Best - what is that?
"Best of the Best
The best recipes from the 25 best cookbooks of the year"
Now how can you resist an enticing title and sub-title like that? And indeed why should you. Even if you have your doubts there is surely bound to be something wonderful in there. And this is a publication from the venerable Food and Wine Magazine published by Time Inc, which is sort of publishing aristocracy isn't it?
This was one of my Christmas gifts and I was really interested to read it. And as I read I started to realise a few things - some about the book itself and some other things about the notion of 'best'.
'Best' is such a subjective word is it not?I suspect that even something as obvious as a running race where there might be a clear winner is not that clear cut. One of the other runners might have been feeling a bit off on that day. They might not have had a good start. Frankly I don't know a lot about athletics but I'm sure there are numerous reasons why you would win on one day and not on another. And is it fair to say that someone trained with today's highly scientific methods is better than someone from a bygone era who did not have the benefit of all of that?
I guess over time you can make some broad selections of the best this or the best that, but even those are subject to the taste of the times, let alone the person or persons who are making that judgement.. Just think of all the various artists, writers, musicians who have come in and out of fashion over the centuries. Even Shakespeare. Mozart and Leonardo had their downtimes.
So back to my lovely cookbook. It was, as I said, an interesting read.
Number one - it is an American publication and is therefore rather American focussed. Although there were a few books from elsewhere the majority were very definitely American.
Number two - it was published in 2013 so I'm guessing the books were from 2012. this is fair enough though - it would have been a hard enough task to work your way through all cookbooks for one year and one country. Imagine doing it for all time and all countries. And then they had to select the best recipe from each book. According to the editor, Dana Cowin they
"spend a full 12 months reading, testing and retesting stacks and stacks of books to find the 25 absolute best. The work can be tedious sometimes (we made countless kale salads this year) ..."
I had to smile about the kale and wondered whether they found the best recipe for a kale salad. So I checked and there is not a single recipe for kale salad in the book - so they obviously did not come up to scratch - or maybe nobody on the judging panel liked kale. For even with such a professional venture as this, in the end it comes down to the taste of a few people, and maybe, ultimately, one final arbiter. And really what are the criteria for inclusion in the book - you would have thought that they would want a balance between recipes for each stage of a meal, each kind of ingredient, different cuisines. And by and large there is - but I have to say that for me I perceived there to be a bias towards baking and pastry things - or maybe that is my own prejudice against our notions of American food - too much of the bad things.
I checked their choices against others made by other magazines and bloggers, and other countries too and found that there were a few titles common to most of them - so surely these must be the best? Or to be cynical, are these the ones that have been marketed to the world better? The list of books that appeared on more than two lists (I looked at about ten different lists) were the ones shown below.
And I almost forgot Jerusalem by Yotam Ottolenghi, which had one of the most intriguing recipes for me - Tomato and Almond Tarts, described by the editor thus: "In this clever recipe, Ottolenghi spreads a tasty mix of ground almonds, eggs, garlic and cheese over puff pastry before piling on juice tomatoes, creating a layer of rich nutty custard." You can find the recipe online at the Guardian website. Well I think it's the same recipe. His website says it's in his book Plenty More, so maybe he has fiddled with it a bit over time. Although now that I look at it this was one of their 'exclusive' recipes, so maybe it had not yet been published.
And speaking of Jerusalem, which would have to have been a bestseller I wondered what other books published in 2012 might have been missed out and found three that I would have thought would have been on the list - Nigel Slater's Ripe and also his Kitchen Diaries II and Claudia Roden's The Food of Spain. But these are British based, and also the date of publication might not have been quite right to qualify. Who knows. Maybe they just didn't like them.
There are a couple of idiosyncratic choices - one that is exclusively about macaroni cheese and another on sandwiches - both pretty American to my mind.
It's a very interesting read if only to see who is hot in America, some of whom I knew of and others who were totally new to me. And interesting also to see that some of these books come from people who started by blogging. Don't think I'm about to publish though.
Thank you Dionne.
