Bifrons

Bifrons refers to Janus — the double-headed Roman god of beginnings and duality after whom January is named.

There's no such author, of course. It was the nom de plume (= pseudonym) for a French art critic who also happened to be a terrific home cook. His name was Jean Bouret.

There's only one book Recettes secrètes de la cuisine française (horribly translated into English as: "Secret Recipes from the (sic) French Cuisine.")

Really, translators? "The (!!!) French Cuisine"?!? From?!? Not "Secret Recipes of French Cuisine"? How unidiomatic!

Every single recipe has a coup de main (= "sleight of hand" or "twist") in French. You will only be able to use this book if you're already familiar with the idiom and then you will be surprised in every single one. There are exactly 200. (They are also neatly numbered in that French style of precision. Please note that the recipes start at 001 and end at 200. Those three digits precisely rendered in gorgeous typography. This is exactly how the CC falls in love!)

They are not strictly speaking recipes. Most are, of course, but there are also general instructions and tricks and all kinds of ups and downs inside. It's quite idiosyncratic and the CC says that with the highest praise possible. (For example, there's a truly exceptional "dessert" omelette. Also, a killer recipe for fish in red wine. That kinda thing.)

The English translation has six of them missing which is exactly the kind of thing that would drive the CC crazy (because now the numbering is all off! Why for the love all that is good in this world? Why?!?)

Since the CC has a completist bent, here are the six missing recipes:

048 - Sanguinette de pigeon
099 - Le poulet au sang
122 - Filet de cheval en venaison
144 - Marmite corsoise
164 - Queues de sarrigues
188 - Les champignons

Most are being omitted to preserve the (supposedly) delicate American sensibilities of the time — chicken blood, horse-meat, pigeon, possum, mushrooms. The original is from 1965 and the translation from 1967.

Ironically, possum is traditionally American as you can clearly find in ol'-school Southern cookbooks.

The most galling one is the last which just translates as "mushrooms". It's rather critical of North American culture in that they don't appreciate mushrooms. Welp, boys and girls, fifty years later, it's a totally different ball game. Even the CC goes mushroom picking!

The French tome is a masterpiece of design. The typography is absolutely gorgeous — the CC happens to be a font geek. The American translation is a crappy paperback. However, from the point of view of translation, it's actually quite decent. It systematizes the French work from the stream-of-consciousness style into the traditional explanation-ingredients-recipe style of modern cookbooks.

The book truly deserves the misused moniker of one-of-a-kind. The CC has never seen anything like it.

If you read French, get the original (very hard to find!) Otherwise, the American translation (dirt cheap!) suffices.

However, it's without a doubt a masterpiece.

That 70's Show

The CC is absolutely obsessed with collecting recipe books that date back to the late-60's and early-to-mid 70's.

Why the 70's?

It's the first transformation of many of these societies into the modern consumer world and it set off a wave of rather "naïve" cookbook writers almost all women who were documenting the recipes of an earlier age.

The naïveté shouldn't be taken as a pejorative. It's actually a compliment. They were literally writing down what they knew without any filter. These are really amazing documents.

These cookbooks have been updated but they have never been bettered. They are actually the source of inspiration to most modern cookbook writers who all down to a fault refuse to acknowledge the immense amount of ideas that they have nakedly stolen from these earlier writers.

The CC is always collecting these things as he travels. (They tend to be rather cheap.)

There are a few commonalities which are just extraordinary.

One is that they all tend to be obsessed with a level of precision. It is very important to them that the reader make the dish perfectly. The instructions tend to be rather precise and detailed. (This, of course, just warms the cockles of the CC's cold analytical heart.)

The other is how they were marketed. Not through the traditional channels. Often via "nail salons" or "beauty parlors" which was the domain of women. It was word-of-mouth and viral marketing at its earliest and finest.

The third is the primitiveness of the publishing industry at the time. They are frequently published in indifferent editions. Pictures are rare. The print is not glossy. The binding is falling apart. Spelling mistakes abound. However, the passion just jumps off the page!

