ARCHIVED BOOK REVIEWS

Cioppino’s Mediterranean Grill: A Lifetime of Excellence in the Kitchen

A true-life, modern update of the classic Audrey Hepburn movie Sabrina, Seattle-based writer Kathleen Flinn’s first book is the account of a career woman’s transformation as she sheds her corporate trappings, dons chef’s whites, and falls deeply in love along the way.

Le Cordon Bleu played a key role in the 1954 movie Sabrina, in which Audrey Hepburn's character attends the famous Parisian cooking school. In the process of learning to prepare fine French cuisine, she transforms herself from a mousy teenager into a sophisticated, worldly woman and, ultimately, falls in love with the man of her dreams.

Jump to the real world, 50 years in the future. In 2003, Kathleen Flinn, a 36-year-old American living and working in London, is downsized out of her corporate job and ignores her mother's advice that she find another job immediately or “never get hired anywhere ever again.” She instead cleans out her savings and moves to Paris to pursue her dream—a diploma from Le Cordon Bleu.

Equal parts travel diary, love story, and memoir, The Sharper Your Knife… reads like a Hollywood script. The book has a strong cast and several plot twists that make it a surprisingly suspenseful read. Flinn’s boyfriend, Mike, is the leading man who joins her in Paris. While she attends cooking school, he spends his days learning how to parler français in an immersion class and planning their wedding.

The demanding French chefs, who pronounce her name “Meeze Fleen,” serve as her chief antagonists. They stress, “Goutez, goutez, goutez”—taste, taste, taste—and bring her to tears when she fails in her cooking assignments. But they also build Flinn’s confidence—in her cooking and herself. “If I can master puff pastry,” Flinn says after a successful day in the kitchen, “we can plan a wedding in a foreign country.”

Chapters are prefaced by “lesson highlights” that list the dishes Flinn is making at school, as well as key events in her French sojourn. Her stories in and out of the kitchen often read like parables, with the moral that life can be a lot like a recipe—following the directions is no guarantee that your dish will turn out perfectly.

In one poignant episode, the couple goes shopping for their wedding rings. Being (relatively) young and in love, living in Paris, and planning a wedding—what could be more romantic? Flinn’s spirits are humbled, however, when she presents her kitchen-scarred, cut, and burned hands to the well-coiffed saleswoman at Cartier: she fumbles for words with her modicum of fluency in French, attempting to explain, “But I work in a kitchen…”

Each chapter concludes with a recipe, making it part cookbook as well. Flinn collects French classics such as coq au vin, duck confit, and pâte brisée, along with some international dishes and updates on traditional dishes such as grilled leg of lamb with white beans.

In Sabrina, Audrey Hepburn fails the soufflé class; in The Sharper Your Knife…  Flinn’s soufflé au chocolat is flawless. It’s a testament to the skills and passion that Flinn hones during her education at Le Cordon Bleu.

–Peter Szymczak

Balls!
Round the World Fare for All Occasions

How does one begin a review on a cookbook entitled Balls!? There are an endless number of possible puns, and an enormous (and, I might as well admit, alluring) opportunity to cause everyone to lose their appetite. It’s treacherous. Looking for background information on the book, I almost Googled “Angela Murrills Balls,” but quickly thought better of it. I suppose I should use the same discretion here.

Murrills is a food writer based in Vancouver, B.C. and southern France, has written books on Vancouver and Languedoc, and (full disclosure) has written many articles for Northwest Palate.

She also must really like balls. Her new cookbook is a compendium of round foods. There are meatballs, fishballs, cheese balls, apricot globes, falafel, and much, much more. In addition to the literally ball-shaped foods, the pun-crazy Murrills has included recipes for drinks like “Mountain High-Balls” (get it?) and soups like “Marseillaise Ball-abaisse,” and so, after very little inspection, one realizes that the ball theme has been stretched to include foods that have “ball” within their name, or could have “ball” within their name if their name was misspelled, or which, as is the case with a French Canadian Pea Soup, are merely dishes containing naturally ball-shaped foods. This extension is probably just as well, though it may offend ball-loving purists.

To answer a question that has undoubtedly occurred to the curious: no, there is not a recipe for Rocky Mountain Oysters, or other such ballsy delicacies.

Certainly much of the joy of such a cookbook is in the sheer quantity of word play you could unleash upon your friends and family if they were foolish enough to visit you in the midst of cooking one of its recipes. Or simply the look on their faces when they see the title amongst other more refined ones on your shelf. I wonder if she’s contemplating a sequel. Who knows what that would be called: the possibilities are staggering.

