Classic cookbook review reprised: ‘Lidia's Mastering the Art of Italian Cuisine’

EDITOR’S NOTE: We reviewed this book shortly after it was published, on February 28, 2016. We have come back to it again and again since then; it has very much shaped up to be a classic. Here’s our 2016 review.

"Everything you need to know to be a great Italian cook." That's the subtitle of Lidia Bastianich's Lidia's Mastering the Art of Italian Cuisine. Hard to resist, right? 

Here's the short review: Bastianich's book is a new classic – something you'll want on your shelf as a reference, a manual and (perhaps to a lesser degree) a source of inspiration. Want to hear more? Read on.

The book is particularly strong on technique, and on offering thoughtful variations on basic recipes, like ragù alla Bolognese. And it's comprehensive: I found every classic recipe I sought, including saltimbocca. The recipes work, and they're generally delicious – as wonderful as they look in the photos.

You may know Lidia Bastianich from her PBS show, Lidia's Italy, or from one of her New York restaurants, Felidia, or Esca, Becco or Del Posto (which she co-owns with her son Joseph Bastianich and Mario Batali).  She's also one of the forces behind the Eataly empire.

If you're an American home cook who has been in the game a long while, Lidia's Mastering may remind you of another classic: Marcella Hazan's The Classic Italian Cookbook, or her the Essentials of Italian Cooking (The Classic Italian Cookbook and More Classic Italian Cookbook together in one volume). 

Both are encyclopedic works that take a no-nonsense approach. Both do without photography, relying instead on black-and-white drawings as illustration. I have to admit I'm a wee bit disappointed in the antipasti offerings in Lidia's Mastering, just as I've always been with Hazan's book. I do want to make Bastianich's chicken liver crostini sometime soon, though, and once summer rolls around, I'll definitely turn to her zucchini blossoms filled with fresh ricotta perfumed with lemon zest (doesn't that sound good?).

I've tested six recipes from the book, and loved five of them.

One of my favorites is rabbit in gremolata. A few weeks before I made it, I'd noticed some nice-looking frozen rabbits at Whole Foods, so I picked one up. I had no idea what I'd do with it, so I was happy to find, when this cookbook landed in my mailbox at work, not one but three recipes for rabbit. Besides the gremolata, there's also rabbit with sage and rabbit stew with mushrooms and pine nuts (both sound delicious, too). 

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It's easy to put together: Brown the rabbit, braise the legs in white wine and lemon juice, then add the rest of the rabbit plus some potatoes, cook some more, add parsley and serve. I had one small issue with the recipe: not quite enough liquid; I added half a cup of chicken broth about halfway through the cooking.

Friends came to dinner that night, and we all loved it. My friend Habib loved it so much he bought the book the very next day. 

Want to try it? Here's the recipe:

Dinner started with a salad, then we had Bastianich's spaghetti alla carbonara as a middle course. No foolin' around when I'm testing recipes: You must come hungry!

Spaghetti carbonara, the pasta coated in a silky sauce of eggs, bacon and cheese, is a great dish to make at home, because when made right, it's so wonderful, and it's so often botched in restaurants. (Dudes – there is no cream in carbonara!) You want the egg yolks to cook just slightly, and very evenly; you don't want to end up with spaghetti and scrambled eggs. Bastianich has a good way to achieve a wonderful, silky sauce: she has you whisk a little hot water into the egg yolks, which ensures even, slight cooking. Her technique is easy, and the recipe – which includes sliced scallions (unconventional!) – turned out perfect. It's killer comfort food.

I haven't yet tried any of Bastianich's appetizers, but there are quite a few wonderful-sounding salads, like one with dandelion greens, almond vinaigrette and ricotta salata (I'll definitely be making that soon – maybe even tonight!). Roasted beets with beet greens, apples and goat cheese sounds nice; I love the idea of using the beet greens. A shrimp and mixed bean salad sounds wonderful, and so does lobster salad with fresh tomatoes – something to make us wish for summer.

I didn't, alas, love the one I wound up making: radicchio salad with orange, radishes and oil-cured black olives. It struck me as so perfect for a wintry day. 

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It was OK, but the radicchio was unrelenting; there was just too much of it.

But that was the only dish I didn't flip for. I loved that Bastianich offers three versions of Bolognese sauce – including one with milk (I'll try that next!) – plus an Italian-American meat sauce. I went for one she called, simply, meat sauce Bolognese (sugo alla Bolognese). It calls for half pork and half beef and two to three hours of simmering time – "the longer you cook it," she writes, "the better it will become."

