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(More customer reviews)The San Francisco Examiner--
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Patricia Unterman
Worth taking the time
Wolfert's new book celebrates art of cooking.
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Patricia Unterman
Special To The Examiner
Published on Wednesday, October 29, 2003
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Every season a new batch of cookbooks calibrated to the trend of the moment, like tapas or a miracle diet or a hot new chef, mount on bookstore tables. Yet every once in a while an inevitable classic like "The Slow Mediterranean Kitchen" by Paula Wolfert (Wiley, 2003, $30) appears. The difference between this expert's meticulous, intriguing, ground-breaking work and the facility of so many of the others is a little like the qualitative divide between novelists Jhumpa Lahiri and Danielle Steel.
Should they share the same table?
Wolfert's books change the way people cook. They appeal to those who get equal pleasure from both cooking and eating, those who love bones, big aroma and depth of flavor, and enjoy producing great, comforting meals in their own kitchens. Her books teach technique at the level of Julia Child's "Mastering the Art of French Cooking," and they excite and broaden taste by making accessible traditional flavors from a broad swath of Europe, North Africa and the Middle East.
If you need convincing, leaf through the four sections of seductive color photographs by Christopher Hirsheimer, the magician behind the natural, unstyled Saveur magazine food shot. Wolfert's dishes look crusty, saucy, golden, deep. You want to eat them, now, and by following Wolfert's instructions, you can, later.
This is food meant to be cooked at home, though these recipes do take time, not so much in active or fussy preparation, but in long cooking, refrigerating, skimming, and finishing over several days. The cook can't pick up this book two hours before dinner to find an idea. These recipes require shopping and patience -- finding good-looking short ribs or oxtails at the meat counter and accepting that you won't be eating them for two days. However, the rewards of deferred gratification in this case outweigh the frustration of smelling the slowly bubbling pot and having to make do with a dinner of salad and scrambled eggs while the dish cooks.
Some of the recipes in this book qualify as slow only because they call for soaking chickpeas overnight, as is the case with Maghrebi Veal Meatballs with Spinach and Chickpeas, a lush casserole full of aromatic spices that is a complete meal in itself. I substituted ground round steak instead of veal and went the whole nine yards by making my own "Le Tabil Spice Mix," a blend of ground coriander, caraway, cayenne, fennel, cumin, black pepper, tumeric and cloves to season the meatballs. (Wolfert offers the substitute of ground coriander mixed with a pinch of ground caraway.)
The resulting casserole of creamy chickpeas, bright green spinach and spicy meatballs in a lusty gravy that conveniently uses the chickpea cooking water as a base -- very little stock is required in Wolfert's recipes, a tip-off that they truly come from home kitchens -- tasted authentically and thrillingly Tunisian. It looked as sexy and green as its photograph right after I finished cooking it, but it tasted better and better for two more days as I ate it cold, or reheated and garnished with yogurt. You get as many days of pleasurable eating as days of preparation for Wolfert's slow Mediterranean dishes.
The development of flavor between the just-completed dish, and the same dish after it has rested overnight, is almost startling to those of us used to eating quickly prepared foods. Taking the time to build a fire and roast whole eggplant (which are so good now) over it until they become charred on the outside and creamy inside, and then chopping it with ricotta, walnuts, a little vinegar, parsley, olive oil and a roasted green pepper creates a dish that evolves dramatically the longer it sits in the refrigerator. The flavors marry and mellow. The smokiness adds dimension. The effort it took to make the dish more than pays you back at the other end.
Maybe my favorite recipe of all (among those I've tried) is the one for oxtails. I've cooked oxtails quite a bit, using Judy Roger's recipe in her fine new book, and my grandmother's. But Wolfert's Stop-and-Go Braised Oxtails with Oyster Mushrooms creates the ultimate oxtail. The meat maintains enormous character and a velvety texture while still easily coming off the bone, and the sauce packs layers of flavor without an ounce of fat. You'll have to buy the book to get this recipe, and the one for the Golden Potato Gratin that Wolfert recommends as the accompaniment.
I feel that I personally owe Wolfert a debt of gratitude for putting so much work into every recipe, for curating and translating recipes that reflect a lifetime of travel, research and experience in the kitchens of the world. When I cook and eat these dishes I think about the places they come from and the women, and men, who have made them over generations. Wolfert's work deserves a prize that goes beyond the arc of food -- a Nobel for cultural understanding, a Mac-Arthur for culinary anthropology.
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