The fourth is a level of awareness of nutrition. It's not the modern gluten-free fat-free version but they are rather interested in the fact that in an era where budgets are tight that the food not only be delicious but also nutritious.

Last but not least is the obsession with the pineapple. No, the CC is not joking. Hawaii only became a US state on Aug 21st, 1959. There was a massive global marketing campaign to sell pineapple across the world. You can see the obsession everywhere from Life Magazine to newspapers and magazines in all the corners of the world. Think "Mad Men". These women were not exempt from the pull of the siren song. Rest assured that there will be a recipe or three for pineapple in these books!

The CC has had plenty of books go in and out of his kitchen but you will take these books out of his cold dead hands!

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Here's an extraordinarily incomplete list — roughly going westwards:

Middle-East

Arto der Haroutunian (Middle-East at large)

Afghanistan

Helen Saberi

India

Tarla Dalal (Gujarati vegetarian)
Ummi Abdulla (Kerala Muslim)
Joyce Fernandes (Goan)
Kamalabai Ogale (Maharashtrian)
S. Meenakshi Ammal (Tamil vegetarian)
Katy Dalal (Parsi)
Minakshie Das Gupta (Bengali)

Sri Lanka

Chandra Dissanayake

Taiwan

Fu Mei-Pei

Philippines

Enriqueta David-Perez

Caribbean

Babette de Rozières

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Line Drawings

The CC is a complete sucker for line drawings rather than photographs in cookbooks.

Years ago, the CC once met an illustrator who interestingly was employed in both the Paleontology and Egyptology (sic) departments. They actually fought over her to the point where they "agreed" to a 50-50 time-commitment split. (Needless to say, she was excellent at her job!)

When she talked about line drawings, the CC blurted out, "It's obvious, right? A photograph shows all details. With a line drawing, you can highlight or suppress details at will."

She started laughing and asked me how the CC figured it out. It was cookbooks naturally.

It's particularly useful in architectural stuff especially when the ancient monuments have deteriorated. You can do a theoretical reconstruction. While the CC is talking about black and white line drawings, he also understands that there is room for subtle polychrome work too.

Many of the greats — Julia Child's classic, for example, feature line drawings not photographs.

Years later, the CC read an interview with the formidable Anna Gosetti della Salda who pointed out that "Styles of photographs go in and out of fashion. Line drawings are classic and don't need to be updated."

There you have it.

Anna Gosetti della Salda

Anna Gosetti della Salda (1918-2011) was an extraordinary woman.

She published the ultimate book of regional Italian recipes, Le Ricette Regionali Italiane, that is the mainstay of Italian cooks everywhere. Even Michelin-starred chefs in Italy go into rhapsody when talking about this book.

First published in 1967, it's never been out of print (current edition: 17th, 2001.) It was printed out of her own publishing house of whose catalog it's the sole item. She has never authorized a translation.

She made a "small concession" in 2002 allowing a pronunciation guide in Japanese to be added as an insert because "if they were going to go to all that trouble to learn Italian, she would help."

It's 1206 pages long nearly 5 lbs featuring 2174 recipes — 13 are "base recipes" (e.g. besciamella = bechamél.)

She made four arduous trips up and down the "Italian boot" in the days when such trips were absurdly difficult. She did it as a single woman (never married) and she was adamant about having her own way in everything from the fonts to the paper to the illustrations.

It's a product of a singular mind which admits no compromises.

The regions of Italy are organized in the order that a theoretical motorist could actually traverse them. They form a Hamiltonian Path which warms the cockles of the CC's mathematical heart. (The two island regions of Sicily and Sardinia come last.)

There is no table of contents — in her own words, "Why have it when the indices are perfect?"

Indeed the indices are perfect. All 116 pages of them. Each recipe is numbered. There are two indices organized by "region" and "analytics" (theme/topic). There's a meta-index of one page that tells you where to go find the indexes. The end of each of the regional indices has a excellent curated list of the "wine types" of that region. The cross-indexing admits no mistakes.

