Menus in cookbooks
"Entertaining is designed to sweep you along dish by dish, menu by menu, to heights of culinary skill which you never before imagined possible. ... From now on, you will know how to plan a buffet party, a barbecue, a picnic, how to cook delicious Continental summer meals and how to combine hundreds of exciting dishes in everyday and party menus, that you , your family and your friends will long remember."
Robert Carrier - Introduction to Entertaining
Continuing with my ramblings about my latest cookbook acquisition I decided today to talk about the way it is arranged - in menus. From the cover it looks as if he is going to be talking about fancy food and formal dinners with polished silver and Waterford crystal. But no, there are sections on barbecues, picnics, children's parties and breakfast. And actually there are not a lot of really complicated recipes in there, so the cover is actually a little misleading.
What he is stressing really and trying to get you to do, is to eat in the company of friends and family because this is FUN. Robert Carrier is all about fun - rather like Jill Dupleix who I think became a friend. He certainly gives some of her recipes in some of his later books. And in spite of the cover he wants you to get away from the idea that entertaining is all about the flowers, and the silver and the cut crystal.
"Its aim is to broaden the scope of everyday entertaining beyond the traditional lunches or dinners we are so used to. There are so many other opportunities for welcoming friends and relations to our homes - breakfast parties, brunches, teas, wine tastings, barbecues, after theatre or cinema suppers, picnics, punch parties, cocktail parties, children's parties and all kinds of buffet meals."
So maybe a bad choice for a cover on the part of the publishers?
So given that the chief aim of the book seems to be to encourage you to have people round more often - and oh how we should - then I guess it's logical to organise the book into menus. The aim being not only to teach you how to cook a few delicious things but also to show what goes with what and what suits one occasion rather than another. To make it super easy for a novice.
It's not a really common way of arranging a cookbook, but neither is it uncommon - indeed even the common things like Coles Magazine will often include a menu for a particular kind of meal in its offerings. Indeed as I searched my bookshelves I found I had quite a few - rather more than I remember in fact. And each time, the intent and how it is done is perhaps slightly different. Here are a few examples from my shelves.
Keeping with Robert Carrier and the strict organisation of a book by menus I have a few - indeed several. I have already mentioned the Women's Weekly Christmas book and shown a picture of a table setting when I was talking about laying the table. There are actually relatively few pictures of the finished meal as a whole but each different kind of meal - and being Australia there are all sorts of things you can do at Christmas - every chapter/meal is organised the same, with the menu at the beginning decorated with some of the things you can make to decorate and enhance. This one is for a Bush Christmas. i was given this book as a present and I confess that at first my heart sank, I mean Christmas over and over, but no - it is actually a really lovely book with lots of good ideas for all sorts of things - not just food. If you are looking for foodie gifts for example, they're in here. And beautifully presented. Interestingly, although it is the Women's Weekly which really is aimed at Mrs. Average - some of the food is actually quite fancy - roast turkey with roast almond stuffing and spiced cherries, shogun cocktail with oysters, roasted fennel and rosemary beef with capsicum almond salsa - and so on. Very modern Australian I guess.
Beautifully presented too. And then there is the other book I talked about the other day, Guillaume Brahimi's massive coffee table book, full of beautiful people in beautiful locations and somewhat complicated food. All designed around a particular kind of menu though, but almost always cooking for a crowd. I'm not really quite sure what the intent was here, other than to show off his cooking. He says it features various notable Australians all devoted to their families, and that they devise a dream menu that he then cooks. And it's mostly very fancy food such as this Pigeon with onion purée, witlof and foie gras. Not your everyday meal. Though to be fair there are some simpler things in there - glazed ham, roast vegetables - even though these have expensive truffles added. It's very definitely a coffee table book but that's OK. Especially when it's one of Monika's op shop finds, as this was.
Stephanie Alexander, another chef type has arranged her various books in all sorts of different ways, but in A Shared Table she took the menu route. For the book she travelled the country exploring the regional produce that is increasingly available in this wide brown land and in each place she stopped at she compiled a menu and a meal from this produce. She states her intention thus:
"My hope is that some of them [young people] will be inspired by the stories and photographs in this book to move into the kitchen from time to time so that they can experience the heady pleasure of sharing a table with friends, confident in having chosen and prepared fine Australian ingredients with ease and simple good taste."
So the intent here is not so much for you to follow a particular menu, or even learn to cook, but to become aware of what wonderful (expensive) artisan produce is available and what you can do with it. I gather it was a TV series too.
Skipping through the decades I go back to one of my most heavily used cookbooks back in the day. And there are still a few things I cook from it. This is Beverley Sutherland Smith's A Taste in Time, whose subtitle is 60 minute menus. And that's why I used it a lot. It's dishes are quick - and also it must be said - delicious. She organises her menus into seasons and for each menu gives three dishes which she claims can be made in an hour for the whole lot. Probably not quite true, but as I said I used it a lot, although I never followed an actual menu.
