavor combos and tend toward the very sweet. But a test of the family-style crème brulée produced with ease a just-right dish of rich, smooth custard (spiked simply with vanilla paste in testing). Just watch it carefully toward the end of the baking time, which Lewin gives in the very broad range of 35 to 50 minutes because she calls for a 1 ½-quart baking dish with no other dimensions.

Along the way, Lewin drops in recipes and tips for cocktails, glassware, amounts of some typical foods to figure out how much to cook, and a few extra menus and uses for some of the side dishes and sauces throughout the book. One glaring omission: Ingredients are generally listed by volume (cups) only, not by weight.

Quick takes:

Big Night: Dinners, Parties & Dinner Parties, by Katherine Lewin. 288 pages. Published by Union Square & Co.

Photos: At least one photo runs alongside nearly every recipe, in saturated, heavy-on-red color schemes with deep shadows.

Organization: By season; each season includes three “Bigger Night” menus

Index: Fairly comprehensive.

Disclosure: I am an affiliate of Bookshop.org, which supports independent booksellers, and I will earn a commission if you click through and make a purchase on the title above.

The Spice of Life

Everything is better with Pepper

You can keep your crème brulée—Pepper has pork.

Freezer Door Cocktails provides what it promises in the subtitle: 75 cocktails that are ready when you are. And boy, you had better be ready—these are not drinks for the faint of ABV.

The concept is simple and has been knocking around on the web for years: Mix up enough cocktail ingredients to serve about six people, pour them into the original liquor bottle, and stick it in the freezer to be enjoyed later that day, week, month…as long as the cocktail ingredients contain mostly alcohol, to avoid freezing solid. Author J. M. Hirsch, editorial director of Milk Street, produced a variety of TikTok videos showing how it’s done before publishing this book.

To make amounts that fit in the original bottle, Hirsch calls for pouring off some liquor from a full bottle, for which he provides a non-frozen recipe alongside each freezer batch. Then, because his goal is to drink straight from the freezer—no melting required—his recipes contain no more than 20 percent no- or low-alcohol ingredients. That includes not just juice or sugar syrup but lower-ABV—alcohol by volume—drinks such as vermouth or sherry. But because the drinks are so cold they don’t generally call for being served over ice, a small amount of water is added to the bottle to account for the usual dilution from shaking or stirring a cocktail.

So how do fruit flavors get their turn in the freezer? Sometimes, from frozen concentrates (cranberry juice concentrate in a cosmopolitan). Often, Hirsch pulls the flavor in just through citrus zest: Chop it finely in a blender with the alcohol, infuse for several minutes, then strain out the zest for. Or, to get a flavor such as coconut without using coconut milk, which would curdle, he uses the fat-washing technique. It’s an unappetizing moniker for a tasty effect: Mix melted coconut oil, for example, into zest-infused rum, let stand several minutes, then freeze for 30 minutes, leaving an easily removed disk of white oil on top.

Coconut-Lime Daiquiri Colada uses both lime zest-infused rum and coconut oil plus a touch of water and simple syrup. A Blue Moon infuses gin with lemon zest, then turns electric blue with the addition of crème de violette and Blue Curaçao. And a more basic daiquiri simply mixes 18 ounces of rum, 2 ounces each of lime juice and water, and a dash of simple syrup. Tests of all of these produced powerful, balanced drinks.

Mint juleps, however, were somewhat less successful. To avoid freezing mint leaves, Hirsch infuses sugar syrup with 4 cups of fresh mint (he offers no suggestions of type, though spearmint is typical), but the test produced a muted mint flavor. Should the syrup have been heated more to draw out more flavor, or would it have benefited from a touch of mint extract or the mint bitters used in his mojito? Herbs can vary widely in their strength—even according to whether they picked early or late in the day—so a description of how strong the syrup should taste, and how to adjust as needed, may have helped.

Readers may also wish Hirsch gave some details about his preferences for the liquor of each chapter. Do some brands fare better after long freezer stints? Would that mint julep have been better with a different bourbon? (Interestingly, the mint seemed to come through slightly more after two weeks in the freezer, while the Blue Moon felt less balanced after a chilled week, with the floral notes suffocating the rest.)