The paper is deliberately yellow (to indicate "old school" yellowing) and the illustrations are black and white line drawings. (Her initial career was in advertising. She opened her own agency. The book was published when she was nearly 50!)

Each recipe not only has exact details (tested, of course) but also any regional and family variants.

Even though the CC speaks no Italian, he can handle recipes in the language — limited vocabulary and content;  context makes things "obvious". The illustrations help. You are left in no doubt whatsoever about what the recipe entails.

The CC's favorite part is an excerpt from an interview she gave when she was nearly 90, "I recently read the book one more time, very carefully, just to find out what new criticisms I might have. I'm my most severe critic, yet I can't help admitting I did such a good job. I looked deeply into every recipe and technique; there's no room for superficiality in my work. If I were to start again I would do just as I have."

The book is just a staggering masterpiece.

The Rules of Buying Cookbooks

Over the years the CC has amassed a pretty large trove of cookbooks. Even more importantly, he has disposed of a vast quantity. Much money, time and energy has been expended over the problem so before you fork over your hard-earned money, read through the following:

1. Never buy a cookbook for the pictures. In fact, never look at the pictures because most of the "styled" pictures are not even food. They are make-believe just like magazine covers.
2. Never buy a cookbook that is too broad (Great Recipes of the World, Fish Cooking, Splendid Soups) or too narrow (Grill Cooking, Oysters, Biryani).
3. Never buy a cookbook on vacation. The fantasy clouds your judgment. You'll never cook from it ever again.
4. Most cookbook authors just like novelists only have one book in them^†.
5. Don't give up your classic cookbooks when the author recycles them for an "anthology". This means they have run out of ideas.
6. Rarely should you buy "celebrity chef" cookbooks. Remember, you pay for their talent at their restaurant not for a shittier home-made version thereof.
7. Books that teach technical skills are worth their weight in gold. (The exceptions to the "celebrity chef" rule are ones that are technically engaged.)
8. Always gauge how long an author has engaged with a culture before buying a book. The longer they have spent time, the more authentic the cooking is likely to be. The CC has made this mistake in three entirely separate languages. It's universal. The categories below are the only ones that should be purchased — they are in no specific order.
1. A cookbook from someone within the culture.
2. A cookbook from a first-generation immigrant of that culture.
3. A cookbook from someone who has spent their life understanding that culture^‡.
9. Conversely, if an author seems to flit about cultures, all the books are crap.
10. Shamelessly sell, donate or recycle. Cookbooks are worse than cars. They depreciate to zero the moment you buy them (with some rare exceptions.) So dispose them off if they no longer serve a purpose.

Happy Holidays!

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† Frequently, the first one is a masterpiece. In fact, the greater it is, the more skeptical you should be about the second. ("They poured out all their energy on the first one. There's nothing left.")

‡ The people living within a culture and first-generation immigrants are not necessarily the best judges of their own culture. In fact, their logic tends to be faulty or filled with superstitions and half-truths. It frequently takes an outsider to write cogently and analytically about something.

The Polyglotism of a Chef

If you truly want to be a great chef, you are going to have to be really good at picking up languages and cookbooks in those languages.

This is both insanely difficult and yet not as hard as you think.

Arabic and Japanese are fairly difficult languages particularly for people trained in the Indo-European tradition. (The same goes in reverse. No chauvinism is either intended or even entertained.) And learning a language is hard no matter what since it takes time and energy both of which are in finite supply.

There's a silver lining though. Cooking is a fairly narrow and technical subject and it's easy to master narrow and technical matter in almost any language given a little aptitude, a ton of work, and the usual panoply of modern-day tools.

The payoff is stupendous beyond belief.

Let's first talk about the two adjectives stated above — narrow and technical.

Cooking is narrow because we do not need to understand the full massive vocabulary of a language that pertains to all the various kinds of situations we could ever possibly encounter in our lives. We only need to know the names of food items and instruments (nouns), how much of the food (cardinal or weight measurements), what things to do to the food (verbs) and how long to do it to them (time measurements).

