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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.
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.
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