THE SCARLET PUMPERNICKEL

Good Books For Cooks

by Fred Thomas

A Singularly Good Idea

This Month's Recipe: White Beans with Linguica Sausage

I'VE SAID THIS BEFORE: Saveur magazine is the best cooking magazine on the rack. Editor Dorothy Kalins (Goddess), formerly ran Metropolitan Home, which we remember rose from the ashes of Apartment Life. (My, we were silly back then.) She started Saveur three years ago. Today her magazine has a circulation of 1.6 million -- quite a coup in the declining consumer magazine field.

What Kalins did at Met Home was to offer at least one singularly good idea in every article. Readers picked up the great ideas, called them their own, and their friends wondered how the Johnsons ever figured out how to use parachute cloth as a ceiling treatment.

Kalins brought that same workmanlike ethic to Saveur. Her issue with the do-it-yourself cassoulet -- like a great tiramisu, this duck, bean and sausage godsend is one of those neurotic, three-day monk-in-an-apron affairs -- is an issue I will not loan to best friends, current girlfriends or rich Uncle Harry. I like this magazine a lot, and when Chronicle Press recently published the Saveur Cooks Authentic American, I was impressed right down to the ground.

Saveur Cooks borrows its editorial and spectacular photography from the pages of the magazine. Yet the coffee-table packaging is so well done -- 320 wide horizontal pages loaded with color -- that I completely forgive the editors for being capitalist running dogs.

From Appalachian fried catfish and home-canned pickles, to Mennonite Bierocks, to New England's white beans with linguica sausage, Saveur Cooks provides a rich culinary tour of the regions of America, entree by entree.

Throughout the text are small sidebars that add depth to the main articles and recipes. In the American cocktail section, featuring the Sazarac, mint julep, and white spider (a popular drink at the Algonquin Hotel), there is this about the sacred martini:

The martini is a very serious matter. Any bartender who can't make it right might as well retire -- and according to one master of the bartender's craft, the cocktail has even spawned a new breed of man: the Martinian. 'Tennessee Williams was a Martinian,' says Mauro Lotti, longtime head bartender at Le Grand Hotel in Rome.

'He would come to the bar with his funny little dog, who would jump up on the bar stool as soon as I finished making Tennessee's martini. The dog would delicately poke his nose into the glass, pull out the stick with the olive on it, and toss it to the floor, where he would eat it.

'Another Martinian was Richard Burton. Burton's martini was extremely large, and I served him many of them over the years. He came in late one night with Elizabeth Taylor. She was carrying an enormous bouquet of roses. He ordered his usual martini and she ordered champagne. Their conversation became so heated that she stood up and started hitting him with her roses. He clutched his martini and through it all, didn't spill a drop.'

Saveur Cooks is a book not only to cook out of, but to read with pleasure. This book has a prominent spot on my cookbook shelf.

January Update: Noteworthy Reissues

Two reissues, not brand new but definitely worth noting: From Our Kitchens, a small book that packs a wallop from the Culinary Institute of America, and an updated version of Stephen Schmidt's Master Recipes: A New Approach to the Fundamentals of Good Cooking.

The CIA book, under the editorial direction of Mary Dierdre Donovan, who edited the mammoth New Professional Chef, reviewed here glowingly in October 1998, is a nice companion, most useful when in need of a quick supper idea, or when a blah meal needs a lifeboat as well as a gravyboat. It is not a definitive work at all; indeed, this trifle of a book offers just 120 recipes -- but what recipes they are!

The very first recipe in the book sets the tone: Roasted Garlic And Mustard Vinaigrette is a crowd-pleaser when drizzled on a salad or used as a marinade for crudités, or even pork chops. Other recipes in the book are well considered and worth the read. Grilled Flank Steak With Pineapple And Roasted Shallots takes trash meat and dresses it up so nicely. My favorite: Grouper Poached In Louisiana Saffron Broth, in which fennel, leeks and pepper flakes play supporting roles. Twenty minutes from start to table.

In 1987 Stephen Schmidt published the first edition of Master Recipes, a thousand-page be-all and end-all book. Schmidt's take is that cooking can be more or less reduced to a master recipe. Think of veal scallops: Once the basic dish is mastered, then Oscar, Marsala, Lemon-Butter treatments are but tasty adornments.

In mid-1998, the tome was reissued with hundreds of recipes reread by Schmidt, some bowing to the fashion for fewer calories, others just wonderful updates. He doesn't fiddle with créme brûlée -- lest the ghost of Escoffier rise and break his fingers -- and continues to insist that Steak Tartare requires a raw egg yolk. Take that, you salmonella cowards!

His fried chicken has one element I've sought for years -- without knowing what it was I was looking for. I have spent 30 years trying to perfect Southern fried chicken and have found all the recipes lacking. All have flour, salt and pepper. A few rambunctious authors would have one soak the chicken in buttermilk; others recommend adding paprika or cumin to the flour mixture. And all insist on the cliché cast iron skillet. Ho hum. Most are passable, some downright horrible -- the aforementioned buttermilk soak comes to mind -- but nothing noteworthy. Schmidt offers a tip that has made the difference: After dredging the chicken in the flour mixture, let the pieces air on a rack for 20 to 30 minutes. The result is a chicken whose skin is thin, tight and crisp without the excess batter. For this tip alone, Schmidt deserves our lasting gratitude. Yet the tip alone doesn't produce perfect fried chicken. The quest continues. . . .

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 West Central Florida, he specializes in writing about food and architecture. He knows the secret of perfect French fries.