Book reviews 

Foodstyle magazine looks at a raft of Kiwi cookbooks that came out at the end of 2011. By Alan Titchall.


Italia: Simple Recipes from the Italian Cook School
Jo Seagar, Random House, October 2011, RRP:$65

Jo has made a thorough job of this book, which is as much travelogue as recipe book. It works well because Italian cuisine is about ‘attitude’ and ‘conviviality’.

Recipes are inspired by her Italian ‘mamma’ mentor, Fenisia Vittori (the two share an uncanny likeness) at Villa Campo Verde, a hospitality venue based in a renovated 17th century villa in the village of Eggi (about two hours north of Rome) in the land-locked province of Umbria. The venue accommodates up to 25 guests and has a programme that includes cooking lessons. Italia is based on the recipes and lessons Jo has learnt from her visits to the villa on working tours and holidays to Italy every year – and the book is also a plug for these tours.

“This book is my own interpretation of her family recipes and ideas. Italian food is too diverse a subject for any book to be a complete authority, but this is my take on the subject. I’ve written for people who have come home from a trip to Italy or even home from a great meal at an Italian restaurant, wishing they knew how to recreate that deliciousness in their own kitchen.”

The design of this hard-cover book is sort of pseudo-manuscript style with headlines in script and the paper given an aged, earthy look, which kind of works – but much more for the lovely landscape, social and people pics by Jae Frew than for the food pics, which don’t exactly bounce off the page, kiss both cheeks and shout buon gusto. The paper choice sucks the life out of otherwise great photographs, sacrificing ‘you eat with your eyes’ food photography for a fashionable ‘recycled’ look that, I predict, will age quickly. The book would have been an ideal publishing project using spot over-gloss (or spot-UV), where matt areas (such as food pics) are highlighted. 

Recipe-wise, this book sweats with research, detail and hard work, featuring around 100 recipes organised from a practical ingredient ‘Italian pantry’ chapter through to baking and drinks as the last two chapters. I particularly enjoyed the chapter on ‘bread’ which covers all the international Italian dough favourites. I, like many travellers to Italy, can’t fathom why a country that gave us pizza base, focaccia, breadsticks and ciabatta serves up some dreadfully hard, tasteless bread on its tables.

It is a ‘classic’ from the Jo Seagar production family that reaches beyond her ‘pearl set and dinner party’ following.

The Molten Cookbook
Michael Van de Elzen, Random House, October 2011, RRP:$65

As a student of Kiwi cuisine I am very aware that our restaurant industry, wine industry and horticulture owes so much to a changing cocktail of aspiring immigrants.

Auckland chef Michael Van de Elzen has Dutch connections through his mother, and so has Babiche Martens, the book’s photographer, who was born in Amsterdam and raised in Auckland. I don’t know if that has any reflection on this book, but I thought I would mention it. This country doesn’t pay enough interest or respect to the immigrants that have made it what is over the past 200 years and are continuing to make it even tastier.

As a hard-cover book this is an expensive publication like Italia. Its recipes are focused on the menu of a successful neighbourhood restaurant and associated tapas bar. Michael is of the same vintage of that early 1990s school of young chefs who are at the very front line of this nation’s cuisine, and who include Michael Meredith and Simon Wright and Matt Bouterey (featured in this edition).

The autobiographical details in the foreword tell us Michael learnt his craft from a career that started as a pot walloper in a west Auckland restaurant co-owned by John Banks, and worked his way through the Auckland kitchens of Kermadec and Antiks to be polished in London under chef John Torode (of English MasterChef).

“Coco Chanel advised taking off one thing before leaving the house, and I feel the same about removing distracting flavours and the superfluous additions to recipes,” he says.
Still, many of these recipes have a ‘high degree of difficulty’ as they say in recipe speak.

The contents is basic enough – cocktails, nibbles, starters, mains, desserts and essentials. Pip Duncan has ‘home-tested’ his recipes, which is important, as commercial kitchens work at higher heats and a degree of skill unmatched in the domestic kitchen.

Be warned, Michael is a fan of the ‘smear’ school when it comes to plating and saucing, which means thick, purée-like sauces.

Signature dishes include beef krokets, crinkle-cut chips with truffle aioli and crispy squid (pictured), and he certainly likes his truffle oil. Main recipes of note are the ham-wrapped monkfish, three-cheese terrine, goat’s yoghurt cheesecake, and Dutch doughnuts.
There’s an excellent ‘essential’ chapter on dressings, reductions, aioli, onion bread, pea pesto, and purées.

A highlight of this book is Babiche’s photography, which also features in Viva, Canvas covers and other weekly publication in Auckland. She has gone to a lot of trouble with lighting to produce some of the best food photography I’ve seen in recent years.
 