I cooked mine about two hours and twenty minutes, and it was superb. This, too, I served with spaghetti. Not the same night! This one I made for Wylie and his friend Michael, who's half-Italian. Michael gave it the stamp of approval.

Feeling like I had hit the basics pretty well, I thought I'd stop there and write the review.

But then I thought I should try cooking something that really required technique. I've made fresh pasta a jillion times; while it's labor-intensive, there's nothing tricky about it. But what about gnocchi? I attempted potato gnocchi once or twice a hundred years ago, but definitely didn't master it. If Bastianich could teach me to make great gnocchi, that would be something. 

My friend Shaun was coming over for dinner. She loves to cook, so I thought she'd enjoy helping me make them. We had a great time: The dough – basically boiled potatoes you put through a ricer then combine with eggs and flour – came together quickly and beautifully. We rolled it into half-inch ropes, cut them into half-inch pieces, rolled them over the tines of a fork (though we also tried using a little wooden gnocchi paddle I had in my drawer – we liked the fork better). They were beautiful, as you can see. They seemed to be perfect! How exciting! And then how disappointing when they nearly dissolved in the boiling water. I dropped them into butter-sage sauce. Great flavor, but they were soft as mush. 

 Hm. What was the problem?

Aha. It was sort of my fault, and sort of the book's fault. The recipe called for six large Idaho or russet potatoes, "about 2 1/4 pounds." I had six, but I hadn't weighed them – my bad. The proportion was way off: I had far too much potato for the amount of flour called for, three cups.

A few nights later, I rolled up my sleeves and attempted the gnocchi again: This time going by the potatoes' weight rather than the number of potatoes. Six large russets weighed a whopping five pounds! That was the problem. I used 2 1/4 pounds, as Bastianich called for – which was a little less than three large russets. (And these were the smallest ones I could find, not whoppers by any stretch!). Once again, the dough came together beautifully, but this time, they held together. 

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In fact, they were wonderful, light yet firm. Tossed in the butter and sage sauce with plenty of grated parm, oh, man — that's comfort food. It involved some work, for sure, but rolling out those puppies was soothing, even therapeutic. Definitely fun to make with a friend. Or a child learning to cook.

RECIPE: Rabbit in Gremolata

RECIPE: Spaghetti alla Carbonara

RECIPE: Meat Sauce Bolognese

RECIPE: Potato Gnocchi with Butter and Sage Sauce

Lidia's Mastering the Art of Italian Cuisine by Lidia Matticchio Bastianich and Tanya Bastianich Manuali, Knopf, $40.

Cookbooks We Love: José Andrés' 'Vegetables Unleashed' is a summer cooking bonanza, with great ideas for all seasons

NOTE: This is the first in a new and ongoing series of mini-reviews of cookbooks both new and old.

Vegetables Unleashed: A Cookbook, by José Andrés and Matt Goulding; photography by Peter Frank Edwards, Ecco, 2019, $39.99

Backgrounder: This is the third cookbook from superhero chef José Andrés, founder and chairman of World Central Kitchen and co-founder of ThinkFoodGroup, which owns and operates some of the best and most forward-looking restaurants in the United States. The book is not strictly vegan or vegetarian (recipes might include a garnish of bonito flakes or optional anchovies, for instance), but it is certainly vegetable-driven and completely vegetable-centric.

Sangria made with watermelon, peaches, cherries, blackberries, basil, thyme, rosé and brandy.

Why we love it: It’s filled with delicious, expansive ideas that are so inspired you can’t wait to try them, elucidated with fun, colorful photo-driven graphics. Often the concepts extend the reach of a familiar technique.

For instance, Andrés provides a framework for building a sangria from a variety of fruits, wines and spirits. Put one pound of chopped fruit in a pitcher with 2 to 4 tablespoons sugar, any herbs, spices or citrus you’d like and macerate that in the fridge for 1 to 4 hours. Pour in a bottle of wine plus a few ounces of an optional accent spirit. Pour in to large glasses filled with “massive amounts of ice” and garnish with citrus peel and/or herbs.

I riffed on it using the seasonal fruits at hand — watermelon, peaches, blackberries, cherries, rosé, basil, thyme and brandy — it was delicious. (And gorgeous.) As Andrés suggested, I served the fruit leftover on the bottom on ice as a boozy-fruity dessert.

You’ve gotta try this: A bunch of our favorite recipes and ideas in the book happen to feature summer produce that’s now in its peak.

Zap whole ears of corn, husks and all, in the microwave and the kernels come out perfectly sweet and tender, ready to be slathered with one of four topping/sprinkle combos. We went crazy for one inspired by elotes and another with miso-butter and a combo of Japanese seasonings.