—Ben Bliss

The Elements of Cooking:
Translating the Chef’s Craft for Every Kitchen

Michael Ruhlman, author of The Making of a Chef and co-author of Thomas Keller’s French Laundry cookbooks, along with several other titles, is a man who believes in the transformative quality of cooking. To quote from his website, he believes “that America’s insatiable appetite for food and cooking know-how is really the beginning of a spiritual quest for the bigger things: a search for meaning, order, and beauty in an apparently chaotic and alienating universe.”

This philosophy is at least indirectly apparent in his new book, The Elements of Cooking, where he defines the ultimate goal of a chef as finesse. This, in Ruhlman’s eyes, involves intense attention to detail and unrelenting dedication to excellence and form.

Loosely inspired by Strunk and White’s famous writing guide The Elements of Style, the book starts out with a series of short essays on kitchen fundamentals that culminate in his discussion of finesse. The bulk of the book, however, is in the extensive glossary of cooking terms that follows the essays. The glossary covers many bases, but has a definite prejudice for French jargon and methodology, and while this focus does undermine the book jacket’s claims of universality, I found it illuminating and helpful nonetheless.

Ruhlman defines, clearly and concisely, rare culinary words like pinçage (browned tomato used to flavor stocks and sauces) alongside ordinary techniques and devices: for example, he briefly explains the uses for a blender. This range of attention is heartening, and goes a long way towards to forming a solid understanding of how to cook. Soon after I finished reading the book, I found myself flipping through its pages while I cooked, looking for the odd bit of advice or insight, folded neatly into a simple definition.

Though I found both the essays and the glossary helpful and fun to read (I should divulge that I am a person who enjoys reading the dictionary), there’s something a little dissonant in Ruhlman’s approach. There is only one full recipe in the book. This recipe, for veal stock, is to Ruhlman, “The essential. If you could only have one preparation in a book of essentials, veal stock would have to be it.” (His italics.) The recipe takes ten pounds of veal bones and eight to 12 hours to prepare, and yields two quarts of stock. No doubt the results are delicious, but is he nuts?

Ruhlman says that such preparations are what separate a home cook’s food from that of a professional kitchen’s, and while I can’t argue with that, what strikes me as strange is the implication of a continuum with the home cook on one side, the professional on the other, with the home cook striving to replicate the foods of the professional. I would venture to say that my kitchen and Thomas Keller’s have different goals, and, as a matter of definition, the most essential recipe for my kitchen can’t take 12 hours and ten pounds of bones. I wonder if, in his quest for beauty and order through cooking, Ruhlman has put too much emphasis on the acrobatics and resources of super-premium restaurants. There are other types of finesse with a separate beauty of their own.

Despite that caveat, the book does contain a wealth of useful knowledge, and it’s a pleasure to read. It just needs to be taken with a grain of salt.

—Ben Bliss

Fresh:
Seasonal Recipes Made with Local Foods

“In the past,” writes restaurateur John Bishop in the introduction to Fresh, “I, like other chefs, would get on the telephone and place my orders with wholesalers who could provide ready-peeled vegetables, pre-made salads, even cleaning fluids and paper products …. The problem with this system is that I had no real idea where the produce was coming from, who had grown it, and how far it had traveled.”

Today, Bishop’s Restaurant in Vancouver, B.C. works directly with farmers, to the benefit of diners and growers alike. John Bishop’s fourth cookbook celebrates that relationship with a seasonally organized collection that puts local ingredients in the spotlight. A winter menu, for instance, might include Pan-roasted Fanny Bay Oysters with Roasted Red Pepper Sauce, Pork and Apple Meatloaf with Yellow Tomato Sauce, and Braised Leek Casserole.

Augmented by luscious food and farm photography, these straightforward recipes, unencumbered by exotic ingredients or techniques, would make an inspiring first cookbook for a young Northwesterner.

Wild Sweets Chocolate
Savory, Sweet, Bites, Drinks

Be forewarned: The Dubys’ second volume of culinary exploration is meant for those who cook with tremendous passion and curiosity—or not at all.

Based in Vancouver, B.C., Dominique and Cindy Duby are best known to consumers for their exquisite chocolates, but among professional chefs, they are better known for their contributions to molecular gastronomy. Their new book introduces amazing new bites and drinks while introducing lay readers to some of the techniques that make them possible.

