The Art of Simple Food wrap-up

mb:

Wow.

m-c:

Second the motion.

What a month! I feel like I could go on cooking from Simple Food for the rest of my life and never exhaust its possibilities.

I kept forgetting to take pictures because cooking from the book was so simple and natural that by the time I thought, "Uh-oh, I'm supposed to be doing this for the website," everything was eaten. I should have taken a lot of photographs of empty plates licked clean.

mb:

Yeah. I have to admit that I did have a hard time with one aspect of this book ... finding things that I actually wanted to alteR. The recipes are (as is so cleverly noted in the title) simple. They're simple and stylish and incredibly delicious and I found myself not wanting to change anything from them. This was a toughie!

And I completely agree with you; I'd be more than happy to cook from this book for the rest of my life.

m-c:

I liked the way her recipes would set me off on a trail of exploration.

For instance, the shallot butter you made for salmon made me think of doing something similar but oil-based, and that sent me to topping a poached fish with Jesse Ziff Cool's parsley‑almond pesto (Simply Organic, Chronicle, 2008, page 61). That was pretty good too, although I don't think anything's ever going to top the shallot butter.

But the point I'm trying to make is that all of Alice's ideas seemed to fit. They seemed natural and comfortable. Like stuff a good grandmother would make, or treasured but oh-so-easy recipes from the kind of next-door neighbor who always has leftovers to share. Nothing stiff, nothing weird, nothing hard, just plain home cooking raised to the nth power.

mb:

Sure, if your next door neighbor who's doing all this home cooking is a famous chef. Like, oh say, Alice Waters.

But you are correct. The thing that makes this book so perfect is that the recipes are all so accessible, but everything is something that I'd be more than happy serving to my friends who are chefs. It's gourmet cooking for the layperson.

m-c:

Well, let's say something about Patricia Curtan. In the initial book report I wrote that I wished I knew the name of the text designer; somehow I had missed that Patricia Curtan did the design as well as the illustrations. The book is physically comfortable -- small enough and with type large enough to make for easy reading in bed at night, planning what to have the next day. I can't think when I've seen a more unassuming and yet excellent design.

mb:

I know that you and I tend to disagree on the layout of recipes. I want to start with an ingredient list and then have the recipe follow. This book doesn't do that, which I know you don't mind as much as I do. This book goes for the Joy of Cooking style and has the ingredients in the recipe as their steps come up, instead of in list form in the beginning.

And that's just a personal thing, not at all a complaint. It doesn't make the recipes unreadable or even harder. It's simply a preference on my part.

m-c:

I long for the day when you can look at a recipe online and say, ingredients at the top, please, and I can look at the same recipe and say, walk-through style, please. It doesn't seem all that hard, but as far as I know nobody has done it yet.

mb:

Oh, oh, oh ... and lest we forget. I think my favorite part of all of this is that Alice makes suggestions at the end of nearly every recipe for different variations for us to try. I think that's a mark of serious class on her part. She's padding out our repertoire by giving us ways to make a couple different dishes from the same basic beginning. I really, really liked that.

m-c:

The prose is like everything else about the book, so clean and so simple that you probably wouldn't realize how well it's written unless you've tried to write that well yourself. (Alice did get a BA from Berkeley in French cultural studies, after all.)

mb:

A BA in French cultural studies, huh? Well no wonder she's such a class act.

The prose is gorgeous. Like everything else in this book it's simple and yet beautiful. It's easy to read and calming and perfect.

And the index, Mamma?

m-c:

Ah yes, the index. The index is probably the best I've ever seen. There's one typo ("torte" where it should be "torta"). Other than that I didn't find any missing entries -- none. I bet you thought you'd never hear me say that.

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