Fresh Off the Farm: Preaching the Chef's Philosophy

Wendell Berry, in his recently published masterful collection of essays, Citizenship Papers, builds the case that consumers who prefer fresh, wholesome food must accept some agricultural responsibilities. Especially those “who have grown doubtful of the healthfulness, the trustworthiness, and the dependability of the corporate food system.” Such responsibility includes supporting small farmers who avoid the use of poisonous fertilizers, antibiotics, alien genes, and other contaminants, and practice sustainable agriculture. Of course, organic vegetables and pasture-raised poultry and beef cost more. But as Berry, a farmer himself knows, the expense is far offset by the exceptional goodness of the food.
Professional chefs wouldn’t have it any other way. The freshness factor compels most top restaurants around the world to nurture close relationships with nearby farms and create daily menus based on what was delivered that day; in other words, what ripened that day. The most adventurous chefs challenge their farmers to experiment with overlooked vegetables and fruit, resuscitating heirloom varieties in danger of extinction. And perhaps most important to Berry’s concerns, through their restaurants and cookbooks, these chefs are educating consumers on what to do with the unfamiliar produce.
A number of these freshness fanatics have worthy new cookbooks on the market. As is often the case when a chef puts his or her name on a project, most of these books are beautiful, large-format, four-color trophies.
Chef Terry Conlan, author of Fresh: Healthy Cooking And Living From Lake Austin Spa Resort, manages nicely to incorporate the fat-free/low-cal/minimalist spa impulse into a collection of recipes that will also appeal to eaters’ naughty side. Organic gardens provide him with the herbs, vegetables and ideas to offer, “Not just the best spa food that they have ever eaten, but some of the best food that they have eaten anywhere.” There’s an unmistakable Asian and Mediterranean tint to his repertoire of recipes. Helpful sidebars and “Chefstips” appear on virtually every page.
Winning Styles Cookbook: Recipes From The James Beard Foundation Award-Winning Chefs gathers twenty-one culinary behemoths, including such names as Charlie Trotter and Rick Bayless, marking the 100th anniversary of Beard’s birth. Each chef contributes five or so recipes; restaurant dishes that are impressive but not too intimidating to try at home. With photographs, and essays on the food philosophy of each chef, there’s plenty here to enlighten the home cook.
In Creating Chefs: A Journey Through Culinary School With Recipes and Lessons, author Carol W. Maybach seeks to capture the “wisdom and cooking secrets of her chef instructors” in almost journal-like prose. Part textbook, part cookbook, part student notebook, and with illustrations and photographs throughout, Creating Chefs feels compellingly different and delivers on its promise to teach readers how to “appreciate the value of the culinary arts.”
After ten years, 11,000 cooking shows, and 30,000 recipes, the Food Network finally has a presence on the book shelf with an energetic collection of favorite recipes called Food Network Kitchens Cookbook: Fresh Ideas, Bold Flavors, Tips & Techniques. To be sure, television has changed the way Americans cook, eat, and appreciate the art of cooking. Credit for this phenomenon belongs largely to the Food Network, which helped promote the concept of the celebrity chef to the point that Mario and Emeril no more need a surname than Tiger or Uma.
There’s a There Here
At a time when the ubiquity of national chains like Starbucks and the Chili’s make it hard to tell what region you’re in—let alone what city or state—there’s a welcome antidote in cookbooks that reflect a keen sense of place.
Fifteen years of the best Manhattan has to offer is featured in New York Cooks: The 100 Best Recipes From New York Magazine, showcasing recipes from legendary restaurants like LeCirque, Nobu, LeBernandin, and Tavern on the Green. Culinary Editor Gillian Duffy culled 100 recipes from the magazine’s biannual entertaining issues to select recipes including Oxtail Rioja from Daniel Boulud, Lasagna Bolognese from Mario Batali and Chicken-And-Shrimp Paella from Bobby Flay.