Among these techniques are sous-vide cooking (boiling in a bag); old-fashioned pressure cooking; the use of agar for creating heat-resistant gelatins; and xantham gum for thickening liquids.

If all this sounds impossibly technical, don’t despair. Every recipe is photographed with gorgeous clarity, and many of them feature simplified “e” versions for “everyday” cooking. For instance, the Milk Chocolate Pear Mousse with Ginger Orange Coulis and Pear Ribbons can be made without the Pear Ribbons.

I could have done without the chapter subheads that are supposed to evoke chemical symbols, such as S₁H for the Sweet/Herbal recipes and S₃M for the Savory/Meat dishes. But one person’s gimmickry is another person’s playfulness, and playfulness, clearly, is essential to the Dubys’ remarkable creative process.

As the Dubys’ fellow culinary pioneer Charlie Trotter writes in his foreward: Stu-pen-dous!

–A.J.

Kitchen Literacy: How We Lost Knowledge of Where Food Comes From and Why We Need to Get it Back

By Ann Vileisis
Island Press, 329 pages, hardcover, $26.95

Oregon-based historian Ann Vileisis’s new book starts off more than two hundred years ago—back when your chicken soup waited for you in the coop, and your future stew mooed in the barn. As a child you would have spent a good deal of time picking insects out of the family garden, and later, when your wrists grew strong enough, you would have squeezed cow udders and wrung chicken necks. There would be no question of where any of your food came from, and it would be exquisitely fresh (well, at least some of the year).

In Kitchen Literacy, the basic question Vileisis asks is: “How was it that basic ignorance about foods had become truly the norm in our culture, and what difference has it made?” It is Vileisis’s mission to chart the country’s course from this immediate and visceral experience of food, rife with bugs and blood, to where we are now, with much of what we eat having traveled thousands of miles before it reaches our plates, its origins obscure and method of production invisible. Vileisis focuses in particular on how industrially produced food has been marketed to the public, often unscrupulously, and how, through the various circumstances of history—waves of immigration, the World Wars, the Great Depression—such food has been accepted into the daily life of Americans.

Richly researched (the footnotes alone contain fascinating nuggets of knowledge), Kitchen Literacy should be of much interest to readers interested in the burgeoning local and organic food movements, both of which Vileisis champions as healthy reactions to mainstream food. The book only fleetingly touches on related historical subjects—like what pasteurization and other industrialization practices have done for public health—so it is best read as a narrow history, an in-depth view of a particular historical thread.

It’s an interesting thread to follow, and worth your while if you’re passionate about food and where it comes from. Little fragments of folk knowledge sparkle throughout Vileisis’s landscape of the old, agrarian America—for example, that the best-tasting trout is caught under waterfalls. That could be lost knowledge—but it’s not, it’s in the book. Kitchen Literacy serves as proof that there are antidotes for ignorance.

—Ben Bliss

Service Included: Four-Star Secrets of an Eavesdropping Waiter

If you’re intrigued by what goes on inside a super-famous, high-end restaurant but can’t imagine footing the dinner bill, here’s a chance to live vicariously. And if you’re lucky enough to dine at such places, here’s how the experience looks through your waiter’s eyes.

Phoebe Damrosch, first-time author and self-described diva, has written a memoir of her time as a server at Per Se, one of New York City’s top restaurants.

Per Se is the brainchild of Chef Thomas Keller, the man behind Napa Valley’s renowned French Laundry and a master of French-influenced American cuisine. Damrosch, who loved food but lacked extensive serving experience, successfully used serendipity and good connections to land a job with Keller’s team. She was present for Per Se’s much-hyped opening in 2004 and the busy, accolade-filled year that followed, and so comes armed with a insider’s perspective on the restaurant, its culture, and its clientele.

Per Se is no ordinary fancy restaurant. Located on the fourth floor of the Time Warner Center, with a sweeping view of Central Park, it cost $12 million to build. Dinner for two starts at $500, not including wine. For its first year, reservations were required at least two months in advance. There were even rumors that President Bush would attend the opening (he didn’t). To call Per Se “high profile” is an understatement.