Overall, though, Hirsch’s recipes achieve his aims. But they leave one nagging feeling: While the cult of pricey, elaborate, and classic cocktails continues to draw new converts, the book feels somewhat out of step with the rising religion of low- or no-alcohol drinks, which have risen far above the mocking “mocktails.” Everyone who participated in drinks tasting for this review—from 20-somethings to 40-, 50-, and 70-somethings—had the same reaction after a sip or two: If you want to get hammered fast, these recipes will get you there. But if you’d like more ideas of how to use them as a very tasty base for something a little less jolting, Hirsch has nothing to offer…so you’ll need to wait patiently for the ice to melt, slowly, in the drinks he serves over ice. For those with no ice in the glass, pack your Advil.

Quick takes:

Freezer Door Cocktails: 75 Cocktails That Are Ready When You Are, by J.M. Hirsch. 182 pages.

Photos: None; each recipe illustrated with simple sketches.

Organization: By type of liquor.

Index: Opens with a list of drinks by name before shifting to a traditional index.

Disclosure: I am an affiliate of Bookshop.org, which supports independent booksellers, and I will earn a commission if you click through and make a purchase on the title above.

The Spice of Life

Everything is better with Pepper

Pepper sometimes overindulges.

If, at a farmers’ market, your problem is not your eyes being bigger than your stomach, but your brain’s ability to convince you that of course you can cook 12 quarts of strawberries tonight, no problem!...then the Fruitful therapist may have a prescription for you.

Fruitful, by Sarah Johnson—raised in California, trained at Chez Panisse, and now cooking in London—provides recipes and flavor inspirations both sweet and savory for a wide variety of fruit, including, since this is a British book, some most Americans can’t lay hands on.

But no matter; often, a cook can figure out adequate substitutions, and in others, just enjoy the dream of a day when quince, loganberries, and blackcurrants can all be yours as you move to an 18^th-century farmhouse surrounded by acres of wildflowers and luscious fruit. Despite some caveats for an American audience, Fruitful provides reading pleasure and largely unfussy recipes that work.

Chapters group fruit by type, with sweet and savory uses side by side, such as stalks and shrubs (rhubarb, blackcurrant, gooseberry), citrus (lemon, orange, clementine, grapefruit, lime, kumquat) and stone fruit (apricot, cherry, peach, nectarine, plum, damson, greengage). Just those three chapters hint at how many recipes’ main ingredient may be a challenge for U.S. cooks.

Not as much challenge, potentially, as the recipe measurements themselves—wherein cooks must own a decent scale. No quantities are listed by cups, only grams/ounces and milliliters. But a good scale can be had for $25 to $50—well worth it for something cooks will quickly come to rely for its convenience and consistent recipe results.

Also challenging: Many of the recipes require overnight waits. In some cases, that—or at least a several-hour delay—should be expected, such as ice creams and frozen desserts or bread dough. Others may come as an unpleasant surprise midway through preparation. Yes, cooks should always read through a recipe before beginning, but that goes double here: For polenta-olive oil muffins with blackberries, how many cooks would expect an overnight rest to be a requirement? This one at least mentions the rest in the headnote, but makes it sound optional, unlike the recipe instructions. A short recipe for almond cookies calls for a quick whisking of ingredients—and then an overnight chill, with no explanation of the necessity of this.

Throughout the recipes, the fruit takes center stage, unhindered by many other flavors. For bakers who have become accustomed to an almost universal teaspoon of extract in every recipe, vanilla is noticeably absent in most of the book. And sugar is consistently used sparingly, letting natural sweetness shine. Sometimes, even for palates that have become accustomed to lower sugar, recipes may seem to skimp too much. If cooks taste a mixture destined for the freezer and find it barely sweet enough, they may feel tempted to rethink the recipe, as most foods tastes less sweet when frozen (and Fruitful is heavy on frozen items). But resist and be rewarded with fresh, clean, sweet-enough desserts.

