Other Books: The Essential New York Times Cookbook

Okay, we need to talk about a different cookbook for a minute.

Last month saw the release of The Essential New York Times Cookbook: Classic Recipes for a New Century, and it’s a huge, fascinating monster of a thing, weighing in at almost five pounds and over 900 pages. Amanda Hesser and her team have put together the most comprehensive review of over a century of culinary culture.

It’s not an update of Craig Claiborne’s classic. It’s a cookbook where you can check for a new or an old method for roast chicken (there are three) and end up reading about Turducken. Hesser’s writing is so good that I even thought about making it. The chapters are organized chronologically, and it’s interesting to read the progress of, say, salads through ages. Some of the recipes are novelties, at least to me, but a lot are incredibly useful. After all, tons of them come from Bittman. Hesser jokes in the introduction, as she did in this must-read article for the Times magazine about compiling the book, that she thought of naming the book Forever Bittman: The Best Recipes from the Recipe Writer We Love. (Sidebar: there is a book of all of Bittman’s recipes from the Times up through 2007 or so, and it’s great to have around)

But this book is so much more than just Minimalist columns. As a huge fan of the dining section, the book is a must have. Hesser spent years culling recipes from the archive and testing each and every one of them; cooking notes are often included with helpful tips and explanation. Recipes are updated in many cases, which poses interesting questions of authenticity. But it also makes the book more usable. The knee-jerk reaction may be to say that for posterity’s sake, recipes should appear unaltered. Knowing they’ve been tested to work in a modern kitchen, however, makes the book far more usable. And if you’re looking for the genuine article, as it ran in 1872 or 1904 or 1957 or 2003, well, there’s always nytimes.com for that.

The recipes selected for inclusion may represent something of a revisionist history, but that too is a bit of a knee-jerk reaction. Hesser’s book shows America’s culinary history as always worldly, enlightened, and forward thinking, but was that really the case? I’ve been watching a lot of Julia Child reruns on the Cooking Channel lately, and they are thrilling and fascinating but for all the great breakthroughs Child made, the food in the episodes always looks kind of bad. Flipping through Hesser’s tome, you can’t help but think that these recipes were cherry picked not for their historic representational qualities, but for their appeal to today’s readers.

But isn’t that bound to be the case? This retrospective reflects its audience, which again, makes it all the more appealing and usable. All of the heavy hitters are included, from Craig Claiborne to Molly O’Neill to Hesser herself, among others–in the early days, there was no editorial department, just reader recipes submitted by the likes of Bob the Sea Captain and others. Seriously.

The Essential New York Times deftly walks the line between historical artifact and utilitarian cookbook. It’s both; it’s neither. The recipes range from essential techniques to fanciful projects, hidden gems to exalted classics. If you’re a food person, it should be on your shelf. It even bears a striking resemblance to its cousin How to Cook Everything, no?

The Essential New York Times Cookbook [amazon]
Recipe Redux: The Community Cookbook [nytimes sunday magazine]