The Cookshelf 2022 Gift Guide
It’s that time again. Time to look back on what we ate, drank, and cooked up in our kitchens. As I write this, cauliflower from the farmers market, tossed with melted butter and curry powder, is roasting in the oven. Once it turns golden brown, I’ll add crispy fried capers. Combining capers and curry isn’t an idea I would have entertained on my own; the recipe comes from Everyday Dinners by Jessica Merchant, a cookbook from the 2021 “holiday gift guide” that I cook from often, and still have tabs marking recipes I want to try.
For this year’s gift issue, I searched for books that held similar promise. Books loaded with more enticing recipes than I could possibly fit into my weekly or monthly meal plan. Looking at the stack of books before me, I realize how generous 2022 has been. Of course, my memory does what memories often do – recall the glorious moments that produced gems like the chewy Buckwheat, Sesame & Chocolate Cookies found in Benjamina Ebuehi’s A Good Day to Bake, cookies so good that I can’t move on. So good that I can’t turn to the next beautiful page.
Where to start? The holiday season is upon us, so how about with a drink? A carefully considered libation from Derek Brown’s Mindful Mixology: A Comprehensive Guide to No-and Low-Alcohol Cocktails. After twenty years in the bar business, Brown has shifted his focus to “mindful” drinking, which implies a certain kind of intentionality. Many of his recent creations are alcohol free, yet all are complex, satisfying, and worthy of your very best cocktail glass. Brown includes an excellent primer on booze-free spirits, wines, and beers flooding the marketplace, though many of the cocktails are made with inexpensive syrups and mixes created at home. For example, the refreshing GF Horse’s Neck, which was the most popular drink at our Easter brunch despite a stocked bar of the “real” stuff, is made with grapefruit, lemon juice, homemade ginger syrup, salt tincture, and soda water. There’s a chapter on low-alcohol cocktails as well. The Negroni Sbagliato is made with Campari, vermouth and prosecco, but Brown suggests zero-proof substitutions to make a booze-free version. Mindful Mixology isn’t the only book to focus on low alcohol drinks this year, but I won’t find my way out of the tantalizing offerings in this one anytime soon.
I’m always on the hunt for easy to prepare dishes with interesting flavors, and this year’s prize is The Modern Proper: Simple Dinners for Every Day by Holly Erickson and Natalie Mortimer. Smoky Chicken Skewers with Corn Salad, infused with bold smoked paprika flavor and a dipping sauce to match, received the highest possible rating by those at my dinner table. The Niçoise Salad is wonderful, too, but it’s the Honey Mustard Vinaigrette that stands out. There’s always a bottle in my refrigerator to drizzle over leftover salmon, chicken and vegetables. Did I mention there is an entire chapter devoted to meatballs?
If your interest in the British monarchy has been piqued, I suggest Tea at the Palace: A Cookbook, by former personal chef to the Royals, Carolyn Robb. It’s a great gift for anyone who likes afternoon tea breaks with sweet and savory treats and who has an interest in the history of numerous royal palaces dotting the United Kingdom’s countryside. For my holiday cookie challenge this year, I’ll attempt the Buckingham Palace-inspired Gingerbread Soldiers in Sentry Boxes. I’m also keen to try the Glazed Ginger Shortbread from Blenheim Palace, inspired by Winston Churchill’s cook.
Great British Baking Show alum Benjamina Ebuehi’s book, A Good Day to Bake: Simple Baking Recipes for Every Mood, relies on ingredients from the cupboard and kitchen garden. Besides the oh-so-successful buckwheat cookies, I highly recommend the Plum & Pistachio Frangipane Tart. Why? Because the crust recipe rectified my lifelong failure with pie dough! Everyday bakes, like Mint & Lemon Drizzle Cake, get a refreshing twist from fresh herbs or tea. There are savory bakes, too, like the picture-perfect Potato & Cauliflower Curry Pie with its impressive lattice top (yes, mine came out as pretty as the picture). It bears mentioning that Paul Hollywood, judge of the Great British Baking Show on which Ebuehi appeared, also has a new baking book out -- Bake: My Best Ever Recipes for the Classics. I’ll be mixing up a batch of Oatmeal Crackers to add to a cheese board for holiday entertaining and wrapping up the Chocolate Orange Banana Bread as one of my gifts from the kitchen this year.
While recipes provide us with a list of ingredients and set of instructions, they also tell stories. I have a stained recipe card sent to me by my grandmother that contains not only the instructions for Chicken Divan, but also an accounting of who had given her the recipe and for whom she had last prepared it (my parents, on a Sunday evening in October, 30 years ago). This year, there are several cookbooks that are heavy on story. One of them is Breadsong: How Baking Changed Our Lives, by father-daughter baking duo Kitty and Al Tait, which tells the journey of then fourteen-year-old Kitty’s mental health struggle and how baking became a refuge for both. The Taits now run a successful community-focused bakery in England. I can attest to the success of the lightly fermented Biga Bread, possibly the best sandwich bread I’ve ever made, and the slightly sweet cardamom and orange scented Fika Buns shaped like little knots.
In Running on Veggies: Plant-Powered Recipes for Fueling and Feeling Your Best, Lottie Bildirici recounts her early-in-life battle with cancer and an eating disorder, which inspired a career as a nutrition coach for professional athletes (Bildirici herself has completed the Ironman competition). These mostly vegetarian recipes appeal to the athlete in all of us, no matter how accomplished. Fresh ginger, kale, green apple, and coconut water whirred in the blender makes Green Ginger Smoothie Juice, a perfect post-workout refresher. Portuguese Spicy White Bean Stew is hardy fare for a post-afternoon winter walk. I love the clever technique of brining carrots in flavors reminiscent of lox (a concept I first came upon in Jeanine Donofrio’s Love & Lemons blog) for Roasted “Smoked” Carrot Toast with Sesame-Crusted Egg and Dill. Healthy dinners to ring in the new year will certainly include Veggie Shepherd’s Pie with Cauliflower Mash and Miso-Mashed Sweet Potatoes with Ginger Shiitakes.
This list is woefully inadequate given the scope and span of cookbooks out this year, but I must mention Stanley Tucci’s Taste: My Life Through Food – a memoir (published in late 2021) that includes delightful recipes related to each chapter’s story. Even if you didn’t grow up in a food-centric family like Tucci or haven’t traveled across the globe to explore the food of your ancestral past as he has, there’s much to take away from this book, including how food is interwoven into our family stories and how it connects us to the outside world. The meals I make for family and friends – some out of the very cookbooks mentioned in this column – just might become someone’s tradition, passed along to another cook on a recipe card, made and passed along again. Let’s celebrate the end of the year by pulling an old cookbook off the shelf or by taking a chance on a new one. In doing so, we might embark on a new culinary journey, or call forth memories of a culinary past.
Browseabout Books
133 Rehoboth Avenue, Rehoboth Beach, Delaware
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