Problems for home cooks using chef's recipes: Sourcing

A difficulty about cooking from books by restaurant chefs is that they simply cannot imagine how difficult it is for home cooks to find ingredients. Truffles and caviar are no problem – expensive, but easy to find. It's the humble ingredients that stump us. Tom Valenti promises us at the beginning of his book on Soups, Stews, and One‑Pot Meals:

This Book Does Not ….

… call for hard‑to‑find ingredients

Would that it were so.

On page 104 I look with longing at his recipe for chicken hearts and gizzards in Italian‑Style Tomato Sauce. Gizzards are OK with me, but I'm wild about poultry hearts. In a headnote, Valenti addresses sourcing:

If you think you can't find hearts and gizzards in your supermarket, guess again. You'll be surprised how close they are to the other chicken parts in your grocer's refrigerator.

In your grocer's refrigerator, maybe, Tom, but not mine. Chickens arrive at my grocer's already parted out and packaged. No hearts, no gizzards. No backs, no necks. No feet, no coxcombs. I can get backs and necks frozen from Whole Foods, but no hearts and gizzards. I can special order hearts and gizzards from a very classy butcher, a week in advance. Chicken feet and coxcombs may be available on the Web, but my spirit rebels at the thought of paying for expedited and refrigerated shipping of stuff I used to be given free for the cat.

Take another example. Jeremiah Tower tells us in his recipes for xxx (xxx, pp xxx) to get fresh shrimp rather than frozen. To the best of my knowledge, the only way for home cooks to get their hands on fresh shrimp is to ship out on a shrimp boat. All shrimp for home consumption are flash frozen at sea. You can't get fresh shrimp on the docks. By the time a shrimp boat appears on the horizon, all the little shrimps have gone to dry-ice heaven.

spring dug parsnips in Jaspar White 50 Chowders pp 178-179

As a worst case, take the ingredient list for Daniel Boulud's Endive Braised in Crème Fraîche (Braise: A Journey through International Cuisine, page 175):

unsalted butter

sugar

Belgian endive

lemon

dry white wine

coarse sea salt

black peppercorns

French ham

Gruyère cheese

crème fraîche

mace

In big cities on either coast, all these ingredients except perhaps the French ham are available in ordinary grocery stores. But in Arkansas? In Montana? In West Virginia? For the home cook in Truth or Consequences NM the ingredient list might just as well read

sugar

Period.