9/9 - How to pick a cookbook

And Panera now has robots at its drive-thrus.

Restaurants:

-Michelin will release its 2022 New York City Guide on October 6th. In advance of the release, the company announced its newest additions to the guide. A few Restaurant Adjacent recommendations will be included: Ensenada, Cadence, and Zaab Zaab. Of course, being included in the guide does not equate to receiving an all important star nor should that matter. Good restaurants are good restaurants and the ones you like are as important as anywhere that a tire company tells you to eat at.

-Fentanyl testing strips can now be found in the bathrooms of many notable New York City restaurants. This is a step in the right direction in terms of raising the standard of the restaurant-bathroom-experience. It can be fun to conjure up an image of your ideal restaurant bathroom- typically mine begins with the addition of a secret bathroom bartender that will pour you one oversized shot if you’re in the midst of a terrible group dinner. 

Stories:

-Panera is testing AI drive-thru technology in upstate New York meaning you can now order mac and cheese in a bread bowl in your car and not have to deal with any human to human shame. Will this take away jobs? Probably. Will it eventually become something we enjoy? Unfortunately. Could this breathe life into the ailing genre of drive-thru rapping videos? Let us hope.

People:

-Chef Drew Keane of Chicago’s Cabra is currently serving the best dish I’ve eaten in months: a deep fried pork shank with summer peaches and an elote salad. If you’re in need of cooking classes or want to buy them for a friend, DM him and he’ll hook it up.

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How To Choose A Cookbook:

After many positive responses to last week’s recommendation of David Kinch’s At Home in the Kitchen, I’ve organized my understanding of cookbooks into a hopefully helpful series of notes. 

There are two types of cookbooks: cooking manuals and restaurant books. Cooking manuals typically provide a wide range of simple recipes. As the name suggests, cooking manuals should help you cook at home. A good cooking manual might never leave your kitchen counter (i.e. the mangled copy of Joy of Cooking holding residency beside my mom’s stove). Cooking manuals will guide you through the bounce passes and pick and rolls of flavors and techniques. A few good examples: Joy of Cooking, At Home in the Kitchen.

Restaurant books offer the recipes, stories, and context behind restaurants and their chefs. Recipes may be adjusted for home kitchens but will maintain the complexity of their original restaurant iteration. Often including biographical parables, restaurant books (when done well) will bring you closer to a chef’s understanding of their own life and restaurant. A good example: The French Laundry Cookbook.

Within these two categories are innumerable subcategories and offshoots. You could lump cookbooks from ‘food personalities’ (e.g. Molly Baz) into the restaurant book category. A deep dive into cake baking or whole hog barbecue would best be understood as a technique specific cooking manual. Regardless, understanding what each type of cookbook does well is the first step in finding a cookbook that will work for you.

Here are a few personal recommendations:

Cookbooks I use to cook:

Market Cooking by David Tanis 

As the name suggests, this book offers recipes for nearly any ingredient that you’d bring home from a farmer’s market. There’s also some provocative roast chicken recipes that will play as it gets colder. 

At Home in the Kitchen by David Kinch

It bears repeating, but this book does not miss. The cocktail section is so good it will convince you to start drinking rum again. 

Take One Fish by Josh Niland

I like this book because it gives numerous substitutes for the fish used in each recipe. The recipes are simpler than Niland’s first book, The Whole Fish Cookbook, but equally delicious. 

The Superiority Burger Cookbook by Brooks Headley

Vegetarian recipes that couldn't care less about being healthy. 

Cookbooks I like to read:

The Art of Living According to Joe Beef: A Cookbook of Sorts by David McMillan and Fred Morin

Essays on oysters and foie gras, an entire chapter about transcontinental railways, and tasteful photography– I’ve spent many rainy afternoons happily flipping through this treasure trove. 

State Bird Provisions by Stuart Brioza and Nicole Krasinski

Intricate recipes and an innovative restaurant concept and great photography and everything in here looks nice and the stories are nice and this book makes me feel nice. 

Cookbooks I own and never use and never will use but will not throw away because (much like Infinite Jest) maybe one day I’ll get around to it:

The Noma Guide To Fermentation by Rene Redzepi and David Zilber

Purchased during senior year of college while I lived in a house with eighteen dudes. An opening chapter instructs you to build a fermentation chamber in a sterile environment. Said fermentation chamber would’ve taken up more than half of my room. Garum recipes ask you to rot fish. In short, it didn’t happen. 

If you guys enjoy this segment, let me know. I’m always looking for new books and will continue to share the good ones if that’s something y’all like. 

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