What I'm Reading, December 2024
Preliminary Thoughts About My Coffee Table Tower
Lots of reviews and short takes on cookbooks to come this month, but here are a few of the books in the about-to-topple-over stack on my coffee table.
*Easy Weeknight Dinners: 100 fast, flavor-packed meals for busy people who still want something good to eat, by Emily Weinstein
This is a compilation of New York Times recipes, so Times subscribers may find little use for it—or they may appreciate having these popular recipes compiled in one spot. Cooks can quickly find something that works with their needs and pantry through chapters broken down by type of meat or grain, and vegetables and eggs and cheese, plus three pages listing recipes by categories such as “hand-held dinners,” “good for freezing,” “truly 15-minute recipes,” “dinner party vibes, but on a Tuesday,” and “five-star recipes with 5,000+ comments.” I was curious about whether the recipes were tweaked in testing them for the book, but spot-checking 10 recipes online turned up nearly no changes—even the headnotes are nearly word for word, and recipes come with errors intact (both online and in the book, the sheet-pan shrimp recipe’s last sentence is “Served topped with chopped tomatoes and crumbled feta” instead of “Serve”). About the biggest adjustments I found were along the lines of saying “ground black pepper” online while the book omitted “ground.” (Maybe the changes happened in reverse with testing for the book leading to online tweaks; some of the online recipes I checked said “updated on” with dates within the last year, if not the last month.) Sadly, one tweak not made was to list ingredients by weight as well as volume—so from the first recipe, for mayo-marinated chicken with chimichurri by the reliable J. Kenji Lopez-Alt, you’re stuck with your measuring cups—scooping mayo into a cup, then scraping it out again, instead of just dumping some into a bowl on a scale and adding in whatever a fourth-cup of chimichurri weighs. This is a greatest-hits-of-the-2020-somethings book of easy supper recipes full of flavor. But it missed an opportunity to offer enhancements—more info about a recipe, top tips and tricks to improve or riff on a recipe, other ways to use recipe components, such as more uses for a Yum-Yum Sauce; instead, it offers nothing beyond what you can find on the Times cooking site. So skip the book and put the money toward a newspaper subscription—newspapers need your support, both financial and to show strong subscriber numbers to keep advertisers happy.
*The Bean Book: 100 Recipes for Cooking with All Kinds of Beans, from the Rancho Gordo Kitchen, by Steve Sando with Julia Newberry
As you might expect from the founder of a bean company, this book is a big advertisement for Steve Sando’s Rancho Gordo heirloom beans. His famous beans, championed by famous chefs who went truly gaga over his humble—but not so humbly priced—product, would surely make his recipes the best they can be. But while each recipe calls for a specific bean his company sells (online and in specialty shops), he also calls for its more generic equivalent of black bean, white bean, garbanzo, and so on. The recipes skew short and simple, seemingly to let the beans shine; many could be made from even a scantily stocked pantry (save for the pineapple and banana vinegars that pop up repeatedly). Chapters cover appetizers, salads, soups, stews, beans with grains, baked beans, and more.
*America’s Test Kitchen 25th Anniversary Cookbook: 500 Recipes That Changed the Way America Cooks, by America’s Test Kitchen.
This 5½-pound, 711-page tome makes a bold claim—really, 500 recipes that changed the way all of America cooks? They forgot the humble part of humble bragging…but ATK, as its fans know it, and the related Cook’s Illustrated (for which I freelanced many years ago, pre-test kitchen) have helped cooks understand why a recipe works or doesn’t, and rounds of testing help ensure success. Some readers may quibble with spice levels or other markers of authenticity, arguing that the recipes seem aimed at an inoffensive middle range. But the book provides a solid start for a variety of classic recipes from multiple cuisines. My quibble: Recipes generally serve four to six people, and often more, but as household sizes shrink, that means many cooks will have leftovers. But almost no recipes provide any guidance for freezing or storing leftovers.
*The Christmas Baking Cookbook, by…no one?
This book stood out in my coffee table tower as a pretty, reasonably sized, nicely photographed book of Christmastime recipes. Don’t be fooled. There’s no author name attached to the book, and I started to wonder, thumbing through, if some hallucinating AI had been involved. Within any one ingredient list, you can find it calling for every possible measurement: pumpkin buns call for 1 cup butter in the filling but 4 ounces melted butter in the dough; the alfajores recipe calls for 8.9 ounces butter, 5.4 ounces sugar, 10.7 ounces cornstarch, and 7.1 ounces flour, but 1 cup of coconut. Rugelach calls for 8 ounces of butter but 1 cup sugar. And a tarte tatin calls only for cup measurements throughout. I’m all for listing ingredients by weight as well as cups, but this is ridiculous. And without any headnotes, recipes and some photos lack necessary context and explanation. Do you know what a goro iron is? For all I thought I knew about Scandinavian recipes, this one was new to me—and maybe new to our AI author as well, because the photo shows round waffle cookies. Goro irons, while they may have different patterns, seem to generally produce rectangular cookies with a scroll or leaf design. Maybe the AI photographer used a pizzelle iron? But where did the AI photographer come up with the brownish, egg-shaped mounds of an unidentified substance atop the cookies? My best guess is cocoa whipped cream, but the ingredient list suggests no garnish, and the recipe doesn’t suggest any uses for goro cookies as a base for egg-shaped brown mounds. For all I know, the recipes would all turn out fabulously. But I didn’t try any, and I never will; such sloppy editing doesn’t deserve any more time than it took me to write this, and the publisher—Cider Mill Press—certainly doesn’t deserve your money.
*I haven’t tested any recipes in this book.