Elote Loco (aka Crazy Corn): This is one of the most delicious things we made from José Andrés’ Vegetables Unleashed

Another microwave trick (and more slathering!) is used for a dish Andrés calls Dancing Eggplant. Japanese eggplants get zapped till tender, sliced open, slathered with a sweet, salty, umami-happy glaze inspired by the Japanese eggplant dish nasu dengaku, then topped with bonito flakes (katsuobushi). The bonito flakes, light as air and activited by the eggplants’ heat, dance around on top. Although we had to tweak the technique a bit, the dish is insanely rich, savory and delicious — something I’ll be excited to make often.

Dancing Eggplant from Vegetables Unleashed

It’s not all microwave tricks; another favorite is Grilled Zucchini with Lots of Herbs — which you don’t even really need a recipe for. Cut zucchini into 1/2-inch-thick planks, brush or toss with olive oil and salt, grilled on both sides till lightly charred, sprinkle liberally with za’atar (the Mediterranean herb mixture) and top with a big handful of herbs — dill, thyme, basil, mint, parsley, tarragon, and/or fennel fronds in any combination.

A few little complaints: Not everything works so beautifully. A recipe for zucchini fritters gave us a batter that was too runny for the fritters to hold together; smashed cucumbers were inedibly salty and oily. A recipe that promised perfect cacio e pepe in the microwave was a giant flop that left us with a pile of crunchy pasta and a blob of melted cheese.

Normally with so many busts (along with a few recipes that were just duds), I wouldn’t recommend buying a book. But honestly, there is so much of value in these pages — and the ideas and approaches are so inspiring — that I’m very happy to own it, and would probably buy it as a gift for certain vegetable-loving friends. There are still a bunch of recipes I want to try, such as a riff on steak tartare made from tomatoes (the dish was born at El Bullí) and a luscious-looking cauliflower with béchamel that will be delicious when the weather cools down.

RECIPE: Corn on the Cob with Elote Slather

RECIPE: Miso Butter Corn

RECIPE: Dancing Eggplant

RECIPE: Grilled Zucchini with Lots of Herbs

Sonoko Sakai's 'Japanese Home Cooking' is one of the best new cookbooks to come along in years

A few years back, when Cooks Without Borders was just a wee thing, I developed an obsession with okonomiyaki.

A thick, luscious savory Japanese pancake, okonomiyaki is filled with vegetables and seafood or meat, painted with an umami-rich okonomiyaki sauce or tonkatsu sauce, perhaps squiggled with mayonnaise and definitely topped with bonito flakes. The bonito flakes — katsuobushi in Japanese — are so thin and light that they catch air currents and wave around, looking like they’re alive.

There’s a bit of a cult in the U.S. around okonomiyaki. After I wrote a story about the crazy pancake for The Dallas Morning News (in 2016), I decided to find or develop a recipe for Cooks Without Borders.

Easier said than done! Too thick, too pasty, too gloppy, too weird — I couldn’t manage to get it right. Recipes were scarce, sketchy, flawed, and I was flailing developing my own. Unable to nail the batter, I resorted to buying something called “okonomiyaki flour” in a Japanese supermarket. The store-bought okonomiyaki sauce I was painting them with was cloyingly sweet. None of it was working.

After something like Okonomiyaki Number Twelve, Thierry begged for mercy. “Stop!” he cried. “Yamero, kudasai ! やめろください!”

Kidding. Thierry does not speak Japanese (nor do I).

The point is, there is now a book that has an okonomiyaki recipe that works: Sonoko Sakai’s delightful Japanese Home Cooking: Simple Meals, Authentic Flavors.

Thanks to Sonoko Sakai’s Japanese Home Cooking, we can now make okonomiyaki at home.

Whether or not a wild-looking savory pancake speaks to you at all, if you are looking to dive (or tip-toe) into Japanese cooking and seeking one great book to guide you, you can do no better than this delightful volume. Published last November, it is now a finalist for a prestigious 2020 IACP Cookbook Award in the International category.

To so many of us, Japanese cuisine means high-flying restaurant food — the kind of precise and specialized dishes chefs spend years (or even decades) learning to execute. I’ve never wanted to make nigiri sushi at home, for instance, as it depends on sourcing the best and most interesting fish, treating them properly, having the knife mastery to slice them to their best advantage— oh, and getting the rice right, which is an elaborate subject in itself. Yakitori — skewered chicken — involves grilling the poultry over blazing-hot binchotan (Japanese charcoal), something I wouldn’t be able to manage at home, even if I could find the binchotan. Because the places I’ve lived — Los Angeles, New York, the San Francisco Bay Area and Dallas — all have such great Japanese food, I’ve always preferred to leave it to the pros.

