PRUNING MY LIBRARY

Spines of the cast-offs hidden to protect the guilty

PRUNING MY LIBRARY

Living in a city-sized apartment keeps a book hoarder mindful of how many inches remain on the shelf for new spines. If things get too crowded, it’s the weak links that are cast off to Goodwill. But quel horreur! A cookbook editor shedding her cookbooks? Brace yourselves, folks: it’s true. While the Internet abounds with Cook’s Illustrated-tested staples and reviewers each adding their two cents, I still usually start with a book. I might build on it with other sources, but I like to learn new things from recipes that were lovingly developed, read by dozens of eagle eyes, and bound in a complete package. What qualities should a book have to serve in my kitchen for the long haul? Here are a few, plus some of the books that kept their spots in my culinary laboratory.

1. The appropriate, relevant basics. An Italian book with nary a recipe for fresh pasta, homemade ricotta, or panna cotta? Gone. A bread book filled with breads that aren’t suitable for toasting and slathering with jam? It’s not useful. If the book doesn’t offer a foothold, it is better replaced with something that does.

2. A trustworthy voice with something to say. For me, this excludes those books from the bargain shelf that boast 1,001 salads and Better Living with Beets: I want an author whose expertise and careful work is evident from page 1. Books tossed together with odd stock photography and no soul just collect dust. If they don’t inspire, move them out.

3. Trends that show their age. To a certain extent, buying in a trend is unavoidable. But there’s a reason why thrift stores of the last two decades have been brimming with unused food mills and dehydrators—and their accompanying cookbooks. If you don’t see Fat-Free Cooking with Sweet ‘n Low fitting into your meals and your interests, pass it up.

Now for the good stuff: my most useful books of late. Some of them are well known (and best-selling), and others just fit the way I live. (This list changes often!)

Zuni Café Cookbook: the over-explanation can be fiddly at times, but it’s a carefully put-together resource for all kinds of good food. Start with the homemade Caesar salad and move onto the marvelous entrées.

What’s Cooking in Cortez: replace this with your own local Junior League cookbook or family recipe collection, but I can’t be without my family recipes for blackened mullet and coconut cake.

Scoop: the best and only ice cream book you need in your repertoire. Period.

Nigella Lawson’s Feast: I love all of Nigella’s books for her effusive approach to good food, but notable here is a super-basic chocolate cake equally good made with Guinness, red wine, or a floral tea, an incredible chocolate gingerbread, and a chocolate-orange cake: all worth making.

Vefa’s Kitchen: Vefa is the Julia Child of Greece, with decades of food TV under her apron strings. The photography is charmingly old-fashioned, but the fish, vegetable dishes, and comprehensive coverage can’t be beat. Try any eggplant dish here.

The Essential New York Times Cookbook: don’t miss a coriander coconut pound cake and excellent cocktails and other beverages in a time capsule retrofitted for daily use.

What books can’t you be without?

-Kristen