Spelt madeleines were the one tested recipe that seemed to miss vanilla or other spicing, but the moist, wheaty cakes made a pleasing base for macerated strawberries. Tested with molasses instead of black treacle, they may have been more bitter than with treacle, but dark brown sugar and honey provided balance. (A note about these recipe tests: ordinarily, I would not make any ingredient substitutions. But I made several substitutions that most American cooks would likely need to make, as noted. Had any of the results come up short in execution or taste, I would have left them out of this review as an unfair test, but none did.)

Polenta muffins needed only blackberries, a hint of lemon, and the crunch of cornmeal to satisfy. Olive oil, an overnight rest of the batter, and 7 blackberries stuffed into the top of each led to tender, very moist muffins (take care to bake these long enough) that last well for several days.

Readers will especially welcome the flavor pairings chart for each fruit, listing what nuts, flower and herbs, spices, other fruits and vegetables, flours, wine and liquor, dairy and meat, and miscellaneous flavors go well with the fruit, as well as a list of favorite combinations with the fruit (such as, for cherries, almond, ricotta, honey, chocolate and amaretto, coconut and rum, or coffee).

A recipe for eiswein (dessert wine made from grapes frozen on the vine) and prosecco set with gelatin looks like it snuck in without editors noticing, given the lack of fresh fruit involved or served alongside. But tested with the suggested alternative of rosé, and set with a best-guess 2 teaspoons of powdered gelatin in place of sheet gelatin, cubes of the simple jelly perked up a typical cheese plate.

For a fun look at how shifting a few ingredients can create kissing-cousin desserts, compare the frozen yogurt parfait to the loganberry semifreddo. A sabayon base of egg yolks and loganberry puree (tested with blackberry puree) folded into softly whipped cream created a creamy, slightly icy, strongly flavored semifreddo. Suggested accompaniments include almond cookies, peaches in syrup, or a berry compote, but this slab held its own, alone. The tangier yogurt parfait (think frozen terrine), on the other hand, needs its pairing with flash-roasted, barely sweetened, pop-on-the-tongue blueberries. Made with yogurt, whipped cream, and a meringue base instead of yolks, the parfait comes out icier and one-dimensional when set against the semifreddo, though less so when made with a strongly flavored honey.

On the savory side (for which fewer recipes were tested during a dramatic heat wave), slow-cooked salmon topped with a rhubarb relish made a quick dinner with great leftovers. Make it with a wild salmon versus an oilier farmed fillet, given the heavy hand with olive oil in the relish, which calls for quick-pickling diced rhubarb in red wine vinegar, a touch of sugar, and a bay leaf, then adding oil, mustard, parsley, and soft herbs (tested with dill). This can create dinner in under an hour if the cook smartly flips the instructions and starts cooking the salmon before beginning the relish.

As the height of summer takes hold, many more recipes beg to be tested—from a simple peach (or mango) and tomato salsa to honey lavender ice cream with syrupy peaches to fig anchoïade. With a gentle, nourishing vibe, Fruitful deserves a bookshelf spot bridging sweet and savory.

Quick takes:

Fruitful: Sweet and Savoury Fruit Recipes Inspired by Farms, Orchards and Gardens, by Sarah Johnson. 251 pages

Photos: Typical rustic garden effect, with lots of roughly hewn wooden tables under gently shadowed plates of food (not included for every recipe).

Organization: By type of fruit, jumbling sweet and savory, occasionally interspersed with farmers’ stories.

Index: Appearing to have been forced to keep to two pages, the index gets only a decent rating. It quickly becomes clear where entries got skipped. If, for example, you can’t recall what that frozen yogurt thing was, you’re out of luck looking under either frozen or yogurt. And don’t bother looking under salmon for the roasted salmon recipe.

Disclosure: I am an affiliate of Bookshop.org, which supports independent booksellers, and I will earn a commission if you click through and make a purchase on the title above.

The Spice of Life

Everything is better with Pepper

Pepper wanted some of that salmon.