However, going back to my childhood in L.A., I always loved another kind of Japanese cooking, something much closer to home cooking. It’s the kind of humble, approachable fare that Sakai features in Japanese Home Cooking.

You might start with something quick and easy, like a cucumber sunomono. One taste of the Sanbaizu dressing — mirin, rice vinegar and soy sauce simmered very briefly then cooled — and I was back at Tempura Hiyama, the beloved neighborhood mom-and-pop of my childhood in the San Fernando Valley.

Sakai’s cucumber sunomono with wakame seaweed is garnished with grated ginger and toasted sesame seeds.

Sakai adds wakame (the same seaweed that’s common in miso soup), along with glass noodles and grated ginger, but you could go even simpler with just the cukes, dressing and sesame.

If you want to go into Japanese cooking in any kind of depth, you’ll want to put dashi in your bag of tricks; not surprisingly, Sakai leads off her book with a chapter about it. A quick stock made from nothing more than katsuobushi (those same shaved bonito flakes that wave around on top of the okonomiyaki), kombu (a dried seaweed) and water, it is the basis for much of Japanese cooking — just as veal stock is the foundation, or fond in French, of French cooking, but it’s even more ubiquitous in Japanese dishes. Dashi is easily achieved — just heat a piece of kombu in water, remove it, and drop in a bunch of bonito flakes, let them steep for two minutes then strain them out.

Kombu (upper left), katsuobushi (lower left) and water combine to make dashi (right).

Miso soup with shimeji mushrooms, tofu, lemon zest and scallions

I like Sakai’s approach to it. She’s quick to let readers know that rather than discarding the spent kombu and bonito flakes, you can (and should) use them to make a secondary dashi. While the first one is good enough to sip on its own (and has lots of culinary uses), the secondary dashi is good for miso soup and for seasoning a wide variety of dishes. Miso soup, by the way, is super easy to make once you have dashi: Just stir in some miso and add whatever else you like — tofu, mushrooms, wakame seaweed, etc.

Sakai provides recipes for several other dashis as well, including two vegan versions (one using only kombu, and the other kombu and shiitakes). That’s a splendid solution for vegans who are limited to what they can eat in a Japanese restaurant: It’s super easy to make vegan miso soup at home.

Also useful is a section about shio koji — which is the easiest way for home cooks to get in on the koji craze that has captivated chefs. To prepare it, get your hands on rice koji — rice that has been innoculated with koji (you’ll find a link to purchase it in the recipe for Koji-Marinated Salmon below). Massage that together with salt and hot water, let it ferment 5 days and you’ve got a useful ingredient that you can use to rub into napa cabbage leaves to make a quick pickle, or onto meat, chicken, salmon or other fish as an overnight (or up to three-day) marinade. As Jonathan Kauffman explains in the Epicurious story linked above, it concentrates the flavors in those proteins, adding umami depth.

Sakai’s recipe for Koji-Marinated Salmon, which she calls her “‘no-recipe’ salmon dish,” proves the point; the extremely simple prep is a great one to add to your repertoire. See some nice fillets in the supermarket? Slap that shio koji all over them and figure out when you’ll eat them later. After overnight koji marination, give the fillets a quick wipe, run them under the broiler and dinner’s ready in less than minutes. While the salmon’s broiling, you can grate some daikon and ginger, which make a really nice garnish.

Koji-Marinated Salmon with grated daikon and ginger

Looking for dishes to round out the Koji-Marinated Salmon? Sakai’s “Potato Salada” (as it is called in Japanese) is wonderful, with lots of cucumber along with carrot and green beans. (And we have other dishes in our new Japanese section — check out the Spinach with Sesame Dressing.)

To make the Potato Salada, Sakai has you whip up some Japanese mayo and nerigoma (Japanese tahini). Our adaptation includes those instructions, but also provides a hack using store-bought mayo and tahini. (We hope Ms. Sakai doesn’t object — it was pretty good!)

I have not yet had a chance to make any of the noodles in the book, but the chapter is enticing, with beautifully photographed recipes showing how to make handmade soba, udon and ramen. Sakai, who was born in New York and grew up in Japan, Mexico and California, lives in Southern California, where she gives cooking classes — including very popular classes on soba-making. So this is definitely something I’ll want to explore. There are also recipes for tofu and miso (which takes from six months to a year and a half to ferment!), and for mochi. A pandemic’s worth of projects!

