COOKBOOKS
Here are posts on cookbooks. Some I review at length; some I merely recommend. My best recommendation, of course, is that I in fact use them.
Home Food: 100 Recipes to Comfort and Connect, by
Olia Hercules (Interlink Books, 2022)
“In her most personal book yet, Olia Hercules distills a lifetime of kitchen curiosity into her 100 most loved recipes. She draws on her broad influences: her childhood in Eastern Europe; her years in Cyprus and Italy [and] her simple, plant-centric family meals at home in London.”
Plusses: As I read this book, I felt closer and closer to its author as a person. I believe that to be rare in a book on food, especially the more mechanical ones. She is completely conversational throughout. (You can find the pronoun “I” in nearly every recipe, either in the topper or within the directions.)
What I believe this means is that this book will be captivating to readers of whatever sort because the readers are persons first, as well. If you begin to relate to the author, she gets to you and keeps you.
Her recipes are beautifully written. They take you by the hand; they have you in mind. For example, she even designs the timing for a dish, less than in minutes or hours, more in “what to look for in a dish when it’s done. [page 292].”
One doesn’t find many cookbooks as acts of kindness to the reader; this one is.
Beautiful photography; a plus is the top-down view that most of them use. Printing on non-glossy, heavy paper is a plus. An A-list of suppliers (page 293). Having QR codes linked to online instructional or educative videos is a stroke of genius. (Expect more of this from others). I tested a half dozen; they’re well done and very helpful. (However, her clarified butter is not my ghee.)
I believe that recipes are stories; you can read much from them. She certainly tells us stories apart from the recipes, but they themselves also tell the central story of the book: cooking and eating are about family, home and the history of both.
(I tested a couple of her recipes: “Punched Potatoes and a Roast Chicken” [pages 28-29] and her mother’s Ciabatta [page 274] which latter is essentially a pâte fermentée and very wet dough that she expertly talks us through as well as illustrates via one of the QR codes. These two recipes are not only supremely well-written, which is typical of the book as a whole, but they work as written.)
Minuses: Because the book is not laid out in any traditional or typical manner (for example, “Mains, Vegetables, Desserts,” etc.), if in search for something specific, you will seek the assistance of the Index.
Major issue for me, an older reader: The font in the Index is very small. Furthermore, it, too, is arranged only alphabetically (which indices tend to do), so you need to look through it with what you might have in mind. But that’s like the conundrums of looking for your misplaced spectacles (that you require in order to look for your misplaced spectacles) or trying to find the spelling of the word in a dictionary before spell-check when you don’t know how the word is spelled in the first place.
Is it OK not to lay out a cookbook in an untraditional manner? Yes, I believe so. But then you, the reader, need to let go and follow along with the author. That’s OK, too; but it is an “ask” on the author’s (and editor’s and publisher’s) part.