Across the river, Jersey girl, Vicki J. Caparulo and her husband Steve traveled the width and breadth of the Garden State researching Great Dishes From New Jersey’s Favorite Restaurants. A restaurant guide at heart, this meticulously written and photographed book showcases more than fifty of Jersey’s best-loved dining establishments, including a recipe from each. Published by Rutgers University Press, Great Dishes will entice many foodies on down the Turnpike from the Big Apple.
Another book that brings the food of a great restaurant into homes is Frank Stitt’s Southern Table: Recipes From Highlands Bar And Grill. Highlands is on virtually every list of best restaurants in America, an endorsement fellow southerner Pat Conroy echoes in the foreword. Stitt offers his take on more than 150 recipes, most of them further evidence that he is firmly staked to his native state of Alabama. The recipes in Southern Table are interspersed with personal essays and profiles of the people, places, and events of Birmingham and the South.
Reflecting another region comes a long-awaited book featuring adapted Spanish-style cuisine from one of America’s oldest restaurants, El Farol in Santa Fe, New Mexico. Author chef James Caruso writes, “This book offers…El Farol’s very unique cuisine, blending Spanish traditions with the untamed flavors of the American Southwest.” El Farol: Tapas And Spanish Cuisine includes more than 120 recipes of hot and cold tapas—especially useful for entertaining.
Midwesterners will feel at home with Schuler’s: Fresh Recipes & Warm Memories by Chef Jonathan Schuler and his father Hans. A Michigan landmark since 1909, Schuler’s built its reputation on hearty food that always pushed the palates of upper Midwest diners.
The hipness award goes to Tongue Twisters: Sexy Food From Bin 941 & Bin 942. In his two Vancouver tapas parlors, Chef Gord Martin serves cross-cultural, “tongue-twisting” cuisine to the city’s celebrity clientele. Sexy Food has a Pacific Northwest swagger, exemplified in dishes like grilled volcanic salt-rubbed halibut and rosemary lemon jus, pan-seared organic duck breast with Bombay mustard sauce, and potato salad.

Gotta Get Back To The Garden
Wendell Berry, and other agrarian-minded conservationists, would like us to shorten the distance between farm and table for the benefit of local economies and to encourage a sense of community. To be sure, locally grown food also has the advantage of tasting better because it was probably harvested within hours of reaching your table. But there are environmental considerations as well. The highly industrialized factory farm requires cheap long-distance transportation to move products to the marketplace, whereas small family farms most often embrace organic and sustainable practices that are more earth friendly. They certainly use far less petroleum than the isolated factory farms. And by using land in close proximity to the urban communities they serve, farms help control sprawl and preserve the rural landscape.
The bountiful Rogue Valley in southern Oregon is the type of setting that might persuade anyone to embrace this approach to food production. It is also the inspiration for a book, written by the owners of the Peerless Restaurant in Ashland, Stu Stein and his wife Mary Hinds. “Our goal with The Sustainable Kitchen is to take sustainable and seasonal cuisine out of the restaurant, out of vegetarian magazines and natural food stores, and (put it) into the home, where it can flourish on an everyday basis with readily available fruits, vegetables, fish and meats.” Stein and Hinds provide the expertise so that “anyone cooking at home can discover the thrill and pleasure of tasting something made from the best seasonal ingredients grown in their own community.” The recipes are original and elegant; restaurant fodder of the highest degree ready to be made at home.
An attractively packaged softcover by journalist Helen Brody, billed as, “A unique exploration of New Hampshire farms and their products in 30 profiles and 118 recipes,” brings us east again. New Hampshire: From Farm To Kitchen is comfortable with casseroles, baked ham and beans, and dishes like Roast Pig with Sister Frances’s Bread Stuffing. There is plenty of nostalgia here, as well as interesting sidebars such as “How To Cook Grass-Fed Beef.” The profiles of small farmers are the heart of this book, offering glimpses into the mindset, work habits, and economic realities facing small farmers in the Granite State.
