With all the cookbooks from the Bay Area's beloved restaurants — Bar Tartine, Tacolicious, and Brown Sugar Kitchen, to name a few — that came out this past fall, it was easy to overlook Twelve Recipes by Cal Peternell (Harper Collins), a chef with almost 20 years tenure at Berkeley's beloved Chez Panisse.
After all, who shells out more than $20 for a cookbook with only 12 recipes? But the title is misleading. Yes, there are 12 recipes and corresponding chapters for each one, some ingredient-based and some technique-based. But each one contains numerous variations on a theme.
Chapter one is called "toast" — and we all know that no one would buy a cookbook in order to learn how to crisp up bread. But that chapter features several variations on crumbs and croutons, an ingredient that many of the later recipes require. There are chapters for beans, chicken, pasta with tomatoes, pasta without tomatoes, and then each one has more recipes around it: For example, the bean chapter has recipes for bean gratin, dals, and various soups and spreads.
The idea for this book came to Peternell when the oldest of his three sons left for college. He thought his kids had naturally picked up how to cook by osmosis, but realized that besides eating, and occasionally doing one specific task in the kitchen, like plucking herbs, they actually had picked up very little. People who live on their own should have basic knowledge of how to cook, he reasoned, intending for the book to be a kind of manual for his son. Then, he figured that others could benefit from it, too.
His tone is casual and conversational, and makes you feel you have a friend in the kitchen with you, cheering you on. "Go, right now, and soak some dried beans in a lot of cold water. I'll wait here. Tomorrow, when you're cooking them, you'll thank me."
If you feel you could use help with the basics, like exactly how to roast a chicken, or how to make the perfect meatballs or pasta, this is the book for you. More seasoned cooks will no doubt skip over how to chop an onion and the importance of mirepoix, but there's plenty of interest for us, too.
As food journalist Michael Pollan says in his foreword: "This is the book I'll give to all those friends who tell me they can't cook."
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