The Year in Reading Food

If you admire the cooking of Joël Robuchon – perhaps the greatest meal of my life was at his Jamin in Paris in 1990 – it is no longer necessary to tease out what bits of Simply French is his and what come from his collaborator Patricia Wells, or to hack out a translation of the potato recipes in the copy of Le Meilleur et le plus simple de la Pomme de terre you bought on your last visit to Paris. Instead, you can pound through the 800+ pages of The Complete Robuchon, gasp at the amount of butter he sticks into his mashed potatoes, and pick up a fairly solid command of French home cooking – it is much more a French Joy of Cooking than a book for the coffee table.

Ferran Adrià’s gorgeous, massive A Day at el Bulli, which may actually be the most book $50 can buy, barely pretends to be a cookbook at all – there are lots of recipes but it is essentially a photodocument of the restaurant. Still, as somebody who sent away for Adrià’s 250 euro first cookbook the week it came out, only to find that I could have waited a few months and gotten an English translation I could actually read, I love this thing, and while several lifetimes will pass before I feel the need to prepare a fresh-licorice-infusion jelly lasagne, it’s nice to know that I could. In a year when the most rapturously received cookbooks include Thomas Keller’s Under Pressure, a guide to sous vide cooking, which became an instant bible to professional chefs but might as well be on subatomic physics for home chefs, and Grant Achatz’s emulsifier-intensive Alinea, A Day at el Bulli is almost accessible. This year’s hippest doorstop, The Big Fat Duck Cookbook from molecule-spinning British chef Heston Blumenthal, retails for $250, is printed with the care of an art book, and will live happily, unsullied and unsmeared, in its deluxe slipcase.

Anne Fishbein

In dogged pursuit of the perfect licorice infusion

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Which brings us, I guess, to Shirley Corriher’s Bakewise, the long-awaited sequel to her Cookwise, which may go on for pages about the chemistry of biscuits and pies but also tells you how to make good ones, tender and flaky if that’s your thing, so nimbly that you almost forget it’s science.

And if you are one of the rare people in California, who still believe in the institution of the dinner party, you could do worse than to pick up a copy of A Platter of Figs and Other Recipes by David Tanis, a guy who is head chef at Chez Panisse for the half of the year he’s not living in Paris, and whose delicious seasonal menus in this book — most but not all French, many of them designed to be prepared a day in advance — make a great dinner for 12 seem as easy as mac ’n’ cheese. If Richard Olney had been from 1970s California instead of 1930s Iowa, this is the cookbook he might have written.