Similarly, though less concerned with recipes, we find Food Lovers’ Guide To Connecticut: Best Local Specialties, Markets, Recipes, Restaurants, Events, and More by Patricia and Lester Brooks. This is really a travel guide for the obsessive epicurean. It lists and briefly profiles food festivals, farmers’ markets, cooking schools, wineries, brewpubs, restaurants, and regional producers of distinctive foods.
Not By Bread Alone
Two of North America’s finest bakeries, both fiercely committed to natural, preservative-free bread, have put their names on projects that simply refuse to behave like baking books. First, from Pascal Rigo, the owner of San Francisco’s Bay Bread comes The American Boulangerie: French Pastries And Breads For The Home Kitchen. Rigo devotes a mere 18 pages to les pains before launching into quiches, tartines, patisseries, crepes, and a decadent selection of house specialties including recipes for chocolate or lemon yule logs, macaroons, hazelnut cakes, and other classic French sweets. This is a stunning, treasure-filled book.
For ten years, the ACE Bakery has been turning out Toronto’s best baguette, attested to by more than 700 hotels, restaurants, gourmet food stores, airlines, and an untold number of bread lovers. The wife-husband team of Linda Haynes and Martin Connell have maintained an artisanal approach to their bread and also the fresh, inspired soups, sandwiches, and other selections they serve from the caf attached to their bakery. The ACE Bakery Cookbook: Recipes For And With Bread, which Haynes wrote, is relaxed, contemporary, and beautifully arranged.
One more bread-based book of note is Homebaking: The Artful Mix of Flour and Tradition Around the World, by award-winning author’s Jeffrey Alford and Naomi Duguid (Artisan). Six continents, 200 recipes, 150 color photographs, and wonderful prose all contribute to this book’s certain success.
And lastly, a nod toward culture — live culture. Sally Fallon, author of Nourishing Traditions, writes in the foreword to Wild Fermentation: The Flavor, Nutrition, and Craft of Live-Culture Foods, “Nations that still consume cultured foods, such as France with its wine and cheese, and Japan with its pickles and miso, are recognized as nations that have culture. Culture begins at the farm, not in the opera house, and binds a people to a land and its artisans.” Culture then, results from the very natural process of fermentation performed by bacteria, yeasts, and molds (microflora). These single-cell organisms break food down into nutrients that the human body can more easily digest, and also bring about extraordinary flavor transformations. Without them staples such as bread, cheese, beer, and wine would not exist. If, as it frequently does, the culinary world goes through another nostalgic period, the ancient rituals and flavors of fermented food will be ripe and ready for the attention.
The fermentation movement, the emphasis on organic and locally grown produce, and the return to regional cuisine, all offer much-needed alternatives to our mega-industrialized, ultra-homogenized, peel-back-the-foil-Wendell Berry, in his recently published masterful collection of essays, Citizenship Papers, builds the case that consumers who prefer fresh, wholesome food must accept some agricultural responsibilities. Especially those “who have grown doubtful of the healthfulness, the trustworthiness, and the dependability of the corporate food system.” Such responsibility includes supporting small farmers who avoid the use of poisonous fertilizers, antibiotics, alien genes, and other contaminants, and practice sustainable agriculture. Of course, organic vegetables and pasture-raised poultry and beef cost more. But as Berry, a farmer himself knows, the expense is far offset by the exceptional goodness of the food.
Professional chefs wouldn’t have it any other way. The freshness factor compels most top restaurants around the world to nurture close relationships with nearby farms and create daily menus based on what was delivered that day; in other words, what ripened that day. The most adventurous chefs challenge their farmers to experiment with overlooked vegetables and fruit, resuscitating heirloom varieties in danger of extinction. And perhaps most important to Berry’s concerns, through their restaurants and cookbooks, these chefs are educating consumers on what to do with the unfamiliar produce.
A number of these freshness fanatics have worthy new cookbooks on the market. As is often the case when a chef puts his or her name on a project, most of these books are beautiful, large-format, four-color trophies.