This is a very narrow amount of vocabulary.

You are not being asked to master linguistic flourishes, idiomatic phrases, or cultural complexity just a very straightforward act of doing things to other things in so much size for so much length of time with prescribed patterns that are insanely repetitive. (Any good cook with a solid knowledge of the grammar of a culture is surely bored silly with reading a recipe book. You read the ingredients not the recipe! The CC can scan almost any recipe is less than ten seconds unless it is suitably complex which happens increasingly less often as time goes by).

Technical refers to the fact that the basics of cooking are (mostly) the same in any language. Just learn the verbs and a few oddball quirks of verbs — do they take direct objects or not, some dative and genitive cases, the conditional constructions ("if, when") — and you're pretty much there.

There are not a lot of verbs because there is not a whole lot you can do. About 30 verbs gets you 90% of the way there and surely you can manage to memorize all the forms in any language which should be around 125-ish (if that). Also, you are not being asked to conjugate the verbs in all their complexity just read them. The CC is pretty sure that he would be hard-pressed to conjugate "bake" in multiple languages but he damn sure can read the recipe which, as sure as sunshine, calls for some "baking". (Comprehension is not the same thing as fluency.)

Technical also refers to the fact that a recipe written in Japanese follows the absolute same rock-solid pattern as one written in Italian. The structure of the format is perfectly predictable. It follows a very strict pattern of logic — ingredients followed by process (with the rare exception of notes for complicated stuff or variants to be made.) In addition, the process always consists of verbs in the imperative mood. ("Do X. Take Y. Mix P with Q. Bake for N minutes.").

There is very little linguistic legerdemain. ("If only X had procured P from Q, and had Y not intervened then Z might have been able to bring A to B's office for a tête-à-tête").

Nope, never happens in a cookbook. Not in the recipe section anyway. That's strictly for the gossip column or the pseudo-literary bullshit that accompanies a cookbook.

Which brings us to the payoff.

The payoff is that you can read cookbooks that are vastly more complex than those that show up in translation in English, or that are historical in nature of which there will never be an English translation. The best cookbooks have always been written for natives and while it is increasingly true that these "best" cookbooks nearly always have an English translation, this is by no means a law of nature. It's a commercial decision and these things have a tendency to drift towards the capriciousness of both editors and the market.

The Internet additionally opens you up to recipes written in all the languages in the world. There are blogs on just about any culture but you will need to be able to read it at least roughly. (The automated translators are a little "iffy" even at this point.)

All of this depends naturally on your level of commitment to the culinary arts and to languages as a whole and there may be a natural tendency to think, "Why do it? The CC is there to translate." to which the CC only can say, "You have no idea of how little makes its way to the blog."

So push your culinary linguistic boundaries outwards and watch your culinary skills strengthen!

The Dark Side of Pastoral

The genre of food writing both memoir and cookbook are the last gasp of the Pastoral.

The pastoral is the genre of art, literature or music which depicts rural life as lived in harmony with nature preferably according to the seasons. It's heyday was in the Romantic era late into the Industrial Revolution. The revolution had created a massive upheaval and migration from rural to urban centers. It also created massive wealth through increased productivity.

It was possible then for an urban aesthete to romanticize the myth of the unsoiled countryside clashing violently with the notably apparent grime of urbanity and thus mythologize the past.

If you find yourself thinking that this resembles a massive number of books in recent time about the "joys" of farm life, you would be entirely correct.

There is a book published recently by a woman who married a Japanese farmer, and the book is spectacular, of course, but the CC was a little puzzled that she could afford a modern house with fancy equipment in rural Japan. A teeny-tiny little dig beneath the surface, you find out that she made her money running an English school.

The book is selling a fantasy.

The blunt truth is that there is very little money to be made in farming. The reason is simple. It requires minimal skill. Any farmer in rural Africa or Asia can do the job so there's a ton of supply and only a fixed demand which goes up only slowly as populations rise.