Julie Le Clerc’s Favourite Cakes
Penguin Group NZ, October 2011, RRP:$50

These recipes, says Julie, are her “tried and proven favourites” - many of them she has been baking since childhood, while others have been made “countless times” over her career.
And it is an extensive career - chef, caterer, food stylist (a profession that doesn’t get much mentioned these days by publishers) food and travel writer, café operator, TV presenter (Café Secrets) and, of course, cookbook author.

This is a very good looking (and I mean very good looking), good-sized, soft-covered book with big, clean, taste-bud teasing, photos (by Melanie Jenkins), and very clear layout with large, spacious typeface. In other words – a recipe book that you can sit on the kitchen bench and follow the recipes easily, or leave on the coffee table as ‘publishing art’. 

And you have to love the recipe compilation; divided into content sections like divine chocolates, syrup drenched, gluten-free delights (such as the pistachio cake pictured), and celebration cakes. There are a few ‘how to make..’ pages for each sections that reflect a well-thought-out baking cookbook. Our volunteer cook who tried a few recipes was very impressed with her results. 

The ‘tropical stained class cake’ on page 196 looks my sort of thing (aimed at Xmas but, as Julie says, “I make it all year round because I can’t resist the flavours’).

A classy book that we think is an essential update for every Kiwi cookbook library – or ‘highly recommended’ as reviewers like to say.


Taste Sweet Feast
Julie Biuso
New Holland, November 2011, RRP:$45

Another cracker baking recipe book that is a compilation of 70 ‘favourite’ recipes by Julie with many of them previously published in Taste magazine.

Some, like the ‘chocolate nut cake’, which apparently has been a YouTube culinary hit, are from her own library of ‘most requested’ recipes, plus “several my mother used to make”.
The photographs, which have a nice honesty about them (and on semi-gloss), are by Aaron McLean, who was a restaurant worker before taking up a career through the camera viewfinder. The food styling is not as elaborate as Julie Le Clerc’s book, but work as well – see the gingerbreads with baby pears recipe on page 67 – I would be a happy punter to be served that in a restaurant. Anyone who thinks food styling and food photography is easy should try it themselves.

A commendable feature of this book is Julie’s ‘cooking classes’ at the end of each chapter, with step-by-step photographs. This instructional feature elevates this book to the kitchen-skills category.

These comprehensive classes run four pages and reflect a lot of work. We looked very closely at the  ‘types of meringue’ class after our own ‘pavlova’ exercise in the spring 2011 issue and I have to say Julie has covered her bases very well.

A wonderful book in my opinion and, like Julie Le Clerc’s, has a fool-proof layout  – easy-to-read recipe on the left, full page photo on the right. Another highly recommended baking book. 

Now is the Season
Laura Faire
New Holland, October 2011, RRP: $45

A garden-to-table recipe book based on seasonal planting and cooking by Auckland food writer Laura Faire, who has authored two books for Nestlé and writes for several lifestyle publications; this is her first solo cookbook. 

It features gardening advice and simple recipes, with a useful list of what to plant in each season and times to plant and harvest. 

The photography is by experienced food photographer Kieran Scott who also did Al Brown’s Stoked.

Laura is riding on a fashion around the world, pushing for seasonal local produce. “Today I stand in a crowd of cooks, gardeners and food writers who have been banging the seasonal drum since the 1970s. I hope the small ting of my triangle reaches the ear and hearts of others on their own journey to authenticity and the love of food,” she writes in the intro and I don’t know where this places New Zealand’s global free trade ideology which has been pushed since the 1980s. 

Recipes include the likes of a crayfish risotto - good to see some expensive product in a recipe – just wish more eateries would do the same rather than bunch menu offerings into price bands. Outstanding for its simplicity is a lovely recipe on page 86 for pears, pecorino cheese and walnut salad. Not as glam as an Annabel book, but more practical. 

Stoked: Cooking with Fire
Al Brown
Random House, October 2011, RRP: $70.

Was the ‘Kiwi Gothic’ cover the author’s idea? I hear that between foraging, cooking wildlife, TV shows and eateries, Al Brown is into design.

And there’s a few unique design features to this impressive 340-page plus, hard-cover recipe book. The cover, when you take it off, folds out to reveal a black and white A3 poster photo of Matahiwi Marae by Kieran Scott, who also did the photography inside the book. Glued to the inside front cover is a packet with four postcards featuring pics from the book.

His first book Fish, a multi-award winner and good seller, used Al’s signature blokey outdoor attitude, yarns and personal essays brought to life with earthy photography and recipes. This time the cooking is ‘outside’, or ‘outdoors’ as the American say, and we can thank that nation for teaching us the social enjoyment and outdoor fun of their ‘barbecue’ culture.