Chef Terry Conlan, author of Fresh: Healthy Cooking And Living From Lake Austin Spa Resort, manages nicely to incorporate the fat-free/low-cal/minimalist spa impulse into a collection of recipes that will also appeal to eaters’ naughty side. Organic gardens provide him with the herbs, vegetables and ideas to offer, “Not just the best spa food that they have ever eaten, but some of the best food that they have eaten anywhere.” There’s an unmistakable Asian and Mediterranean tint to his repertoire of recipes. Helpful sidebars and “Chefstips” appear on virtually every page.
Winning Styles Cookbook: Recipes From The James Beard Foundation Award-Winning Chefs gathers twenty-one culinary behemoths, including such names as Charlie Trotter and Rick Bayless, marking the 100th anniversary of Beard’s birth. Each chef contributes five or so recipes; restaurant dishes that are impressive but not too intimidating to try at home. With photographs, and essays on the food philosophy of each chef, there’s plenty here to enlighten the home cook.
In Creating Chefs: A Journey Through Culinary School With Recipes and Lessons, author Carol W. Maybach seeks to capture the “wisdom and cooking secrets of her chef instructors” in almost journal-like prose. Part textbook, part cookbook, part student notebook, and with illustrations and photographs throughout, Creating Chefs feels compellingly different and delivers on its promise to teach readers how to “appreciate the value of the culinary arts.”
After ten years, 11,000 cooking shows, and 30,000 recipes, the Food Network finally has a presence on the book shelf with an energetic collection of favorite recipes called Food Network Kitchens Cookbook: Fresh Ideas, Bold Flavors, Tips & Techniques. To be sure, television has changed the way Americans cook, eat, and appreciate the art of cooking. Credit for this phenomenon belongs largely to the Food Network, which helped promote the concept of the celebrity chef to the point that Mario and Emeril no more need a surname than Tiger or Uma.
There’s a There Here
At a time when the ubiquity of national chains like Starbucks and the Chili’s make it hard to tell what region you’re in—let alone what city or state—there’s a welcome antidote in cookbooks that reflect a keen sense of place.
Fifteen years of the best Manhattan has to offer is featured in New York Cooks: The 100 Best Recipes From New York Magazine, showcasing recipes from legendary restaurants like LeCirque, Nobu, LeBernandin, and Tavern on the Green. Culinary Editor Gillian Duffy culled 100 recipes from the magazine’s biannual entertaining issues to select recipes including Oxtail Rioja from Daniel Boulud, Lasagna Bolognese from Mario Batali and Chicken-And-Shrimp Paella from Bobby Flay.
Across the river, Jersey girl, Vicki J. Caparulo and her husband Steve traveled the width and breadth of the Garden State researching Great Dishes From New Jersey’s Favorite Restaurants. A restaurant guide at heart, this meticulously written and photographed book showcases more than fifty of Jersey’s best-loved dining establishments, including a recipe from each. Published by Rutgers University Press, Great Dishes will entice many foodies on down the Turnpike from the Big Apple.
Another book that brings the food of a great restaurant into homes is Frank Stitt’s Southern Table: Recipes From Highlands Bar And Grill. Highlands is on virtually every list of best restaurants in America, an endorsement fellow southerner Pat Conroy echoes in the foreword. Stitt offers his take on more than 150 recipes, most of them further evidence that he is firmly staked to his native state of Alabama. The recipes in Southern Table are interspersed with personal essays and profiles of the people, places, and events of Birmingham and the South.
Reflecting another region comes a long-awaited book featuring adapted Spanish-style cuisine from one of America’s oldest restaurants, El Farol in Santa Fe, New Mexico. Author chef James Caruso writes, “This book offers…El Farol’s very unique cuisine, blending Spanish traditions with the untamed flavors of the American Southwest.” El Farol: Tapas And Spanish Cuisine includes more than 120 recipes of hot and cold tapas—especially useful for entertaining.
