By Leslie Brenner
A cookbook starring the delights of France’s “sunniest city” — Nice? Count me in!
That was my thought last summer when I learned that Rosa Jackson, who has run a well known cooking school in Nice for the last 20 years, had published a cookbook. On the cover: a pan bagnat, the juicy sandwich layered with tuna, tomato slices, crunchy vegetables, basil, egg and anchovy that’s a signature in the south of France. Jackson includes a recipe for the roll that gets soaked (pan bagnat means “bathed bread”), so I was even more excited.
On top of it, the inside cover features glowing blurbs from food-world luminaries including Alain Ducasse, David Lebovitz, Molly Stevens and Susan Hermann Loomis.
I dove right in and was instantly charmed — first by Jackson’s delightful introductory essay. Did you know that Niçoise cuisine developed in part by putting its own twists on dishes from Piedmont and Liguria? I didn’t. “Somehow, apart from salade Niçoise and ratatouille,” writes Jackson, “Niçoise cooking has remained a bit of a secret, even in France.” Jan Hendrik van der Westhuizen’s inviting photography helped make the case, irresistibly.
Next I was smitten by a summery Salade de Couscous, couscous salad. You find these all over France, and Jackson gives hers a ratatouille-inspired spin, adding small-diced zucchini, bell peppers and onions to the grains. Raisins, cinnamon and cumin pay respect to North Africa; fresh mint and parsley and lots of lemon add lift. This is so good! I’ve made it several times since. Next time I’ll double the recipe, as it’s terrific just-out of the fridge.
RECIPE: Salade de Couscous
Tian de Courgettes et de Chèvre (zucchini baked with eggs and goat cheese) is somewhere between a frittata and a crustless quiche. The zucchini blossoms topping it are optional.
Jackson’s Tian de Courgettes et de Chevre — zucchini baked with eggs and goat cheese — also got an encore. It’s especially nice when you can find zucchini blossoms, which I couldn’t the first time around.
RECIPE: Tian de Courgettes
A recipe for Choux Farcis (stuffed cabbage) in a brilliantly simple tomato sauce was wonderful, too, as was a thick, luscious Flan Pâtissier — vanilla custard tart.
RECIPE: Choux Farcis (Stuffed Cabbage)
RECIPE: Flan Pâtissier
After that, it’s complicated
There are so many good ideas in this book; for instance, I’ll be using that quick-to-make tomato sauce with all kinds of things. Jackson’s aesthetic is utterly appealing and she has a great palate.
But a number of recipes I tested were flops — or would have been, had I not made radical adjustments.
Carré d’Agneau, Croûte aux Herbes (rack of lamb with mustard-herb crust), which we saved from over-roasting
You don’t have to be an expert to know that racks of lamb you first sear and then roast for 35 to 40 minutes will be way past the desired medium-rare. And goodness, no — an internal temperature between 150 and 160 degrees F (60 and 70 C) — does not result in medium-rare meat! (See the chart in J. Kenji López-Alt’s The Food Lab, which says 150 is medium-well and 160 is well-done.) After spending something like $75 for those ingredients, I’m glad I didn’t follow that recipe to the letter.
However, the bright green, super herbal and garlicky Provençal Breadcrumbs Jackson concocted to coat the lamb were so good on their own that I tried them, as directed, on her Tomates Provençales. Jackson describes the finished tomatoes in her headnote as “meltingly soft but crunchy.” After 2 minutes searing on a frying pan and 20 minutes in the oven, mine were soft enough to eat without teeth. The recipe had called for baking them a whole hour.
Saddest of all, the thing I was most excited to make — that juicy sandwich known as Pan Bagnat, Nice’s iconic treat, the sandwich that graces the cover of the book — was an unmitigated flop. The rolls I was instructed to bake for them turned out beautiful-looking, but terribly, inedibly dry, and there wasn’t a tomato in the world whose slices were juicy enough to revive them. They sure looked pretty, but I had to reclaim their fillings and turn them into a salad.
How can a cookbook with so much that’s wonderful include such egregious mistakes? Has the world of cookbook publishing changed so much since I last published a title that no one tests recipes nor copy edits, nor holds authors accountable for the workability of their recipes anymore? Do editors and publishers stop to think about the small fortunes readers are forking over at the supermarket to excitedly recreate the dishes so lovingly styled and photographed in the books that, by the way, the reader also spent a pretty penny to procure? Or is the assumption that no one actually cooks these things?
If Niçoise were an anomaly, I’d probably have let it go, and simply skipped reviewing it. But these are the kinds of errors I’m finding in so many new cookbooks these days, especially cookbooks by well known authors published by top publishing houses.
In a world that’s small, where cookbook authors probably have no more than one or two degrees of separation from the writer publishing a review, it’s not easy to be so critical. My hope, though, is that Niçoise — which again, has so much going for it — sells well enough in its first run that it gets reprinted, that the first edition’s errors will be corrected in the second printing, and that it goes on to become a fabulously successful backlist title. (That’s the publishing term for a book that stays in print for years or even decades.)
I’ll keep my copy, mistakes and all, on a prominent shelf, there for when I want to be inspired and transported to the South of France.
Niçoise: Market-Inspired Cooking from France’s Sunniest City, by Rosa Jackson; photography by Jan Hendrik van der Westhuizen; W.W. Norton & Company, $39.00
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