“Stoked is all about cooking outdoors and it’s also heavily weighted towards meat cookery,” Al says in his intro. “It celebrates all forms of cooking outside, our love of building barbecues, quirky smokers, outdoor ethnic cooking , hunting and gathering, but especially lighting a fire and understanding the rewards of cooking over charcoal and hardwoods.”

Recipes have a five symbol ‘heat key’ indicating what style of cooking best suits it and are explained with plenty of notes and comments. A sweet section, written in earnest, includes ‘ginger crunch’ – every Kiwi boy’s childhood treat, including mine. My mother-in-law still makes me a tin-full for every birthday. Al’s right about getting the icing right.

The last chapter is a handy list of rubs, sauces, pesto, syrups, dough and an outdoor cooks check list which includes such as advice such as (while barbecuing), ‘Don’t turn the food all the time – it won’t cook in the air”. No mate, but it’s fun and gives you something to do while listening to all that blokey chit-chat.

The ‘hunting fishing foraging’ section photos will probably earn the book the ‘most unlikely Mother’s Day present’ award. Photos can be brutally realistic, and I am talking about the platted steak as much as the one of the abattoir chill room. Others are more ‘national geographic’ than backyard practical, such as the ‘pig in a pipe’ section.

In addition to recipes there’s a Whole Earth Catolog-like range of practical chapters and photography on the likes of building a wood-fired oven, using smokers, gathering and using seaweed, gathering mushrooms, and an early chapter on “To chew or not to chew” – a passionate essay on modern restaurant and commercial food practices compared to the ‘basics’ of old fashion methods that have stood the test of time. There’s even a chapter on cake tins (what?) which is an interesting essay on school lunches and home baking.

I am a huge fan of the Al Brown-designed The Depot in Auckland; it’s my sort of place – simple Kiwi produce, not a foreign culinary word in sight. I hope it sets a trend. I thought his TV series Get Fresh would have been better without its incongruous, adjective-excessive, voice-over telling us what Al was up to, in case it wasn’t obvious, and often sounding like a domestic tourism promo.

The new book? For someone who was raised in the country doing a lot of this stuff, the over-all theme is a bit ‘outdoor romantic’, in an inverted way, for my liking, but ‘sales’ will be the judge on how the rest of the Al Brown community following feel about that. This is certainly a book with attitude and a thoroughly interesting read.

Gorgeous Greens
Annie Bell
New Holland Publishers
October 2011, RRP $29.99

For the price, this is a cracker salad book. Annie Bell is a chef and now full-time food writer who is published in the UK by the likes of Vogue, the Independent and Country Living. Her other books include Soup Glorious Soup and Gorgeous Cakes.

A small but colourful book, it features 100 nicely illustrated recipes with vegetables centre stage - dips, gratins, big salads, and dressings illustrated by nice sharp photos on gloss paper.

We made the Harry’s Bar tuna dip (or paté) using chilli instead of cayenne pepper – very simple and  tasty. A custard-based pea, feta and basil tart with parmesan topping was also very tasty, as was the quinoa, feta and herb salad (pictured). 

Kiwi Classics
Our All-Time Family Favourites
Random House October 2011

Produced for Nestlé to mark the 125h anniversary of the Nestlé’s trademark; first registered in NZ in 1885. The company says it ran a competition for stories and favourite recipes using Nestlé products to get the compilation of recipes – and was “overwhelmed” with responses.

Wouldn’t be many Kiwis who can’t remember Nan’s or even Mum’s mayo using sweetened condensed milk, or dip using Maggi onion soup mix and reduced cream, or making treats such as coconut ice and chocolate crackles. I doubt these days, if you would find a pantry or even a restaurant/cafe storeroom without a packet or catering tin of Maggi chicken stock on hand.
The producers have managed to find a way of slipping their product into some good old Kiwi favourites without setting the recipe world on fire. Typically, a pumpkin & broccoli risotto using chicken stock and a can of Carnation Light & Creamy evaporated milk.

What is surprising perhaps, is the product range from Nestlé – from gravy mix to Milo and Smarties. The baking section is the best, from eggless coffee crisps (from the Depression era), to peanut brownies  and Afghans (using Nestlé Baking Cocoa) and coconut Macaroons using Highlander condensed milk – a childhood favourite. 

The five-minute microwave chocolate ‘mug’ cake is interesting, the Lamington train clever, and the bumble bees using a mix of dried fruits, nuts and condensed milk rolled in coconut will take you back to more innocent time when you learnt to cook from Mum and Nan, not the TV, and a chef was an unseen professional who stayed in their kitchen.

Another of those corporate, self-serving publications that will find a particular welcome as a gift, in a student flat, for amusing the kids on a wet day, and among campers and other folks stuck in small places without fancy products and where you attract puzzled looks if you ask for a kaffir leaf.

Summer 2011

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