THE COOKBOOK TEST #0068: HITS AND MISSES
The Seven Best Recipes I Made in 2024 For The Cookbook Test (and Three... Other Ones)
Dear Readers,
You can't ring in the new year without ringing out the old. After every year of writing and publishing, I like to take stock and figure out whether anything meaningful was discovered and shared, and I'm happy to say that THE COOKBOOK TEST seems to be hitting the mark. Every week brings new recipes and new flavors; some are dynamic and wonderful, and some are... not so much.
So in that spirit: Seven recipes from this year that really, really hit (and that you should consider making in your own home) and three that... well, didn't.
7. The Garibaldi Sandwich | Paisan's In Memoriam
One of the remarkable aspects of this project is that its weekly deadline demands that I strip mine my life for every significant culinary memory I've ever treasured in order to keep feeding the beast. This isn't a complaint - it's all useful to me as a writer, as it's part therapy, part memoir, part cookbook in the making. (Up sometime soon, I'm sure, will be the bread bowl clam chowder from the Disney Pirates of the Caribbean restaurant that absolutely blew my mind as a little kid.)
On that front: I recreated the best sandwich from one of my favorite childhood haunts, Paisan's in Madison, Wisconsin. The Garibaldi is an earthy, spicy, meaty, approachable, cheerful sandwich, a sandwich too casual for anyone but friends, but composed enough that said friends will have a terrific meal.
6. Don't Touch My Car Keys | Good Drinks
How did a non-alcoholic cocktail make it on this list? A combination of turbinado sugar, coconut milk, lime juice, bitters, and mint makes this a legitimately delicious beverage with all the depth you could hope for from a boozy drink cooked up by a serious bartender.
Beyond that, I wound up messing around with the leftover turbinado sugar to make the best caramel sauce I've ever tasted, a happy accident after a well-calculated smart move.
5. Grilled Shrimp with Green Cocktail Sauce | Ithaca Farmers Market Cookbook
This is one of my favorite sorts of recipes: A so-simple-it-seems-pointless method that yields surprisingly delicious results. The key to this one is the green sauce, which paints a powerful, colorful dose of herbal flavor onto the grilled shrimp.
4. Doubles | Code Noir: Afro-Caribbean Stories and Recipes
The first restaurant I reviewed for City Pages here in Minneapolis was a Trinidadian joint called Marla's, and their doubles (spicy chickpeas between two pieces of Indian flatbread) grabbed my imagination the moment I tried them.
Code Noir is a surprisingly heavy cookbook about the legacy of slavery and colonialism in the Caribbean, but it's also loaded with legitimately delicious food, doubles among them. It was a legitimate thrill to make these in my own home, and it gave me even more appreciation for how much art can go into a seemingly simple piece of street food.
3. Pumpkin Cheesecake | An Uncatered Affair: Cooking For Friends
An Uncatered Affair is my favorite kind of cookbook - completely obscure, technically flawless, and told by a unique human voice. In this case: author Joan Harris (a Chicago-based philanthropist) shares the stuff she whips up for her globe-trotting 1 percenter friends. The book puts equal emphasis on "this must taste impeccable" and "this must be something I can make fairly easily while juggling the invitation list / nailing down the fundraising aspects / working with the wine importer." The book's remarkably easy-to-execute pumpkin cheesecake is also one of the best desserts I've made in years.
2. Potato Shinjo in Soy Milk Dashi | Japan: The Vegetarian Cookbook
One of my very favorite flavors of 2024 also happens to have been published on New Year's Day of 2024. The absurdly labor-intensive but strikingly beautiful Potato Shinjo in Soy Milk Dashi dish from Japan: The Vegetarian Cookbook tried my patience as a cook but pleased my eyes and palate as a diner.
It's a croquette! It's a sake / soy milk / dashi broth! It's a slice of blanched zucchini with a dollop of wasabi! It's an awful lot on paper, but in real life it's an incredibly subtle, elegant, soothing dish that would be in the regular rotation of my aspirational diet (dining like a Japanese monk), something that I am not able to do because of my actual diet (bacon, Rice Krispies treats, "Yogies" yogurt bites from Costco, thick-cut bacon.)
1. Hummus bil Lahme | Maydān: Recipes from Lebanon and Beyond
I try not to quote myself too often, but this really is the key thing to know about the lamb and hummus dish from the cookbook Maydān:
One of my recent dinner guests, a well traveled gentleman who is no stranger to good restaurants, ate the lamb and hummus I prepared from Maydān and later proclaimed, “that was one of the best dinners I’ve ever had.”
And he wasn't wrong. This is a recipe that plays into my masochistic craving for working hard in the kitchen: you've got to compound your own Syrian Seven Spice. Hydrate chickpeas. Roast lamb shoulder. Pull and stew that lamb shoulder with fresh orange juice and butter and harissa. Make hummus from scratch. And combine it all into a dish that's as visually stunning as it is outrageously delicious.
Get some fresh flatbread coming out of the oven and you're on as high a level as food can get. This was truly a special thing to taste and share, and the dinner party at which we served it was one of the best we've had in years.
THREE OTHER RECIPES OF NOTE
3. Banana Salad | Extra! Extra! Eat All About It! Recipes and Culinary Curiosities From Historic Wisconsin
The premise of Banana Salad is simple: combine lettuce, bananas, peanuts, and mayonnaise and then, well... you have a salad, kinda? I don't know. And maybe the people who wrote this thing a century ago didn't either, it's hard to tell. While not bad, exactly (there's a certain sort of flavor / texture thing going on here, and I don't hate it), it's definitely not going to fill a niche in your lifestyle. Or if it does, please write to me and explain yourself.
2. Pumpkin Gnocchi | Sweet Basil, Garlic, Tomatoes, and Chives: The Vegetable Dishes of Tuscany and Provence
Disgustingly sweet, texturally gloopy, and altogether bad, these were a fun, terrible twist on a familiar and usually beloved dish. They're also a salute to one of my least favorite cookbooks from the 50+ I've reviewed, a "I went on vacation to Italy for a bit and then decided to write a cookbook" tome that is monumentally non-authoritative.
1. Green Ice Rime | Heroes' Feast: Flavors of the Multiverse, an Official D&D Cookbook
What if you could make Jell-O ... from scratch ... in a much more laborious manner ... and it tasted exactly like toothpaste? And better still: Toothpaste from the popular tabletop role-playing game Dungeons and Dragons?! That's the promise of Green Ice Rime, one of the most malconceived, confusing, basically inedible things that I've ever had the pleasure to taste.
When it comes to food, I'm absolutely a "give me a 10 or give me a zero" kind of guy - if I can't have the world's best, my next choice would be the world's worst. Either way, you've got a story. And toothpaste that eats like a meal is definitely a story. A horror story, sure, but it's neat and concise and it has a point. (That point being: One should generally not look to Dungeons and Dragons for meal inspiration.)
OK, anyway, enough faffing around: next week we’re back on it with a new cookbook.
Happy New Year!
James