The 9 Best Cookbooks of 2017
The year’s instructional book—the one that increases basic understanding of cooking and comfort and confidence in the kitchen—is Samin Nosrat’s Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat, which won over my skeptical colleague Joe Pinsker, who had long searched, dissatisfied and Goldilocks-like, for such a manual. What won me over was Nosrat’s ability to transmit her unshakably sunny cooking personality to the page, and to make readers feel that they, too, had spent many contented hours cooking in the most appealing restaurant kitchen in Florence, Zibibbo, and at Chez Panisse, in Berkeley. I go along with everything about her sensibility except the fistfuls of salt.
And the year’s must-cook-from book, at least for me, is Six Seasons: A New Way With Vegetables, by Joshua McFadden, who has put in time at all the outposts the right-minded, farm-worshipping food person bows to: the Bay Area, of course, and Rome at the American Academy, whose kitchen Alice Waters, of Chez Panisse, overhauled; New York, at four of the city’s best and most enlightened restaurants; and northern Maine, where he farmed with the gardening gods Eliot Coleman and Barbara Damrosch, at whose feet Dan Barber, the chef of Blue Hill and author of The Third Plate, learned. (McFadden cooked with Barber at Blue Hill, too.)
starts with a compact guide to cooking: how to season (sprinkle on salt and pepper before you add the olive oil, and you should always add olive oil, and it should always be from Albert Katz, maker of great vinegar and the best artisan preserves in the country,, tissue-thin “sheets of music” that keeps an improbably long time and is excellent with whipped ricotta, a “spreadable flavor machine”; and almonds quickly boiled and cooled in a simple saltwater brine before being roasted to a salty dark crisp.