Damrosch, as a captain—the lead server at a table—has a point of view distinct from both the kitchen staff and the customers. In such a high-end venue, the interface between the kitchen and the patron is obviously critical. Damrosch, in fascinating detail, recalls her extensive training:

“In the months of training for this restaurant’s opening, we not only learned glassware series and the names of the cows that produced the milk from which our butter was made, but were coached by an eighteenth-century dance specialist. One afternoon, at the Hudson Hotel, we learned to walk, to stand, and to bow like ladies and gentlemen… When holding two hot plates of Snake River Farms calotte de boeuf with crispy bone marrow and a rissole of marble potatoes, one was wise to hold them close to the center of gravity, learned in curtsy training…”

The captains really needed to know everything--not an unreasonable demand, considering both the price of a meal and the staff’s generous pay. The strength of Service Included lies in Damrosch’s detailed behind-the-scenes tour of what it takes to run a restaurant like Per Se. She delves into what she believes makes an excellent server excellent—namely, a semi-psychic ability to anticipate a guest’s desire in everything from the server’s disposition to chocolate preference. Her reflections on the social dynamics of who pays the bill, who among the captains gets extra tips, and how men and women differ in their tipping strategies, are all interesting.

Also entertaining are her observations of guests, who range from the ultra-rich who drop tens of thousands of dollars on a single meal, to the merely wealthy, content to spend only hundreds. Though she doesn’t name names, her encounters with celebrities and eccentrics make for fun eavesdropping—such as when she serves Salman Rushdie (unnamed but clearly him):

“Offering salmon to a famous author quite similarly named was a highlight of the week. I approached him chanting “sammen, sammen, sammen” under my breath so as to be sure I didn’t pronounce the l by mistake.”

I have little doubt that in the same situation my tongue would have slipped and I would have presented the author with a fish that shared his name, l and all.

Unfortunately, at least for this reader, the memoir is only about one-half restaurant tour. The rest concerns Damrosch’s love affair with a Per Se sommelier, which, though potentially intriguing, does not add up to a compelling story. Damrosch has a sassy, clean voice but few truly memorable insights on love. As with so many other youthful memoirs, things can get a little self-congratulatory fast, without much of anything actually happening.

In the end, Damrosch departed from Per Se to pursue a greater passion--the writing of her memoir. She left brimming with admiration for Thomas Keller and his restaurant, and with her beloved sommelier in her possession.

My recommendation for food-loving readers: check out the passages about Per Se, skim over the rest, and you’ll get a rare glimpse of Keller’s elite institution without having to empty your checking account.

—Ben Bliss

Cooking with the Wines of Oregon and Cooking with the Wines of Washington
The premise? Visit the winery and cook with the wine. The authors of the Gourmand World Cookbook award-winning book, Cooking with B.C. Wine, Troy and Cheryl-Lynn Townsin repeat their formula in two new cookbook/guidebooks for Washington and Oregon.
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The Townsins have traveled throughout the world, from Canada to the British Isles to Southeast Asia, and during those travels, their love for food and wine grew. Troy’s work in various restaurants gave him the opportunity to explore food and wine. Cheryl-Lynn, a translator and writer, credits her love of fine dining and fine wine to her upbringing in British Columbia.

Like most cookbooks, these two volumes are divided into sections such as appetizers, soups, entrées, etc. But these books have unique wine-related content aimed at wine novices.

When introducing a wine used in a particular recipe, the Townsins describe the wine right next to the recipe and include that winery’s contact information. Wineries also supplied some of the recipes; others are adapted by the authors from published recipes or were recruited from “world-renowned chefs especially for [these books],” although oddly, none of the chefs is named.

Some of the featured wineries include special offers. For example, Domaine Coteau, featured in the Beef Bourguignon recipe in Cooking with the Wines of Oregon, will waive its tasting fee if you arrive with a copy of the book. Not a bad deal.

These cookbook-winery-guide combos also offer a complete list of every winery in each state (that is, complete as of publication). The authors note that before visiting any winery, travelers should call to confirm visiting hours. To make wine touring a little easier, the authors include a detailed map of each state’s wine country.

The Oregon maps were reprinted from The Oregonian’s “Holiday Guide to Oregon Wines.” While these maps are helpful, if your eyesight is less than 20-20, you may need a magnifying glass to read the accompanying key. The Washington maps, courtesy of the Washington Wine Commission, are much easier to read: the wineries are printed directly on the map. No numbers or letters to navigate. Thank you, Washington Wine Commission. 

Creating a cookbook dedicated to dishes incorporating wine isn’t a novel concept; food and wine have always gone hand in hand. But these guides are fun, handy, and useful, both in the home kitchen and on the road. Just remember to take the books with you to whichever state you are visiting—you can’t redeem a winery’s special offer without it.

—Kasey Breuier