Gifts for Cooks – ‘Best of the Best: The Best Recipes From the 25 Best Cookbooks of the Year’ From the Editors of Food & Wine

What can you give somebody who loves to cook but has a lot of cookbooks you don’t want to duplicate? Maybe Best of the Best: The Best Recipes From the 25 Best Cookbooks of the Year: Vol. 11 (Food & Wine Books, 287 pp., $29.95) www.foodandwine.com/books, edited by Dana Cowin and Kate Heddings.

Every year the editors of Food & Wine produce a coffee-table book of more than 100 recipes from the 25 cookbooks they regard as the year’s best. The 11th volume honors a couple of books by internationally known superstars: Alice Waters’s The Art of Simple Food, Jean-Georges Vongerichten’s Asian Flavors of Jean-Georges. But Best of the Best also has recipes from Sweet Myrtle & Bitter Honey, a Sardinian cookbook by the Texas restaurateur Efisio Farris, and Crescent City Cooking, the first cookbook by the New Orleans chef Susan Spicer. Then there’s Pure Dessert, by the California baker Alice Medrich, who favors “pure” desserts (without glazes, fillings or frostings) and whose treats sound like a license to indulge: “Her Dried Fruit & Nut Cake, for instance, loaded with dried pears and plums, dates and walnuts, is as delicious with a wedge of Camembert as a cup of tea.”

© 2008 Janice Harayda. All rights reserved.

Librarian-Approved Gift Books for a Cook, a Baker, and a Fashionista, Including a Gift Book That Dares to Answer the Question, ‘What Are Spanx?’

A Project Runway judge praises that “life-altering” product — Spanx pantyhose — in The One-Hundred

Oh, joy. Just back from the library with an armload of 2008 coffee-table books I’m going to check out as potential holiday gifts.

One of the challenges of running this site is that because I don’t take free books from publishers, I no longer routinely see all those fat coffee-table toppers that appear at this time of year, as I did at Glamour and the Plain Dealer. I can get almost everything else from the library and other sources. But the gift books are the killer. So many are too expensive for libraries – especially given their vulnerability to theft – and for me.

This week I was lucky. I went to the library soon after it had put out some of the coffee-table books the staff bought this year. Here are three that I’m reading with an eye to whether they might make good gifts. All were among the 2008 books bought by the staff at a suburban library that the American Library Association has named one of the country’s 10 best:

The Christmas Table: Recipes and Crafts to Create Your Own Holiday Tradition (Chronicle, 239 pp., $19.95, paperback) by Diane Morgan. Photographs by E. J. Armstrong. Take that “crafts” in the subtitle lightly. This book has only 13 pages of craft ideas, and one calls for safety goggles and an electric drill, needed to make lighted glass blocks. (The instructions include the slightly ominous note, “This will take a few minutes, so be patient.”) But The Christmas Table is attractive and, at less than $20, reasonably priced for a gift book. It has a suggested menu and recipes for “Christmukkah – the hybrid holiday meal,” which blends Christian and Jewish traditions in dishes such as “Fa-La-La-La Latkes.” www.dianemorgancooks.com

Professional Baking: Fifth Edition (Wiley, 770 pp., $65) by Wayne Gisslen. Photographs by J. Gerard Smith. Foreword by André J. Cointreau. This encyclopedic cookbook has more than 900 recipes for serious home bakers as well as professionals. Published in cooperation with the Le Cordon Bleu cooking schools, it gives U.S. and metric equivalents for ingredients and tells how to adapt them for large-quantity measurements. The book retains its focus on classic techniques. But the fifth edition has a new chapter on “baking for special diets, including low-fat, low-sugar, gluten-free, and dairy-free diets.” Bet that Ciabatta on page 147 and those cream cheese brownies on page 512 would taste better than your supermarket’s. www.wiley.com/WileyCDA/Section/id-311193.html

The One Hundred: A Guide to the Pieces Every Stylish Woman Must Own (Collins Living, 284 pp., $21.95) by Nina Garcia. Illustrations by Ruben Toledo. This book is a brand-name–strewn wallow in consumerism by a judge for Project Runway – you apparently “must own” diamond studs even if your ears aren’t pierced – raised to a higher power by the stylish illustrations on nearly every page. The title is somewhat misleading: The One Hundred is less about what all women need to own than about a hit parade of basics and why they endure: the pea coat, wrap dress, pearl necklace, striped sailor shirt, Wellington boot (“the Royal Family always wears the classic green version for mucking about in the country”). Among the newer items in the book: Spanx, “a life-altering, footless, control-top panty hose that should be warn whenever a woman wants to appear a size smaller.” Bet the teenage boys at the library will like the picture for that one as much as the one for the push-up bra. www.harpercollins.com/books/9780061664618/The_One_Hundred/index.aspx

Other holiday gift ideas will appear later this year. To avoid missing them, please bookmark this site or subscribe to the RSS feed.

