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What's Cooking for
Christmas?Local Chefs & Pretty
Cookbooks.tmp) By Tamar
Love As any true-at-heart San Franciscan
will tell you, we live in the best food city in the world (Paris and
New York be damned). This year, local chefs and restaurateurs prove
this claim with their holiday offerings, a collection of gorgeous
cookbooks perfect for gift-giving, all aimed at San Francisco's
culinary elite.
More than just a collection of "secret" recipes from Bay Area
restaurants, these books were created with an eye for design. Each
solid tome of culinary knowledge is served up in a handsome package,
making this season's cookbooks perfect gifts for your foodie
friends, many of whom might find it more realistic to enjoy their
fine dining at home during this economic downturn.
In The Zuni Café Cookbook: a Compendium of Recipes
& Cooking Lessons from San Francisco's Beloved
Restaurant, chef Judy Rodgers doesn't just divulge some of
the café's most enduring recipes (yes, the recipes for Roast Chicken
with Bread Salad and Rodger's Mignonette Sauce are included), but
explains in painstaking detail how to best prepare her culinary
delights. It is these carefully written instructions that makes the
book a truly special gift for the foodie in your life, who can learn
how to prepare the dishes he or she has surely enjoyed at Zuni, one
of San Francisco's sceniest (if not quite beloved) restaurants.
Other nice touches include comprehensive sections on
selecting menus, properly salting your food as you prepare it,
balancing flavors and creating the perfect stock. While the book
only contains a smattering of the glossy, full-page photos we've
come to demand of cookbooks, Rodger's descriptions, which preface
each recipe, bring the dishes vividly to life.
With almost 550 pages of luscious recipes printed on
exquisite paper stock with a clear (albeit old-fashioned) design,
this book is one of the better values this season, especially since
the dishes are simple enough that your gift recipient might actually
use the book for something other than a coffee-table ornamentation.
The same, alas, cannot be said of The Farallon
Cookbook: The Very Best of San Francisco Cuisine. While the
book is, without a doubt, one of the most beautiful books we've ever
seen, the recipes are so complex that they seem to call for a
Master's in the culinary arts. If you (or your gift recipient),
however, are the sort of person who enjoys making your own homemade
duck prosciutto, you will love this book.
Known equally for its outstanding cuisine and elegant
Captain-Nemo-meets-Nieman-Marcus decor, Farallon the restaurant is
well represented in The Farallon Cookbook. Executive Chef
Mark Franz has teamed up with Lisa Weiss, a professional chef,
recipe tester and food stylist, to reproduce, in loving detail, the
eclectic and dramatic seafood creations for which Farallon has
become famous since opening in 1997.
Printed on glossy paper stock, each recipe is accompanied by
a full-page photograph rendered in exquisite detail by photographer
Paul Moore. Even if you don't feel quite up to making Roasted Rack
of Wild Boar with Chestnut Spaetzle, Braised Cabbage and Sage Jus,
you'll damned well love salivating over its picture.
Mollie Katzen seems also to understand the value of design.
While her new cookbook, Mollie Katzen's Sunlight Café
is sadly bereft of glossy pictures, her breakfast book, a lovely
hardcover, is a simple, reader-friendly update of her classic
Moosewood cookbooks.
Vegetarians and meat-eaters alike will enjoy new recipes for
protein bars, wheat-free muffins and delectable fruit concoctions.
Katzen includes practical tips for the meatless kitchen, such as the
proper refrigeration of one's fresh babka dough and nine ways to
integrate vegetables into your morning meal.
Finally, lovers of food and history will appreciate
Tadich Grill: The Story of San Francisco's Oldest Restaurant
(With Recipes), in which John Briscoe, a Grill customer for
decades, lovingly unfolds the story of the 150-year-old Financial
District eatery.
Far more than just a cookbook, Briscoe's opus interweaves the
restaurant's history -- from its Gold Rush beginnings, through three
wars and into the modern era -- with San Francisco history, firmly
locating the Tadich Grill as an important monument not only to our
rich culinary history, but to the trends and circumstances that have
defined our city. Fans of the Grill will also delight in the 50+
pages of recipes, which, lamentably, do not include the restaurant's
famed tartar sauce.
If, like many of us this hard-candy Christmas, you can't
afford to take your family and friends to an expensive San Francisco
holiday dinner, treat them to a San Francisco cookbook instead.
They'll love you for it, and they might just treat you to a
home-cooked New Year's dinner.
The Farallon Cookbook: The
Very Best of San Francisco Cuisine
by Mark Franz, Lisa Weiss & Emily Luchette, with
forewords by Jeremiah Tower & Pat Kuleto
Chronicle Books;
ISBN: 0-8118-2919-7
256 pages (December 2002)
Hardcover:
$40
The Zuni Café Cookbook: A Compendium
of Recipes & Cooking Lessons from San Francisco's Beloved
Restaurant
by Judy
Rodgers
W. W. Norton & Company; ISBN: 0-393-02043-6
547
pages (October 2002)
Hardcover: $30
Mollie Katzen's Sunlight
Café
by Mollie
Katzen
Hyperion; ISBN: 0-7868-6269-6
302 pages (September
2002)
Hardcover: $29.95
Tadich Grill: The Story of San
Francisco's Oldest Restaurant
by John Briscoe, forward by Michael Buich
Ten Speed
Press; ISBN: 1-58008-425-7
200 pages (December
2002)
Hardcover: $27.95
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