How To Cook Everything

 by Fred Thomas

This Month's Recipe: Stir-Fried Asparagus Three Ways

GRATUITOUS FAVORS HAVE BEEN BUGGING ME LATELY. My Cuban butcher removes as much fat as he can from his ground beef -- a notion of excellence, I'm sure, a favor to his customers. The result: a very boring hamburger, one that consistently turns out dry even when cooked to medium rare. He's trying too hard to please, and in his zeal to provide a favor, has done a serious disservice.

This same butcher places a piece of counter paper between each slice of Swiss for reasons about which I can only speculate: A little bit of luxury, perhaps? A statement that he cares? I suppose, but it takes forever to get a pound of sliced cheese, and the wait is damned annoying. Twenty-five-dollar paper-thin prosciutto requires the counter papers. This cheese is headed for two slices of rye -- not a gallery opening. These are favors I can do without.

Saveur magazine in November did me a favor and notified me, breathlessly, that my subscription would expire in April. I scribbled a note on their scare tactic, said to contact me before my sub was up, and I'd renew then. I received a terse note from John Voss, the title's circulation manager, which said -- duh! -- that you have to pay to keep your subscription, prompting this letter back:

Sir:

You missed my point entirely. I will try again.

Your trying to renew my Charter Subscription five full months before expiration is:

Crude;

Insulting;

Not in keeping with SAVEUR's classy image;

Some sort of scam giving the impression that you are cash-strapped (and therefore a bad renewal investment); and

Unnecessary for Charter Subscribers.

Because of Saveur's breathless "you must renew now" shouting tactics, I almost didn't renew. I renewed only because Dorothy Kalins is publishing a fine magazine.

If you persist in such disturbing renewal tactics, I will not renew next year and may or may not go the single-copy route. Count on it.

Truly,

Were it not for the greed factor, I'd assume that Saveur is doing me a favor, yet another favor I can do without.

Cookbook publishing, too, is offering favors with titles that appeal to the cook with more money than brains, published by greasy-fingered rut boars, not persons of civilized letters: George Foreman's Knock-Out-The-Fat Barbecue and Grilling Cookbook and Weber's Art of the Grill. Cookbooks for using the manufacturer's product would strike me as silly were it not so damnably brazenly greedy. The "art" of grilling? A good paella is art, a steak flipped twice over coals isn't. More book publishing anomalies: the trend that won't die, the "based-on-the-TV-series" title. Oh, please, don't get me started down this road.

Yet there are a few old-fashioned publishers that provide a good service book at a good price, with readers comfortable that these recipes did go through the test kitchen and revisions before being proffered to the home cook. Anything by John Wiley & Sons is a good cookbook investment. Two other titles that set the standard for excellence in cookbook publishing: How To Cook Everything by Mark Bittman, and The Best Recipe, by the editors of Cook's Illustrated. Here are two meaty books, each well fleshed out, each a heavyweight for the kitchen, with Bittman's book coming in at more than 900 pages. The Best Recipe weighs in at 540 pages, but it is published on oversized stock.

Cook's Illustrated is not a magazine as much as it's a laboratory journal about food. The title contains no advertising whatsoever, and, as a result, is always a skinny little book when it comes out. Subscriptions are steep at $24.95 for a year of six issues. Ah, but what good little nuggets Cook's provides. Cooking as an experiment! Lab coats instead of aprons! Esoteric measuring tools!

Consider the lowly hamburger, placed under the Cook's Illustrated microscope:

For those who buy a chuck roast for grinding, we found the average chuck roast to be about 80 percent lean. To check its leanness, we bought a chuck roast -- not too fatty, not too lean -- and ground it in the food processor. We took our ground chuck back to the grocery store for the butcher to check its fat content in the Univex Fat Analyzer, a machine the store uses to check each batch of beef it grinds. A plug of our ground beef scored an almost perfect 21 percent fat when tested in the fat analyzer.

Up to this point, all of our beef had been ground with approximately 20 percent fat. A quick test of the burgers with less and more fat helped us to decide that 20 percent fat, give or take a few percentage points, was good for burgers. Any higher fat percentage, and it's left in the pan; any lower, and you start compromising the beef's juicy, moist texture.

I must provide my butcher with a copy, and at $29.95 ($20.97 at our Bookstall), it might pay dividends in the hamburger aisle.

What I really like about the Cook's book are the narratives about the testing procedures, the pratfalls and solutions to the common problems. Roast leg of lamb becomes much more approachable after reading the lab notes. Homemade pizza becomes an option after a tour through the home-cook instructions. The downside, a naysayer might grumble, is that this is not a cookbook that finishes the dish -- indeed, after the master recipe and all of its science is presented, the saucing, largely, and side-dish recommendations are up to you. Still, there are 700 recipes thoroughly tested, thoroughly pondered and considered, and that in itself makes this a wondrous book, one that fits as nicely on the bedstand as it does in the kitchen.

For finishing off the master recipes, turn to Mark Bittman's How To Cook Everything. Bittman, whose Fish is in our desert-island must-have books in the Pumpernickel Canon, loves food, loves the history, loves writing about it. Like the Cook's Illustrated book, Bittman provides the basics and lore of the subject dish.

For example, years ago, I covered the "manners" summer camp at The Breakers, in West Palm Beach, for a city magazine. Maybe you read about it: Filthy rich yuppie couples sent little Muffy and Junior to two weeks of high-life at Palm, getting good doses of manners, how to order from a menu, and lectures on the importance of clean fingernails. The summer camp was taught by Emily Post's great granddaughter, Elizabeth. At cocktails, I asked her two burning questions: What in the world do you do with the lemon peel in your champagne cocktail? (You remove it with your fingers, silly; a fork will issue an off taste to the champagne.) And how does one correctly eat asparagus? (With the fingers, of course.)

Bittman:

Classically, asparagus is steamed, but it doesn't much matter how you cook the stalks, as long as you leave them just a little crisp -- not so crisp that they crunch when you bite them, but not so soggy that they begin to fall apart. Some people eat asparagus with a knife and fork, but using your fingers is considered polite, even among sticklers.

Simple asparagus, and Bittman to the rescue for finishing it off with: melted butter cooked to the browning point, freshly squeezed lemon juice or balsamic or sherry vinegar, extra-virgin olive oil, vinaigrette, lemon butter, Hollandaise, mayonnaise, sauteed mushrooms, a garnish of minced hard-boiled egg, bread crumbs, or roasted minced red pepper, fresh herbs (such as tarragon and chervil), and thinly sliced prosciutto. His master recipe for Stir-Fried Asparagus Three Ways is inspired, and is worth repeating here

His book, at $17.50 in our Bookstall (30 percent off the suggested publisher's price of $25), truly covers soup to nuts, and is a worthy addition to the cooking library. The favors Bittman provides are welcome and appreciated.

In case you haven't been paying attention, we remind you that selected books reviewed in The Scarlet Pumpernickel may be purchased at a discount on the Books For Cooks aisle at The Bookstall.

Fred Thomas has been a writer and editor for more than two decades, as a reporter for the St. Petersburg Times, as tabloid editor at The Tampa Tribune, as group editor for a chain of Florida magazines, and as founding editor of Southern Homes. Now at home on the beach in South Florida, he specializes in writing about food and architecture. He knows the secret of perfect French fries.