THE COOKBOOK TEST #0054: SWEET BASIL, GARLIC, TOMATOES, AND CHIVES
INSTALLMENT #0054 (PAID) CULINARY TIME TRAVEL / A GLANCING BLOW / PRISONER OF THE FORMAT / RETURN TO CAPRI
Dear Readers,
One of the great joys of writing THE COOKBOOK TEST is the research part of it. That's a matter of reading and cooking out of all these books (nearly 50 at this point), but it's also a matter of picking what era I'd like to parachute into. Sometimes it's earlier this year. Sometimes it's 1971 in New Orleans. Sometimes it's 1831, or thereabouts, and people are making something called Chicken Pudding. I don't really know. Doesn't sound great. Not surprised that you can't get it at McDonald's.
This week, the year is 1992, more than 30 years ago. At this point in history, Bill Clinton was mounting his successful presidential campaign, AT&T started selling its video telephone (cost: $1500), New York Mafia boss John Gotti was found guilty of 5 murders, and Weird Al Yankovic released Smells Like Nirvana, which went all the way up to number 35 on the pop charts. I'm not sure if any of that helps set the scene, but the upshot is that 1992 was a goddamn long time ago, and since I was already in high school at that point, I am officially Old.
What was I talking about? Oh yes, the great joy of writing and researching this stuff.
I don't recall a lot about the culinary state of affairs in 1992, other than I think it was around then that the Cinnabon store opened at West Towne Mall in Madison, and I began a lifelong love affair with roughly two pounds of wet dough slathered in sweetened cream cheese frosting. (Cinnabons are TERRIBLE. I absolutely LOVE THEM.)
The Olive Garden had already been going strong for about 10 years at this point in history, setting the stage for stuff like this week's experiment: SWEET BASIL, GARLIC, TOMATOES, AND CHIVES, a cookbook focused on the vegetable dishes of Tuscany and Provence.
Described in the book's jacket copy as two cuisines that are famously "fresh, fast, and affordable," SBGTC has all the breezy confidence of an infomercial, calling upon its readers to rise up and "take advantage of the herbs and produce these regions are renowned for." Therefore: let's start taking advantage of some herbs.
at your service,
James
SWEET BASIL, GARLIC, TOMATOES, AND CHIVES: THE VEGETABLE DISHES OF TUSCANY AND PROVENCE
BY DIANA SHAW
HARMONY BOOKS | 1992 | $20
I was drawn to SBGTC due to its charmingly dated vibes and the idea that it promised: refreshing, produce-driven recipes rendered quickly and neatly on the page. But after diving into it with a little more seriousness, I began to wish for something somewhat less quick and much less neat.
SBGTC's appeal to its publisher must have been the author's skill for quickly rendering complex recipes and ideas, but a lot gets lost in translation; it’s parallel to journalism’s drift from long-form interviews into “sound bites,” with similar consequences. Once you dig into the mid-recipe anecdotes a bit, you get the sense that while the author was once a tourist in Europe, she never really traveled there.
For example:
Forget the riddle of the Sphinx. For me, the far more baffling question is, Why aren't the French fat? How is it that the Japanese raise successive generations of sumo wrestlers on raw fish and rice, while the French, with their well-known penchant for butter and cream, are so svelte?
Deconstructing this hair-raising pile of logic is a bit like dynamiting a great many fish in a very small barrel. So I'll just pick one tiny little nit: Is the premise of this dichotomy supposed to be that the Japanese are famously a large, fat people?
And while the Internet wasn't really a thing in 1992, surely Shaw could have pinged an expert and discovered that while, sure, sumo wrestlers eat rice and fish, they much more relevantly also consume tremendous quantities of meats and noodles?
Or this:
Cooking in the style of southern France and Tuscany involves trusting your senses - including a sense of proportion, and common sense. There really aren't any authoritative "authentic" recipes for regional specialties, since no one could count on having the same quantity of any particular ingredient twice.
REALLY?! The people living in two supremely well-connected, deeply resourced, famously traditional parts of the world haven't ever known, week to week, whether or not they were going to be able to find any goddamn garlic at the market?!
I'm not saying that food isn't seasonal or that everything has always been available in a modern supermarket-like fashion, but, my God, the extent and sophistication of European commerce is definitely a thing. Shaw's not wrong that many parts of the world don't fetishize canonical and scientifically measured recipes for foods that have been cooked in families for generations, but all of this waffling reads to me (granted: a supreme cynic) as a preemptive defense for irritating and probably also sometimes correct readers incensed that a given recipe for X included the absolutely incorrect Y or left out the ever-so-crucial Z.
In fact, let's get right to that, a recipe that includes an awful lot of Y, to its detriment.
PRISONER OF THE FORMAT
About the only good thing I can say for the pumpkin gnocchi recipe in SBGTC is that it correctly commands the home cook to use baked rather than canned pureed pumpkin.
It's a marked hassle to buy a whole pumpkin, halve it, scoop out the halves, quarter the halves, partially immerse them in water in a large vessel, cover said vessel, bake the pumpkins, and scoop out the meat before blending it with a fork. But the resulting gnocchi are lighter and more tender than their puree-based brethren, and they taste a little bit more like pumpkin, too.
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