Midwesterners will feel at home with Schuler’s: Fresh Recipes & Warm Memories by Chef Jonathan Schuler and his father Hans. A Michigan landmark since 1909, Schuler’s built its reputation on hearty food that always pushed the palates of upper Midwest diners.
The hipness award goes to Tongue Twisters: Sexy Food From Bin 941 & Bin 942. In his two Vancouver tapas parlors, Chef Gord Martin serves cross-cultural, “tongue-twisting” cuisine to the city’s celebrity clientele. Sexy Food has a Pacific Northwest swagger, exemplified in dishes like grilled volcanic salt-rubbed halibut and rosemary lemon jus, pan-seared organic duck breast with Bombay mustard sauce, and potato salad.

Gotta Get Back To The Garden
Wendell Berry, and other agrarian-minded conservationists, would like us to shorten the distance between farm and table for the benefit of local economies and to encourage a sense of community. To be sure, locally grown food also has the advantage of tasting better because it was probably harvested within hours of reaching your table. But there are environmental considerations as well. The highly industrialized factory farm requires cheap long-distance transportation to move products to the marketplace, whereas small family farms most often embrace organic and sustainable practices that are more earth friendly. They certainly use far less petroleum than the isolated factory farms. And by using land in close proximity to the urban communities they serve, farms help control sprawl and preserve the rural landscape.
The bountiful Rogue Valley in southern Oregon is the type of setting that might persuade anyone to embrace this approach to food production. It is also the inspiration for a book, written by the owners of the Peerless Restaurant in Ashland, Stu Stein and his wife Mary Hinds. “Our goal with The Sustainable Kitchen is to take sustainable and seasonal cuisine out of the restaurant, out of vegetarian magazines and natural food stores, and (put it) into the home, where it can flourish on an everyday basis with readily available fruits, vegetables, fish and meats.” Stein and Hinds provide the expertise so that “anyone cooking at home can discover the thrill and pleasure of tasting something made from the best seasonal ingredients grown in their own community.” The recipes are original and elegant; restaurant fodder of the highest degree ready to be made at home.
An attractively packaged softcover by journalist Helen Brody, billed as, “A unique exploration of New Hampshire farms and their products in 30 profiles and 118 recipes,” brings us east again. New Hampshire: From Farm To Kitchen is comfortable with casseroles, baked ham and beans, and dishes like Roast Pig with Sister Frances’s Bread Stuffing. There is plenty of nostalgia here, as well as interesting sidebars such as “How To Cook Grass-Fed Beef.” The profiles of small farmers are the heart of this book, offering glimpses into the mindset, work habits, and economic realities facing small farmers in the Granite State.
Similarly, though less concerned with recipes, we find Food Lovers’ Guide To Connecticut: Best Local Specialties, Markets, Recipes, Restaurants, Events, and More by Patricia and Lester Brooks. This is really a travel guide for the obsessive epicurean. It lists and briefly profiles food festivals, farmers’ markets, cooking schools, wineries, brewpubs, restaurants, and regional producers of distinctive foods.
Not By Bread Alone
Two of North America’s finest bakeries, both fiercely committed to natural, preservative-free bread, have put their names on projects that simply refuse to behave like baking books. First, from Pascal Rigo, the owner of San Francisco’s Bay Bread comes The American Boulangerie: French Pastries And Breads For The Home Kitchen. Rigo devotes a mere 18 pages to les pains before launching into quiches, tartines, patisseries, crepes, and a decadent selection of house specialties including recipes for chocolate or lemon yule logs, macaroons, hazelnut cakes, and other classic French sweets. This is a stunning, treasure-filled book.
For ten years, the ACE Bakery has been turning out Toronto’s best baguette, attested to by more than 700 hotels, restaurants, gourmet food stores, airlines, and an untold number of bread lovers. The wife-husband team of Linda Haynes and Martin Connell have maintained an artisanal approach to their bread and also the fresh, inspired soups, sandwiches, and other selections they serve from the caf attached to their bakery. The ACE Bakery Cookbook: Recipes For And With Bread, which Haynes wrote, is relaxed, contemporary, and beautifully arranged.
