Len's News, Notes, and Stuff

Get Multiple Viewpoints from Multiple Cookbooks

It has always been obvi­ous to me, but every once in a while I get the ques­tion, “Why have so many Japanese/Italian/French/Chinese/Indian/Caribbean/whatever cook­books?  You just need one of each type, right?” Maybe you would ask me the same thing. My answer is sim­ple. You get bet­ter advice and bet­ter food when you can con­sult dif­fer­ent cookbooks.

1. No one cook­book is totally comprehensive.
2. Each author has their own take on things, and their own strengths.

No one cook­book will cover every­thing. It can’t, because it’s made for a dif­fer­ent audi­ence, and has a dif­fer­ent pur­pose and intent.  One cook­book might focus more on casual, fam­ily cook­ing. Another might be fancier and focus on restaurant-grade cook­ing. Yet another may focus on tra­di­tional dishes and recipes, and a final one might be take a fusion per­spec­tive on the cuisine.

Each author has their own per­spec­tives on food in gen­eral and on the cui­sine in par­tic­u­lar. Food is an expres­sion of the per­son who pre­pares it. Each chef who writes a cook­book brings his or her own biases, pref­er­ences, and style to the book and its recipes. That, really, is why you buy cook­books from one author and not another!

By hav­ing mul­ti­ple cook­books that, at first glance, seem to all cover the same ground, you get advice and guid­ance from dif­fer­ent advi­sors. Hav­ing a cook­book and refer­ring to a cook­book is like hav­ing the chef or author in your kitchen giv­ing you guid­ance. Like every other field in life, the deci­sions you make for your­self are likely to be bet­ter when you can hear dif­fer­ent experts give you their advice.

Take dashi, for instance. That’s the basic stock fun­da­men­tal to so much of Japan­ese cook­ing.  It’s sim­ple as hell with 3 ingre­di­ents: water, kombu (sea kelp) and bonito. That’s it. Yet when I con­sult dif­fer­ent cook­books by dif­fer­ent authors, there are slight dif­fer­ences in how they approach it.

• A book focused on soup noo­dles empha­sizes the con­ve­nience fac­tor. Close enough is good enough. Soak the kombu in room tem­per­a­ture water for 20 min­utes and bring it to a boil, then remove. Keep at a sim­mer, add bonito for 10 min­utes and remove.
• A book focused on art, pre­sen­ta­tion, and restaurant-grade prepa­ra­tion, empha­sizes qual­ity. You get the best damn kombu you can, and let it soak overnight in room-temperature water, and you take the kombu out before you boil the stock. Take off heat, put in the bonito, when it sinks to the bot­tom, remove.
• A book focused on tra­di­tional prepa­ra­tion empha­sizes soul­ful, atten­tive cook­ing with an eye to econ­omy and get­ting the most use out of your ingre­di­ents. It notes the dif­fer­ence between pri­mary dashi, which takes cen­tre stage (as in soup noo­dles), and sec­ondary dashi, which is used for mak­ing sauces. Soak the kombu, bring *almost* to a boil but don’t let the water reach a boil, and remove, sav­ing it to make sec­ondary dashi. Bring to boil, add bonito, add some cool water to bring it down from boil, when it boils again, remove bonito and save for sec­ondary dashi.

I agree that it costs more money to stock mul­ti­ple books that cover some of the same ground. Unfor­tu­nately, the only way to become excel­lent at what you do is to get the best instruc­tion you can and then learn for your­self which way to go. For those of us who don’t cook pro­fes­sion­ally, instruc­tion from authors and chefs we trust is the best way to build that foun­da­tion of knowl­edge upon which real skill is built.

Even for some­thing so sim­ple as dashi soup stock, there are dif­fer­ences in the details. Even with only 3 ingre­di­ents, you can see there are dif­fer­ences in the approach each chef takes and advises.

Add up enough details and you end up with notice­ably dif­fer­ent results in your food. This applies to every kind of cui­sine you want to prepare.

If you want to be excel­lent, or even just very good, I would sug­gest that you need to have, ready at hand, mul­ti­ple view­points from mul­ti­ple authors and cookbooks.