© 2008 Janice Harayda. All rights reserved.
www.janiceharayda.com

Under the Neapolitan Sun — A Repressed British Soldier Has a Sensual Awakening in Anthony Capella’s World War II Novel, ‘The Wedding Officer’

When love seasons the pasta sauce

The Wedding Officer. By Anthony Capella. Bantam, 423 pp., $22.

By Janice Harayda

The Wedding Officer gives unexpected life to a theme that English novelists have developed so often it borders on a cliche — that of the repressed Brit who has a sensual awakening in Italy. This love story isn’t on par with E. M. Forster’s A Room With a View and Elizabeth von Arnim’s The Enchanted April. But it is popular fiction of a high order, or easy but intelligent reading that is far above novels such as Newt Gingrich’s Pearl Harbor.

Captain James Gould arrives in Naples in 1944 with the thankless assignment of discouraging marriages between British soldiers and their distracting Italian girlfriends. His emotions collide with his duties when Livia Pertini becomes the cook for the Allied officers and prepares sumptuous pasta dishes followed by deserts such as baked pears with honey and rosemary. As James’s passions awaken, Mount Vesuvius emits ominous plumes of smoke, the bloodbath at Anzio approaches, and Naples resembles an open-air brothel overrun by prostitutes who sleep with soldiers to pay for their syphilis treatments.

As he tells this briskly paced story, Anthony Capella deftly balances history, gastronomy and the dilemma of a young intelligence officer at odds with more than the Axis powers and the local gangsters. And that mix helps to make The Wedding Officer the rare popular love story that may appeal equally to men and women. Anybody who doubts it needs only to read the first line of this novel and see if she — or he — can resist reading more: “The day Livia Pertini fell in love for the first time was the day the beauty contest was won by her favorite cow, Pupetta.”

Best and worst lines: This post will be updated, possibly by the end of the day, with these lines and more information on Capella’s work. I’m still in computer purgatory.

Published: May 2007 www.theweddingofficer.com and www.bantamdell.com

Furthermore: For information on the movie versions of The Enchanted April and A Room With a View, go to the Internet Movie Database www.imdb.com and search for their titles. Von Arnim was born in Australia and moved to England at a young age.

(c) 2007 Janice Harayda. All rights reserved.

‘Japanese Women Don’t Get Old or Fat’ (Books I Didn’t Finish)

Maybe this is how the new Miss Universe stays thin?

Title: Japanese Women Don’t Get Old or Fat: Secrets of My Mother’s Tokyo Kitchen. By Naomi Moriyama and William Doyle. Delta, 274 pp., $12, paperback.

What it is: One woman’s theory of why Japanese women have the lowest obesity rate in the world (3 percent) and the highest life expectancy (85 years) even though the country has “millions of stressed-out, nonexercising people who are smoking and drinking their way to early graves.”

Where I stopped reading: At the beginning of Chapter 4, entitled “How to Start Your Tokyo Kitchen, or Yes, You Can Do This At Home!” (page 67).

Why I stopped: You’d need to have a more serious interest in Japanese cooking than I do to read more than I did. The first three chapters explain the Japanese philosophy of eating as seen by Tokyo-born Naomi Moriyama, who moved to the U.S. at the age of 27. And these sections are interesting and well-written, though rooted in the views of an earlier generation (that of the author’s mother). Many Americans may be surprised to learn that the Japanese love desserts, especially chocolate. “One elegant Tokyo department store now offers shoppers their own accounts in a Chocolate Bank – you buy an amount of gourmet chocolate, the store keeps it in its temperature-controlled chocolate vault, and you stop in to make a withdrawal any time you want.” But after the first three chapters, the book turns into a collection of recipes for what Moriyama calls “Japanese home cooking.” “This is not a diet book,” she says. “And it’s not a book about making sushi.”

Best line in what I read: The Japanese philosophy of eating includes the concept of hara hachi bunme – “eat until you are 80 percent full.”

Worst line in what I read: I stopped before the recipe-intensive section. But even the recipes in earlier chapters call for ingredients that might be hard to find outside big cities. Among them: dashi, kombu, mitsuba, shiso leaves and bonito flakes.

Editor: Beth Rashbaum

Published: November 2005 (Delacorte hardcover), January 2007 (Delta paperback). This site has video clips of Moriyama’s Today show appearance: www.japanesewomendontgetoldorfat.com

© 2007 Janice Harayda. All rights reserved.
www.janiceharayda.com

At least 50 percent of all reviews on One-Minute Book Reviews cover books by women. Except during holiday weeks, books by female authors typically appear on Mondays and Wednesdays and books by male authors on Tuesdays and Thursdays. Please consider linking to this site and telling others about it if you’re frustrated by how often Sunday book review sections consist mainly of reviews books by male authors, written by male critics. To my knowledge One-Minute Book Reviews is the only site that, while reviewing books by both sexes, has had from the start a publicly stated commitment to parity for female authors. Thank you for visiting this blog. — Jan