One more bread-based book of note is Homebaking: The Artful Mix of Flour and Tradition Around the World, by award-winning author’s Jeffrey Alford and Naomi Duguid (Artisan). Six continents, 200 recipes, 150 color photographs, and wonderful prose all contribute to this book’s certain success.
And lastly, a nod toward culture — live culture. Sally Fallon, author of Nourishing Traditions, writes in the foreword to Wild Fermentation: The Flavor, Nutrition, and Craft of Live-Culture Foods, “Nations that still consume cultured foods, such as France with its wine and cheese, and Japan with its pickles and miso, are recognized as nations that have culture. Culture begins at the farm, not in the opera house, and binds a people to a land and its artisans.” Culture then, results from the very natural process of fermentation performed by bacteria, yeasts, and molds (microflora). These single-cell organisms break food down into nutrients that the human body can more easily digest, and also bring about extraordinary flavor transformations. Without them staples such as bread, cheese, beer, and wine would not exist. If, as it frequently does, the culinary world goes through another nostalgic period, the ancient rituals and flavors of fermented food will be ripe and ready for the attention.
The fermentation movement, the emphasis on organic and locally grown produce, and the return to regional cuisine, all offer much-needed alternatives to our mega-industrialized, ultra-homogenized, peel-back-the-foil-aWendell Berry, in his recently published masterful collection of essays, Citizenship Papers, builds the case that consumers who prefer fresh, wholesome food must accept some agricultural responsibilities. Especially those “who have grown doubtful of the healthfulness, the trustworthiness, and the dependability of the corporate food system.” Such responsibility includes supporting small farmers who avoid the use of poisonous fertilizers, antibiotics, alien genes, and other contaminants, and practice sustainable agriculture. Of course, organic vegetables and pasture-raised poultry and beef cost more. But as Berry, a farmer himself knows, the expense is far offset by the exceptional goodness of the food.
Professional chefs wouldn’t have it any other way. The freshness factor compels most top restaurants around the world to nurture close relationships with nearby farms and create daily menus based on what was delivered that day; in other words, what ripened that day. The most adventurous chefs challenge their farmers to experiment with overlooked vegetables and fruit, resuscitating heirloom varieties in danger of extinction. And perhaps most important to Berry’s concerns, through their restaurants and cookbooks, these chefs are educating consumers on what to do with the unfamiliar produce.
A number of these freshness fanatics have worthy new cookbooks on the market. As is often the case when a chef puts his or her name on a project, most of these books are beautiful, large-format, four-color trophies.
Chef Terry Conlan, author of Fresh: Healthy Cooking And Living From Lake Austin Spa Resort, manages nicely to incorporate the fat-free/low-cal/minimalist spa impulse into a collection of recipes that will also appeal to eaters’ naughty side. Organic gardens provide him with the herbs, vegetables and ideas to offer, “Not just the best spa food that they have ever eaten, but some of the best food that they have eaten anywhere.” There’s an unmistakable Asian and Mediterranean tint to his repertoire of recipes. Helpful sidebars and “Chefstips” appear on virtually every page.
Winning Styles Cookbook: Recipes From The James Beard Foundation Award-Winning Chefs gathers twenty-one culinary behemoths, including such names as Charlie Trotter and Rick Bayless, marking the 100th anniversary of Beard’s birth. Each chef contributes five or so recipes; restaurant dishes that are impressive but not too intimidating to try at home. With photographs, and essays on the food philosophy of each chef, there’s plenty here to enlighten the home cook.
In Creating Chefs: A Journey Through Culinary School With Recipes and Lessons, author Carol W. Maybach seeks to capture the “wisdom and cooking secrets of her chef instructors” in almost journal-like prose. Part textbook, part cookbook, part student notebook, and with illustrations and photographs throughout, Creating Chefs feels compellingly different and delivers on its promise to teach readers how to “appreciate the value of the culinary arts.”