This book arose apparently out of a series of classes she gave for busy people. And what is she trying to achieve? Well two slightly different things perhaps.
"You can change these menus around if you wish, after all the main purpose of a book on food is to provide stimulating ideas in the kitchen. They have, however been chosen with much thought, not only with regard to the preparation time but also for taste, texture and appearance"
Which sort of explains the menu arrangement and also is slightly disapproving of you if you want to change them, even if she is aiming at creativity in the kitchen.
And:
"So often people believe that beautiful food means endless preparation and cooking time when often the opposite is true ... I hope that this book gives busy people more opportunity to enjoy the company of their family and friends by spending less time in the kitchen while not lowering in any way the standards of fine food."
Alas this also could be for the wealthier amongst us as it is the more expensive cuts of meat that generally are suitable for fast cooking.
My last example of a book entirely arranged round menus is from Madhur Jaffrey and this too is a well used book, but again not for the menu ideas. But then strictly speaking these are not entire menus but a main dish with accompaniments. Desserts are in a separate section. The book is Madhur Jaffrey's Cookbook : Food for Family and Friends and it's not all Indian or even Asian food either. She doesn't really give much reason for why she decided to do it like this merely saying:
"I have decided to break the book up into menus so you know at a glance just what vegetable to cook with what meat. Of course you can move dishes around at will, if that is what you wish. "
So a bit less prescriptive, and maybe even a bit more helpful. Those other menus sometimes did not have accompaniments - just the main dish preceded by an entrée of some kind and followed by a dessert. And mostly we are only cooking one course.
This is one of the double page spreads that illustrate each menu. Each menu is given a brief introduction as to what occasion it best suits and what order to approach it in.
Then there are the others. Mostly these fall into the camp of people who have produced a fairly standard kind of cookbook, however luscious and tempting it might be, and then given examples of how you can combine some of these dishes into menus. Below are examples from Yotam Ottolenghi, Greg Malouf and Falafel for Breakfast.
Sometimes they are illustrated, sometimes not, and sometimes different menus might be illustrated elsewhere in the book. Delia has suggested menus in her Winter and Summer Collections, and Jill Dupleix also has a few actual party menus with recipes in her New Food book towards the end. Greg Malouf perhaps sums up this approach in his introduction to New Feast, for everyone:
"The contents lists all the recipes in one complete spread. We'd encourage you to use it as a reference when you're planning your meals. Cast your eyes over the sections and pick out dishes that you're drawn to. Use your instincts to pull together items that you think would work well together. There are no rights or wrongs but, to get the ball rolling, over the page are some suggestions to inspire you."
As you can see he is rather less prescriptive. Just trying to be helpful.
But let's finish, as we began this rather lengthy post, with Robert Carrier and posh. His gorgeous book Feasts of Provence, is full of recipes for dishes that we can all have a go at, but at the end of each chapter he features a meal from various Provence chefs of real note. There is no real explanation of why he does this and in the words that accompany the recipes and the pictures there is more information about the chef and the location perhaps than the food itself. This is one of the pictures from the Feast by Roger Vergé, perhaps the most famous of them all and his three star Michelin restaurant Le Moulin de Mougins. The menu:
Salade de noix de St. Jacques (Scallop salad with orange dressing), Malfatis au fromages de St Moret, sauce à la crème de basilic (Cheese-filled malfatis (a kind of dumpling) with basil cream sauce), Aumonières de volaille, Moulin de Mougins (Beggar's purses of stuffed chicken - very fancy stuffed chicken breasts), Les pêches et les poires au vin de poivre et de miel de lavande (Peaches and pears in wine flavoured with peppercorns and lavender honey). If you are feeling really adventurous one day it's all possible I guess.
As I said somewhere in here I have never cooked an actual suggested menu. I pick and choose from here and there when I'm entertaining - not even from the same cook. On a normal day, I and just about everyone else would not need a menu anyway as we are mostly just cooking one course, and increasingly that one course would be an all in one dish of pasta or rice or something similar. Menus are mostly for restaurants.
Is a beginner cook more likely to use one of these suggested menus do you think? Or will they be more put off. I guess it's a different way to write a cookbook though, and I guess, that in the light of the enormous competition in that space it might seem a good way to make money. A publisher's good idea. Or even the cook's good idea. I mean they're all in it to make money aren't they? I'm not sure that any of these books really explain what makes a good menu though. Surely a beginner needs to know things like soup followed, by a casserole followed by some kind of runny dessert is not necessarily good menu design. But then again, do we really care as long as each dish tastes good? Does it matter that it's not all perfectly balanced - sweet and sour, crunchy and creamy, hot and cold, cooked and raw ...?
Still I do like the emphasis that the menu thing gives to the notion of entertaining. Of sitting round a big table with family and friends having fun. So go Robert Carrier!
