Why do so many restaurant chefs even write cookbooks? To hawk them on their television shows? Or provide souvenirs for their clients? Just attempting most chefs’ recipes is like hearing a pianist at Carnegie Hall and thinking: “Oh, I have a piano at home, I can play that.” Restaurant chefs cook to dazzle, their recipes are complex, they presuppose mastery of a scary number of professional-level skills: that’s why we pay them the big bucks. In my kitchen I don’t want to turn out a sorry imitation of greatness, I want dinner. Good, satisfying, even sometimes creative dinner. But until cookbook publishers cop to this dislocation, their only best sellers will continue to be books like TV cook Rachael Ray’s “30-Minute Meals 2.” It’s far more challenging to develop cookbooks that enlighten the home cook. No wonder “Joy of Cooking’s” been in print since 1931.
Take Charlie Palmer (please!). The Art of Aureole ($50) features double-page spreads of levitating ingredients in living color, followed by recipes printed in white on a black background at odd angles. Never mind cooking from it, try reading it. Or take that other Charlie, Mr. Trotter. I’d fly to Chicago for his food, but what’s in his latest cookbook isn’t even –cooked. Raw ($35), written with Roxanne Klein from the trendy Roxanne’s, in Larkspur, Calif., is really about plate decoration. You might as well eat the pages. People who try recipes from books like these just throw up their hands. Then they order in.
But there is hope. Jamie’s Kitchen ($39.95) is written, of course, by his nakedness, Mr. Oliver, who was formed in the formidable kitchens of London’s River Cafe. Despite the funked-out pictures of our boyo as rock star wanna-be, Oliver’s book is generous with advice and technique. Simply Ming ($32.50) shows chef Ming Tsai of Boston’s Blue Ginger off the blue drinks at last and happily transforming banal chicken breasts and salmon steaks with fragrant tea rubs, curry pastes and fruit salsas. I didn’t need to live for two days with Tom Colicchio’s braised short ribs because that’s the way they do it at his restaurant, Craft (Craft of Cooking; $37.50), but he did give us fair warning, admitting that he hasn’t simplified his otherwise inspiring recipes. And sometimes souvenirs work: just reading The Da Fiore Cookbook ($34.95) reminds me why I’d almost always rather be at the Martins’ little restaurant in Venice.