After ten years, 11,000 cooking shows, and 30,000 recipes, the Food Network finally has a presence on the book shelf with an energetic collection of favorite recipes called Food Network Kitchens Cookbook: Fresh Ideas, Bold Flavors, Tips & Techniques. To be sure, television has changed the way Americans cook, eat, and appreciate the art of cooking. Credit for this phenomenon belongs largely to the Food Network, which helped promote the concept of the celebrity chef to the point that Mario and Emeril no more need a surname than Tiger or Uma.
There’s a There Here
At a time when the ubiquity of national chains like Starbucks and the Chili’s make it hard to tell what region you’re in—let alone what city or state—there’s a welcome antidote in cookbooks that reflect a keen sense of place.
Fifteen years of the best Manhattan has to offer is featured in New York Cooks: The 100 Best Recipes From New York Magazine, showcasing recipes from legendary restaurants like LeCirque, Nobu, LeBernandin, and Tavern on the Green. Culinary Editor Gillian Duffy culled 100 recipes from the magazine’s biannual entertaining issues to select recipes including Oxtail Rioja from Daniel Boulud, Lasagna Bolognese from Mario Batali and Chicken-And-Shrimp Paella from Bobby Flay.
Across the river, Jersey girl, Vicki J. Caparulo and her husband Steve traveled the width and breadth of the Garden State researching Great Dishes From New Jersey’s Favorite Restaurants. A restaurant guide at heart, this meticulously written and photographed book showcases more than fifty of Jersey’s best-loved dining establishments, including a recipe from each. Published by Rutgers University Press, Great Dishes will entice many foodies on down the Turnpike from the Big Apple.
Another book that brings the food of a great restaurant into homes is Frank Stitt’s Southern Table: Recipes From Highlands Bar And Grill. Highlands is on virtually every list of best restaurants in America, an endorsement fellow southerner Pat Conroy echoes in the foreword. Stitt offers his take on more than 150 recipes, most of them further evidence that he is firmly staked to his native state of Alabama. The recipes in Southern Table are interspersed with personal essays and profiles of the people, places, and events of Birmingham and the South.
Reflecting another region comes a long-awaited book featuring adapted Spanish-style cuisine from one of America’s oldest restaurants, El Farol in Santa Fe, New Mexico. Author chef James Caruso writes, “This book offers…El Farol’s very unique cuisine, blending Spanish traditions with the untamed flavors of the American Southwest.” El Farol: Tapas And Spanish Cuisine includes more than 120 recipes of hot and cold tapas—especially useful for entertaining.
Midwesterners will feel at home with Schuler’s: Fresh Recipes & Warm Memories by Chef Jonathan Schuler and his father Hans. A Michigan landmark since 1909, Schuler’s built its reputation on hearty food that always pushed the palates of upper Midwest diners.
The hipness award goes to Tongue Twisters: Sexy Food From Bin 941 & Bin 942. In his two Vancouver tapas parlors, Chef Gord Martin serves cross-cultural, “tongue-twisting” cuisine to the city’s celebrity clientele. Sexy Food has a Pacific Northwest swagger, exemplified in dishes like grilled volcanic salt-rubbed halibut and rosemary lemon jus, pan-seared organic duck breast with Bombay mustard sauce, and potato salad.

Gotta Get Back To The Garden
Wendell Berry, and other agrarian-minded conservationists, would like us to shorten the distance between farm and table for the benefit of local economies and to encourage a sense of community. To be sure, locally grown food also has the advantage of tasting better because it was probably harvested within hours of reaching your table. But there are environmental considerations as well. The highly industrialized factory farm requires cheap long-distance transportation to move products to the marketplace, whereas small family farms most often embrace organic and sustainable practices that are more earth friendly. They certainly use far less petroleum than the isolated factory farms. And by using land in close proximity to the urban communities they serve, farms help control sprawl and preserve the rural landscape.
