What I'm Reading, September 2024

Preliminary Thoughts About My Coffee Table Tower

The Editor: How Publishing Legend Judith Jones Shaped Culture in America, by Sara B. Franklin

The Editor well deserves its near-unanimous praise. It moves at a steady clip through the quietly barrier-breaking life of Judith Jones, renowned for carving out a niche for serious cookbook authors who made up an incredible roster for one editor: Julia Child, James Beard, Marion Cunningham, Edna Lewis, Madhur Jaffrey, Claudia Roden, Lidia Bastianich, and Marcella Hazan—not to mention getting Anne Frank’s diary published, and editing Anne Tyler, Elizabeth Bowen, and John Updike, among others. Biographies are my next-favorite genre after cookbooks, and I would rank this among one of my favorites.

*The Salad Lab: Whisk, Toss, Enjoy! Recipes for Making Fabulous Salads Every Day, by Darlene Schrijver

The Salad Lab got its start when Darlene Schrijver began posting recipes in 2020 on TikTok, with the shtick of using beakers for measurement. It’s a cutesy made-for-video trick that mercifully isn’t pushed in the book’s recipes, which list ingredients first by volume and then by milliliters—unfortunately, almost never by weight. (Though, of course, you can buy those beakers on her website, along with $200 wooden bowls.) Salad recipes list ingredients in three columns: “start out,” “whisk,” and “toss,” with instructions underneath to match the column headers. Money was definitely spent on photography here, and the promise of creating vibrant salads to match the photos can mask that these are pretty basic recipes. But most salads are, of course, a simple matter of chop, whisk, and toss some complementary ingredients. To see examples of Schrijver’s recipe, go to thesaladlab.net/recipes.

*Come Hungry: Salads, Meals, and Sweets for People Who Live to Eat, by Melissa Ben-Ishay

This is a book with the obligatory photos of its natural fabrics-wearing author (and cupcake company CEO) lovingly gazing at farmers market vegetables, preceded by a food porn shot of a pita sandwich with dressing dripping down the eater’s fingers and followed by photos of her two children in the kitchen and dancing with their father. (Which seems to fit with how she portrays her overall lifestyle.) Posting an initial green goddess salad on—you guessed it—TikTok led to this book. It opens with extremely basic recipes—rarely more than 10 ingredients including salt and pepper. Did you really need another recipe for avocado toast? Me neither. (Really, did you ever need just one?) It does gain in interest as it goes along, with more complex, usually meatless salads, plus a chapter of breads and another of desserts. The desserts offer an interesting mix of creations based on Oreos and other processed foods with recipes featuring alternative flours and sweetened with dates. For all the posturing, these recipes do look more interesting than those in The Salad Lab.

*Good Vibes Baking: Bakes to Make Your Soul Shine and Your Taste Buds Sing, by Sandro Farmhouse

This, from a Great British Bake-Off finalist and likely to be my next full book review, starts out scary, with a recipe that throws 1½ cups of powdered sugar into some strawberries and another cup into some cream—just for 12 pancakes. Would all the recipes be this sugar-stuffed? It doesn’t look like it, and while many feel kitsch-heavy, such as a “rainbow crepe cake” with food coloring-crammed crepes stacked up with whipped cream, the buoyant presentation here does seem to deliver the good vibes it promises…verdict yet to come on the promise for your taste buds.

*On Sundays: Long Lunches Through the Seasons, by Dave Vertheul

This one fooled me into thinking it promised relaxing, drawn-out Sunday lunches. A quiet cover—no faux-rustic or color-saturated photos here—drew me in, but the author, a chef with a restaurant in Melbourne, Australia, has a different standard for Sunday lunch than most home cooks. The biggest audience for this book might be fellow chefs, followed by people who love cookbooks but don’t cook; the rest of us may find this almost comically complicated. As Vertheul notes, almost all the recipes use “a wood-fired oven, a fire built on wood, or both.” Failing that, he suggests a good-quality gas-fired pizza oven or, finally, your oven cranked as high as possible. Admittedly, I’ve been gazing longingly at photos of tabletop pizza ovens since reading how much one respected baker loves his, but if my best shot for now is a 500-degree oven, these recipes seem unlikely to come out as intended. That would presume, though, that I would actually get to the point of putting something in the oven, and if, as he also notes, most recipes in the book require fermented fennel juice, well…making that requires a kilogram of fennel juice (thus requiring a juicer, I assume), whey “from naturally fermented yoghurt or a past ferment,” a vacuum-pack bag sealed on high pressure, and three weeks of fermentation—and, by the way, be sure to release the gas midway and re-vacuum seal it before it explodes. Despite that level of intensity, this was an interesting read. But when I say in this column I haven’t tested any recipes in the other books, here I should add “and never will.”

*I haven’t tested any recipes in this book.