The Cook's Canon : 101 Classic Recipes Everyone Should Know

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Summary: A Tasty Smorgasbord of Culinary HIstory
Review: If you've ever wondered what meatloaf has in common with zabaglione, this is the book for you. Classics scholar, former restaurant critic, and food writer Raymond Sokolov has put these and 99 other recipes together in this entertaining and enlightening book whose prose is as worth savouring as its recipes. The author writes an erudite defense of his choices for the 101 recipes that are included in his compendium of classics, chosen to help heal what he calls a "decline of literacy" that "infects the kitchen". What he means is that the food is good, the stories interesting, and we ought to know them. There are few cookbooks in which you'll find references to Bill Murray's movie "Groundhog Day" , the purchase of Alaksa in 1867, and HBO's "The Sopranos" along side a quote from Brillat-Savarin's 1825 "La Physiologie de gout".
Whether or not I try all the recipes and I do plan to attempt it, it's been great fun to read and will enliven my culinary conversation for months to come.

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Summary: Provocative Culinary Scholarship and Opinion
Review: Raymond Sokolov has collected recipes and background stories on what he believes are the 101 most important dishes or cooking preparations a cook should know, from the point of view of Western, primarily French culinary tradition. This is a book I wish I had written myself, so I obviously believe this is a very important contribution to those of us who approach food as somewhere between an interest and an obsession. I also must say that Sokolov has done a pretty good job of it.

First, I believe the choice of the 101 to put into the canon is very well made. I cannot easily think of one preparation I would replace with an alternate choice. Even the more obscure choices appear to be right on. For example, I have a good familiarity with Fillipino cuisine and I concur that the one Fillipino dish included is the correct choice.

Second, I believe the recipes are also very well chosen. The recipe for 'bread' for example, is not the simple square loaf one can produce in a few hours in a home kitchen. Rather, it is a much more sophisticated generic artisinal recipe using a sponge developed overnight and baked with high humidity added to the oven to promote a hard crust. Very good choice. Also, most of the recipes are actually very simple and few require any unusual ingredients. With some exceptions I will mention below, I believe the care with selection of ingredients is well placed, for example, when Raymond gives us the warning about using very fresh eggs to make zabaglione.

Third, the headnotes to the dishes are delightful and make turn the book into exactly the kind of foodie book I like the best, a combination of historical and linguistic scholarship with references connecting us to the wider world of food writing to such luminaries as Julia Child and Elizabeth David. Herein lies my most significant disappointments with this book.

The headnotes are very entertaining, but they are sometimes so at the cost of very cheap shots at respected colleagues in the food writing field. There is one paragraph in the article on macaroni and cheese which is highly disrespectful to John Thorne and some of his statements. I believe Thorne is if not the best, then one of the best contemporary writers on cooking and the origins of cuisine. I do not always agree with Thorne, but I believe he deserves respect. Sokolov has gone for the mantle of scholarship and has let it slip by a crude ad hominum attack. He makes a similar personal but less acid observation on Elizabeth David. While I love the work, this has turned me sour on the author.

There are some lapses, also, in the description of ingredients. In the recipe for Daube de boeuf a la provencale, Sokolow calls for bacon, preferably pancetta. Later, in the list of ingredients for spaghetti, he correctly distinguishes bacon (smoked) from pancetta (unsmoked). In the first case, it would have been much better to specify pancetta and say one would substitute bacon if necessary. A small point, I guess, but it did tarnish my opinion of the author's expertise.

For the quality and usefulness of the material, the book is very reasonably priced, and I do not miss photographs common to almost every other culinary oeuvre printed today, as I'm sure it would have jacked up the price. What I do miss is a formal bibiographic reference to where the author selected his recipe. Many contain some vague reference to a specifec work, but rarely the full chapter and verse of his text. For quiche lorraine, the author cites both Julia Child and Craig Claiborne for two different opinions, but does not say exactly from which source his recipe comes, as if he had a direct connection to the Platonic idea for each of these recipes.

I really enjoy the kind of culinary writing which opens threads to other writers so the reader and connect the ideas from different sources. This is the heart of scholarship. Mr. Sololov has written an immensely useful book, with blemishes.