There is an exception naturally. As any good economist would tell you that it consists of having a high demand and only limited supply. In this context, it would mean selling a unique product that nobody else produces.

This explains the rush for obscure heirloom tomatoes, varieties of eggplants, herbs, etc. The CC should also mention the existence of Sembikiya in Japan where "perfect" fruit is sold akin to jewelry (with prices to match!) These are luxury items and can easily sustain a livelihood.

Of course, you could always be a "gentleman farmer" as can be seen in the books of Jane Austen but the wealth has always been obtained from somewhere else. The farm is a consumption item not one of production, and the consumption comes attached with the genuine pleasure in consuming a superior product.

So as Ricardo might have understood it, you might as well out-source the problem, and consume the finest produce, meat and seafood that other people can procure or produce better than you unless you happen to be skilled at its production which case the CC would appreciate an invitation!

Things that make you go hmmm ...

Have you ever read a recipe in a cookbook and said to yourself, "There's no fuckin' way that can work!"?

Happens to the CC all the time. He then ends up yelling at the book which classifies him as one of the crazies but that's him, isn't it?

It comes with experience to all cooks even if you are not familiar with the cuisine in question. It's frequently just a matter of timings which have clearly not been tested and/or are more than a touch speculative. The amount of the sizes could also be all bollocksed to high heaven (tablespoons instead of teaspoons is all too common), or the proportions could be upsized and upchuck-worthy. (4 cups of water in 1 cup of flour will not yield a dough — it will yield a liquid mess!)

Here's a classic blooper from Lathika George's "The Kerala Kitchen".

(In the parlance of our time, this bitch be smokin' some serious crack!)

It's a classic egg curry found all over India. You hard-boil some eggs and separately make a curry. At the end, you cut the eggs length-wise and mix with the curry, re-heat and serve. Hardly complicated.

The trick that makes this specific recipe work is the same trick that makes classic French Onion Soup work. It requires a mass of onions to be browned and then a whole ton of spices and tomatoes are added to it. This turns into a dry curry.

The recipe in the book calls for the onions to be fried for 2-3 minutes and after that, the tomatoes to be cooked for two minutes.

In your fuckin' dreams, lady!

Even twenty minutes is too little for this to work. The last time the CC made a French Onion Soup, it took more than an hour for the onions to do their magic.

This is the principle of IST (Indian Stretchable Time) applied to cooking where five minutes really means fifty. (A lot of cultures have this principle encoded as a joke. There is even the concept of NST used by the "suitable in-crowd" and the CC will not translate that particular one.)

Now admittedly, this stuff is cooked at medium-high heat instead of the relatively gentle burble of the onions for the soup and the soup calls for a vastly larger number of onions but still. There is absolutely no fuckin' way in hell a mass of onions plus tomatoes is going to give up all that moisture in a total of five minutes. Incidentally, that's what frying really is — a precise way to remove moisture.

A significant fraction of this can squarely be blamed not on the author but on the editors. You needn't look towards the travesty of Rachael Ray and Sandra Lee. They are just the logical culmination of something that has been going on since Edouard de Pomiane in La Cuisine en dix minutes, ou l'Adaptation au rythme moderne.

We like speed. We like convenience. Cooking can be a chore even for the most committed amongst us. We are, alas, all too human.

Except that Pomiane was a genius. He clearly states what can and can't be hurried up and his entirely elegant solution for "hurrying up" is that if a recipe can't be hurried up, you shouldn't make it or serve it to your guests on a weeknight. Genius!

Pomiane's book is hands-down a work of a master and someone deeply steeped in the art of cooking. You will learn better from him how to make a classic sauce hollandaise than from all the textbooks and French chef's of the world. He has idiot-proofed something that is considered a "junior chef's challenge". (Science is why his technique works and since he was a physician and microbiologist, chances are that he understood in detail what he was doing.)

Editors, listen up! There is no shame in saying that something takes thirty minutes instead of three. There's no fuckin' shame in explaining in simple terms the science behind a recipe. People are smarter than you think and those that are likely to buy an obscure cookbook are much more likely to spend thirty minutes than three.

