I'm getting rather fed up with cookbooks whose covers feature pictures of sylph-like authors whose physiques suggest holocaust survival rather than a healthy and oft-indulged appetite for good food. Aside from resenting the seemingly universal requirement to be beautiful before one's ideas can be deemed marketable and worthy, I don't tend to trust the cooking skills or experience of rail-thin chefs. Granted, a statistically small number of people have metabolisms that won't quit, and remain slim no matter what they shove down their cake holes. But well delineated bone structure says two things to me: youth, and limited food intake. Neither one qualifies you to offer cooking advice to strangers.
Fortunately, I could tell right from the get-go that José Andrés didn't fall into either of these categories. There he is on the front cover - double chin, wide girth and all. Even his fingers are fat. "Now
that's a chef," I thought. His cookbook,
Tapas: A Taste of Spain in America, delivers recipes for hearty, flavorful and yet mostly unfussy dishes.
I was immediately drawn to the sections on legumes and vegetables. There are a number of different preparations for white beans, and I tried most of them. I was a little unsure of what to expect from the recipe for Traditional Asturian bean stew. It called for cooking the beans with a whole onion and an unpeeled head of garlic. Aside from that the seasonings were pretty minimal and I worried that I would have to "jazz up" the resulting dish. But I was wrong, the beans were meltingly delicious; so much so that I couldn't have cared less about the sausages that were also cooked in the same pot. I just wanted the white beans, and lots of them. The spinach sauteed with apples and pine nuts was a snap to prepare and a big hit at the dinner table.
Some of the recipes for Spanish dishes are a little surprising. We think we know what gazpacho looks like, but Andrés presents a recipe for the cold soup that is so traditional it predates the introduction of the tomato to Spain from the new world. I could hardly resist the novelty of gazpacho prepared with blanched almonds, garlic and grapes. Maybe it's not in season in winter, but I was intrigued by the resulting milky white soup. It reminded me somewhat of Mexican horchata.
All of the recipes I tried preparing were fairly simple in their methodology, and I didn't find any recipes that called for slaving over a hot stove for hours on end. The long-cooked dishes required little supervision once started. Most of the vegetable dishes can either be prepped ahead of time, or they require very little effort to execute
á la minute. There were some appetizer-y dishes that seemed just a little too finicky for my taste. I'm not going to go to the trouble of "filleting" a tomato to extract its seed sack in order to plop it on top of skewered watermelon chunks. Nor am I inclined to peel cherry tomatoes still on the vine and then stuff them with herbed crab salad. Fortunately, these fussy recipes are a very small minority of those presented in
Tapas.
There is a lot of Mediterranean style comfort food in this cookbook: potatoes with spicy allioli, Castilian garlic soup, and flatbread recipes all fit an unpretentious approach to eating. But there are also recipes that are elegant enough to serve at a sit-down dinner for guests. Apple and Murcia cheese with walnuts makes a lovely and easy to prepare appetizer, and the Catalan-style chicken stew with eggplant and peppers is as delicious as it is visually striking. No doubt these dishes really could serve as tiny dishes at a chic wine bar, but whenever I prepared them, I wanted a full-sized portion.
Each recipe is written out on a single page, and I believe each one is accompanied by a color photograph showing the finished dish. The photography is truly lovely in most cases. There's enough novelty in these recipes to keep the interest of an experienced cook. And there's also enough simplicity in most of the recipes to encourage only moderately experienced cooks to try them. Many recipes offer brief tips for substitutions or ways to slightly alter the recipe, encouraging readers to branch out from the one given in the book. Seldom does a recipe call for any rare or exotic ingredient. For the most part, these are fairly healthy recipes too, with olive oil being used rather than butter or cream.
The organization of the cookbook is somewhat unorthodox, the recipes being grouped together by major ingredient (e.g. mushroom, citrus or shellfish) rather than by the course the dish would normally belong to were it not being served as a tapa. The layout and design of the cookbook is somewhat austere and arty. This is not a very text-heavy cookbook: the instructions suffice to prepare the dish and the reader is spared purple prose from a chef-poet manque. The photographs show manicured, carefully lit food on elegant dishes or occasionally in the pan. In this case I don't much care about the overall tone of the book, because the recipes really take center stage.
Just about anyone interested in cooking could find something of interest in
Tapas. There are quick and easy recipes, exotic combinations of familiar ingredients, hearty stews and light summer fare. The recipes aren't difficult enough to confound a novice, nor common enough to bore a professional. Those who like to read cookbooks just to drool over the pictures should be happy as well. All around, this is a crowd-pleaser for any crowd with an interest in Spanish cuisine.
Two restaurants I love that feature tapas:
• Á Côté in Oakland
• Málaga in Austin
I can also recommend these cookbooks:
• Indian Cooking - excellent cookbook by Jaffrey for beginner cooks, includes many meat dishes
• Madhur Jaffrey's World Vegetarian - for slightly more experienced cooks, essential for vegetarians
• Vegetarian Cooking for Everyone - Deborah Madison's compendium of vegetarian cookery, great desserts
• Cooking with Pomiane - a deliciously nostalgic review of culinary history, narrated by a great wit
• The Boulevard Cookbook - sumptuous recipes from San Francisco's favorite restaurant
• America's Test Kitchen Family Cookbook - trustworthy guide to the fundamentals of home cooking
• The New Best Recipe - 1000 canonical recipes, perfected
• The Bread Baker's Apprentice - superlative, expert instruction for mastering yeasted breads
• Baking With Julia - Julia Child's award-winning "bakebook", covers all type of baked goods
• Dim Sum - a thorough introduction to these tasty Chinese morsels
• Nigella Express - quick recipes for those who really like to cook
• The Good Egg - fresh & tasty recipes based on the incredible, edible egg
• The Wellness Encyclopedia - excellent guide to the nutritional facts on most anything you could put in your mouth
