December 2006: Two Must-Own Cookbooks (Great Gift Ideas!)

OK, kids, loosen your belt buckle and get a nice bottle of sherry out of the cupboard, throw a log on the fire, and settle into a comfy chair. Here are two of my favorite cookbooks to curl up with this winter—and to cook from.

These two books are old. Both are encyclopedic in scope and both have been on chefs' bookshelves for decades. Name a famous food personage and I can guarantee you they have been influenced by these weighty tomes. Looking for the perfect gift for your food obsessed family member or friend? Here you go.

First up is La Bonne Cuisine de Madame E. Saint-Ange: The Original Companion for French Home Cooking, by Evelyn Saint-Ange. LBC was first published in 1927 as a way to teach French housewives about classical cooking. LBC today is considered the bible of French culinary technique and can be found in every home in France. Madame Evelyn Saint-Ange was a housewife and a professional culinarian. Her prose is highly instructive, she goes into staggeringly deep detail about the arcane ways to fillet a fish, construct a pan sauce, or fold together a mousse.

The current reissue here in America is translated by Chez Panisse co-founder and chef Paul Aratow and contains 1,300 authentic French recipes for all the classics—dishes including coq au vin, boeuf a la mode, pate de campagne, and tarte Tatin. In fact real cookbook experts can pick out the recipes in the LBC that Julia Child, Madeleine Kamman, and others have restyled for themselves in their cookbooks. The LBC is a classic, without peer.

A much younger book (if you consider fifty years to be young) is Il Cucchiaio d’argento, The Silver Spoon. This is Italy’s culinary source book, finally available for the last year here in the States. The Silver Spoon is the most influential cookbook in Italy, an essential in every household, and was conceived and published by Domas, the design and architectural magazine created by Gio Ponti in the 1920s. He charged a herd of chefs to scour the Italian countryside to collect hundreds of traditional recipes from all the Italian regions.

The Silver Spoon is more than 1,000 pages long, has 200 new photos, has been updated and annotated for American cooks, and contains more than 2,000 recipes. The chapters are all inclusive, from antipasti to pasta, cheese dishes, desserts, seafood preparations, roasts, soups, and a killer pork shoulder with prunes. The sauce and soup recipes alone make this one of the most useful books you will ever buy. Naysayers have fretted that the translations are less than perfect, that the idiomatic issues detract from the overall benefits of the text. Bull.

This book is a must for any cooking enthusiast. Who cares if one recipe calls a pot a pan and vice versa? There is not a vague point or misnomer in the book that my two-year-old couldn’t figure out. The point is to have a reference book like this one on your shelf so that when you want to make mozzarella en carozza, stuffed zuchinni flowers, or a good Bolognese sauce, you can access a classic recipe devoid of the ‘extras’ that so many modern chefs bring to the reinterpretations of the standard Italian recipe songbook.

The bonus in the new edition is that it contains a section with original menus from the fifteen most famous Italian chefs of the last fifty years and original menus from Italian celebrity chefs working outside Italy. Sheer perfection.

Buy La Bonne Cuisine and The Silver Spoon at Barnes & Noble.