Critics' choices for Christmas
Slaughter, Anne-Marie
Anne-Marie Slaughter Anne-Marie Slaughter is dean of the Woodrow Wilson School of Public Policy and International Affairs at Princeton. Christmas is a time for indulgence, and all too frequently...
...His job was to improve Hojo's food, creating clam chowder and chicken pot pie that could be freeze-dried and distributed across the country...
...Symon is the antithesis of the technical perfection required of a master chef, but he is hugely successful, named as one of America's ten best new chefs in 1998...
...From France comes a very different account of family and food...
...The precision and rigidity of classical French cooking, and the meticulous training at every stage from chopping carrots to spun-sugar desserts, is a world unto itself...
...More important, he finds an entire philosophy of life...
...And here Ruhlman finds food of a different order altogether, food that transcends food...
...On returning, he drinks a bowl of fresh milk: "foamy and slightly tepid, with a rich, buttery flavor...
...In the end, of course, she and Mr...
...Not the life of the wheat but the life of the person who grew the wheat, the life of the person who baked the bread, and the life of the cook who spent time cutting that bread and burning the croutons...
...Cookbooks have morphed into chef autobiographies with recipes on the side...
...Unlike Pepin, he cooks American food, inspired by James Beard, a chef "as huge and generous as America itself...
...What makes a chef a chef...
...The experience taught him that "food could be much more than mere sustenance...
...But do objective cooking skills make a chef...
...Only two out of the seven candidates succeed in becoming certified master chefs...
...At thirteen, Pepin left school for life in the kitchen, first in his family's restaurant and later through the arduous training required of a real French chef culminating in years spent at the Plaza Athenee in Paris, one of the best restaurants in France and a stint cooking for the French prime minister and even De Gaulle himself during the Algerian war...
...This is the question that Michael Ruhlman sets out to answer in The Soul of a Chef: The Journey towards Perfection (Penguin, $15,384 pp...
...Ruhlman next turns to working chefs in two very different restaurants to explore what makes them and their food special...
...At twenty-two, Pepin left it forever, heading for the United States and the radically different world of Howard Johnson's...
...The soul of Michael Symon, Ruhlman concludes, is charisma, laughter, and a determination to make the best food he can...
...For Elizabeth, a cooking repertoire is "a way to stay connected to all who are important in her life" by using recipes from friends and family...
...He begins by observing the Certified Master Chef Exam given by the Culinary Institute of America, a ten-day marathon that requires the candidates to take written and oral exams and prepare meals in fifteen categories, from American to Asian to classical French, often from "mystery baskets" of ingredients that the chef must use to prepare a menu quickly...
...Read, eat, and enjoy...
...Latte, so named because he orders a latte after dinner on their first date (as all foodies know, Italians would never order milk after a meal), is gradually educated in the ways of fine dining...
...Cooking for Mr...
...Christmas is a time for indulgence, and all too frequently overindulgence...
...Pepin's memoir, The Apprentice: My Life in the Kitchen (Houghton Mifflin, $26,318 pp...
...These are books about lives filled with food, and equally important, the deep connections between food, life, and love...
...Latte is subtitled "A Food Lover's Courtship, with Recipes" (W...
...This year, instead of eating too much, try reading about earing...
...Jacques Pepin is one of America's first celebrity chefs, cooking on television with Julia Child, explaining dishes step by step with accompanying pictures in Gourmet, and writing countless cookbooks...
...He describes his homesickness the first night and then his first day as a cowherd, tending twelve cows with a stick and a dog...
...They compose a life, from chocolate dump-it cake to chocolate toasts with fleur de sel...
...W. Norton, $23.95, 288 pp...
...Along the way, he cooks for her and takes her home to his family, where his mother, Elizabeth, serves time-tested dishes that have become her staples...
...Amanda lacks such a repertoire, a reflection of "commitment issues...
...Second is Napa Valley's French Laundry, under the direction of Thomas Keller thought by many to be the finest restaurant and chef in the country...
...Latte, her sobriquet for her suitor who became her fiance...
...Unlike Symon, who does "the kind of food you can do at home," Keller produces dishes that require the skills and the soul of a truly great chef...
...First is Michael Symon, "a big, rumbling, hilarious fullback of a chef" making his mark at a Cleveland restaurant called Lola...
...They come from her mother, her grandmother, the friends with whom she cooks Sunday dinners, even her favorite restaurants...
...For Keller, "to burn a crouton was a waste of life...
...opens with his summer on a French farm as a six-year-old boy during World War II a sojourn arranged by his mother to ensure that he would be well fed with milk, cheese, and garden-grown vegetables during a time of rationing...
...Latte are married, and this book is precisely her set of much-loved recipes for all of us to share...
...Sitting down at Christmas dinner is not just to eat, but to take time with family members, to savor tastes and memories...
...For any reader who grew up in the sixties, Pepin's account summons memories of countless road trips punctuated by hamburgers and ice cream at those turquoise and orange oases...
...Back at home, Christmas traditions are typically a compound of family and food: Christmas cookies, a special fruitcake made from a recipe handed down through generations, or, in my family, oyster stew and mushroom pie...
...Consider Amanda Hesser's account of her courtship with Mr...
...The result is a chef who spends hours on the basics, with perfectionist insistence on packing fish in ice in the position that it swims in so as not to stress the flesh, peeling fava beans before they're cooked, insisting on blanching them in an "enormous pot of ocean water at a wicked boil" with a "teensy amount of green veg...
Vol. 130 • December 2003 • No. 21