The bountiful Rogue Valley in southern Oregon is the type of setting that might persuade anyone to embrace this approach to food production. It is also the inspiration for a book, written by the owners of the Peerless Restaurant in Ashland, Stu Stein and his wife Mary Hinds. “Our goal with The Sustainable Kitchen is to take sustainable and seasonal cuisine out of the restaurant, out of vegetarian magazines and natural food stores, and (put it) into the home, where it can flourish on an everyday basis with readily available fruits, vegetables, fish and meats.” Stein and Hinds provide the expertise so that “anyone cooking at home can discover the thrill and pleasure of tasting something made from the best seasonal ingredients grown in their own community.” The recipes are original and elegant; restaurant fodder of the highest degree ready to be made at home.
An attractively packaged softcover by journalist Helen Brody, billed as, “A unique exploration of New Hampshire farms and their products in 30 profiles and 118 recipes,” brings us east again. New Hampshire: From Farm To Kitchen is comfortable with casseroles, baked ham and beans, and dishes like Roast Pig with Sister Frances’s Bread Stuffing. There is plenty of nostalgia here, as well as interesting sidebars such as “How To Cook Grass-Fed Beef.” The profiles of small farmers are the heart of this book, offering glimpses into the mindset, work habits, and economic realities facing small farmers in the Granite State.
Similarly, though less concerned with recipes, we find Food Lovers’ Guide To Connecticut: Best Local Specialties, Markets, Recipes, Restaurants, Events, and More by Patricia and Lester Brooks. This is really a travel guide for the obsessive epicurean. It lists and briefly profiles food festivals, farmers’ markets, cooking schools, wineries, brewpubs, restaurants, and regional producers of distinctive foods.
Not By Bread Alone
Two of North America’s finest bakeries, both fiercely committed to natural, preservative-free bread, have put their names on projects that simply refuse to behave like baking books. First, from Pascal Rigo, the owner of San Francisco’s Bay Bread comes The American Boulangerie: French Pastries And Breads For The Home Kitchen. Rigo devotes a mere 18 pages to les pains before launching into quiches, tartines, patisseries, crepes, and a decadent selection of house specialties including recipes for chocolate or lemon yule logs, macaroons, hazelnut cakes, and other classic French sweets. This is a stunning, treasure-filled book.
For ten years, the ACE Bakery has been turning out Toronto’s best baguette, attested to by more than 700 hotels, restaurants, gourmet food stores, airlines, and an untold number of bread lovers. The wife-husband team of Linda Haynes and Martin Connell have maintained an artisanal approach to their bread and also the fresh, inspired soups, sandwiches, and other selections they serve from the caf attached to their bakery. The ACE Bakery Cookbook: Recipes For And With Bread, which Haynes wrote, is relaxed, contemporary, and beautifully arranged.
One more bread-based book of note is Homebaking: The Artful Mix of Flour and Tradition Around the World, by award-winning author’s Jeffrey Alford and Naomi Duguid (Artisan). Six continents, 200 recipes, 150 color photographs, and wonderful prose all contribute to this book’s certain success.
And lastly, a nod toward culture — live culture. Sally Fallon, author of Nourishing Traditions, writes in the foreword to Wild Fermentation: The Flavor, Nutrition, and Craft of Live-Culture Foods, “Nations that still consume cultured foods, such as France with its wine and cheese, and Japan with its pickles and miso, are recognized as nations that have culture. Culture begins at the farm, not in the opera house, and binds a people to a land and its artisans.” Culture then, results from the very natural process of fermentation performed by bacteria, yeasts, and molds (microflora). These single-cell organisms break food down into nutrients that the human body can more easily digest, and also bring about extraordinary flavor transformations. Without them staples such as bread, cheese, beer, and wine would not exist. If, as it frequently does, the culinary world goes through another nostalgic period, the ancient rituals and flavors of fermented food will be ripe and ready for the attention.
The fermentation movement, the emphasis on organic and locally grown produce, and the return to regional cuisine, all offer much-needed alternatives to our mega-industrialized, ultra-homogenized, peel-back-the-foil-and-heat approach to food.