So don't try and push it. Not only do you get a travesty of a recipe but also you get an inedible fuckin' mess!

Isn't this entirely obvious?

So here's the classic egg curry from Kerala reworked for your benefit.

(And yes, the CC used a timer to time it as opposed to the gormless Ms. George who clearly did not test worth the proverbial Indian dam!)

Egg Curry

Ingredients

6 eggs (hard-boiled)

3-4 cups onions (very thinly sliced)
2 tomatoes (finely diced)

12 curry leaves
1 tbsp ginger (chopped into very thin slivers)
4 cloves garlic (sliced thin)
3-4 chillies slit lengthwise

1 tsp turmeric
1 tsp chilli powder (or to taste)
4 tbsp black pepper
salt

Recipe

First make the eggs. Cover them in cold water. Bring them to a boil and turn the heat to low. Cook for 8 minutes. Remove and immediately dunk into an ice-bath to cool off.

You will get perfectly hard-boiled eggs without the yolk turning chalky and none of the green sulfurous ring around them.

Peel them and set aside.

Combine the turmeric, salt, chilli powder and black pepper with a few tablespoons of water to make a thick paste. Don't add too much water.

Heat up some oil and when heated (7 mins) dump in the mass of onions. Let fry on a medium-high heat until they change color but are not blackened. Roughly 17 minutes.

Twenty-four minutes and counting.

Dump in the curry leaves, ginger, garlic slit chillies, and let fry for a bit (3 minutes.)

Add the tomatoes and spice paste. You may need to add some water to make sure it doesn't burn. Let cook at a low heat for about 8 minutes until the tomatoes turn saucy.

We're up to 35 minutes now, you clueless bitch!

Cut the eggs length-wise into halves and add them yolk-side up and let them gently heat up to the sauce. About 3 minutes. Serve.

So nearly 40 minutes not counting the time to make the hard-boiled eggs.

Arto der Haroutunian

A uniquely intense writer who was an architect, really wanted to be a musician but loved food so much that he became a cookbook writer.

He was Armenian but the family lived in Syria and Lebanon, and moved to post-war England with all its deprivations and seventh-rate produce.

It is easy enough to scoff about ingredients in these food-crazy times but dial back about half a century and life was not so easy. You could forget about zucchini and arugula, and fenugreek and fresh turmeric might as well have been fantasies for the average cook.

It was in this environment that the author wrote these books.

He was a polymath and the intensity leaps off every page. The cross-connections between cuisines are made entirely organically (and correctly!) and the sheer encyclopaedic knowledge shines through.

The cookbooks are primarily concerned with the Mediterranean but they leap as far ashore as Mongolia and India when the logical connection between dishes is needed.

The author died tragically young but he authored twelve cookbooks only four of which are easily available.

You can't go wrong with any of them, and these days you will no longer have to make any substitutions. (The author is careful in stating the original first, and the substitution second. It's only the substitutions that make the books dated.)

This is home cooking of the most elevated kind. There are no duds here!!!

And most of all, the author's intense engagement with every aspect of the cooking process both physical and intellectual shines through.

What more could one ask?

Detrending Trends

There seems to be a deplorable trend among cookbooks published by "author-scholars". They are increasingly being made in a coffee-table format.

Firstly, the CC doesn't possess the above vaunted table. Secondly, these things are heavy. Thirdly, if they weren't so excellent, one would just ignore them but they are indeed outstanding.

But you can't cook out of them. You can't even haul them around, and you certainly can freakin' forget about reading them in bed. (Yes, the CC does that.)

This is a trend, and a terrible one at that!

Bengali Cookbook Authenticity Gauge-Meter

There's a shockingly simple way to gauge it.

Just peruse through and check their ingredients for panch phoran (five spices.)

If it features radhuni, it is authentic. If it features mustard seeds, it is not.

For the record, panch phoran consists of radhuni, cumin, fenugreek, fennel and kalonji.

Life can be so simple sometimes.