Meanwhile, what she writes about rice is illuminating. I’d been pulling my hair out during the pandemic because I couldn’t find sushi rice, and Thierry, Wylie and I were all craving sushi.

Sakai explains that any short-grain rice can be used for sushi — including Arborio, which I had in my pantry. I’d had no idea! I cooked that Arborio according to her instructions for Basic White Rice, and turned it into sushi rice, using her seasoning formula — 2 batches of basic white rice (about 8 cups) seasoned with 1/3 cup unseasoned rice vinegar, 3 tablespoons sugar and a tablespoon of sea salt. Perfect sushi rice! With it I made some simple maki rolls. We couldn’t have enjoyed it more.

With hardly an exception, the recipes in Japanese Home Cooking work perfectly — which is incredibly rare for any cookbook these days. I test-drove a lot of them (fifteen, at last count), and still have many on my can’t-wait-to-try list (Kombu-Cured Thai Snapper Sashimi, as soon as I can get my hands on some great fish, and Soba Salad with Kabocha Squash and Toasted Petpitas in the fall!).

Honestly, this is one of the best new cookbooks to come along in years. The writing throughout is clear, charming, thoughtful and frequently illuminating, and Poon’s photos are gorgeous. Already it has given me the tools to feel like a pretty confident Japanese cook, which is quite a gift indeed.

Japanese Home Cooking: Simple Meals, Authentic Flavors by Sonoko Sakai. Photographs by Rick Poon. Roost Books, 300 pages, $40.

RECIPE: Okonomiyaki

RECIPE: Cucumber Sunomono

RECIPE: Dashi

RECIPE: Koji-Marinated Salmon

RECIPE: Potato Salada

Cookbook review: A delicious passage with Madhur Jaffrey to Vegetarian India

It has been quite a rich publishing season for cookbooks that appeal to border-busting food-lovers, and when a review copy of Madhur Jaffrey's Vegetarian India: A Journey Through the Best of Indian Home Cooking landed in my mailbox, I could hardly wait to get cooking.  Jaffrey has legions of fans and admirers – seven of her books have won James Beard Awards. As soon as I started cooking from this one, I remembered why I'm such a fan: Her recipes are simple, they're delicious and they work. There wasn't a single problem in the three recipes I tested. The only tweaks I've made is calling for a medium-sized roasting pan or baking dish for the cauliflower, which would have gotten lost in the larger pan the book called for, and adding a note to adjust the seasoning in the recipe for spinach with dill, which wanted a little more salt.

If you buy Vegetarian India, take the time to read Jaffrey's introduction, which takes you on a mini-tour of vegetarian India: She traveled all around the vast country collecting recipes – from Uttar Pradesh and Benghal to Bombay and Hyderabad and back – for vegetarian dishes "that are both delicious and easy to make." So many things to discover here: dishes, regions, styles, ingredients. I'm particularly curious about poha, flattened and dried rice that's pre-cooked. Jaffrey raves about it, providing a number of recipes for it, including one with ginger-flavored green beans that sounds wonderful.

I love the way she wraps things up: "In India's ancient Ayurvedic system of medicine," she writes, "it is believed that the simple acts of cutting and chopping and stirring are graces that can bring you peace and calm. That is what I wish for you."

For me, Jaffrey's wish came true: I spent a glorious afternoon toasting and grinding and grating spices, which filled my kitchen with wonderful exotic aromas – ginger and coriander and cumin. "Whatever you're doing," said my husband, led by his nose to the kitchen, "it's going to be delicious." Thanks to Jaffrey, he was right.

Flipping through the book, which includes more than 200 recipes and beautiful photos by Jonathan Gregson, it wasn't hard to find three dishes I wanted to jump into: Everything looked and sounded so delicious. I chose Roasted Cauliflower with Punjabi Seasonings (Oven Ki Gobi), Peas and Potatoes Cooked in a Bihari Style (Matar Ki Ghugni) and Spinach with Dill (Dakhini Saag). All were terrific, definitely going into my repertoire.

Next time I cook from it, I'll heed Jaffrey's advice about menu planning: "Indian meals are always put together so they are nutritionally balanced: a grain is always served with a vegetable and a dairy product, not only because they taste good together but also because together they are nutritionally complete." This time around I hadn't chosen anything involving dairy. The ingredients were easy to find in my regular supermarket, the instructions were clear and the amounts and times were spot-on.

Vegetarian India: A Journey Through the Best of Indian Home Cooking by Madhur Jaffrey, Alfred A. Knopf, 416 pages, $35.