Roy Miller's Blog, page 254
March 6, 2017
Irish Cookbooks for St. Patrick’s Day
This March 17, you can move beyond corned beef and soda bread with help from new cookbooks on Irish cuisine. While they still feature familiar and comforting dishes, the books also delve into recipes that reflect a more modern Irish palate.
“The U.S. has a huge Irish-American population, a large Irish immigrant population still, and everyone wants to be Irish on St. Patrick’s Day,” said Donna Spurlock, director of marketing at Charlesbridge, which released The New Irish Table: Recipes from Ireland's Top Chefs in February. The book, compiled by Leslie Conron Carola, showcases the recipes of 10 Irish chefs, all in service of dismantling the reputation of Irish cuisine as being “a boil, a fry, or soda bread,” according to the publisher.
“Past travelers to Ireland often expressed disappointment with the food, many of them knowing only pub food,” said Carola. “The general misconception has been that Ireland’s food, the produce itself, was of poor quality.” Although the prepared food may have been heavy, said Caron, like a hearty Irish stew or bread, the natural produce—fresh fish, meat, vegetables, cheese, butter—are high-grade. “Ireland has a perfect climate for producing an extraordinary bounty of fine natural foods,” added Caron.
Among the chef contributors to the book are Kevin Dundon, host of PBS's Kevin Dundon's Modern Irish Table; Darina Allen, founder of the Ballymaloe Cookery School; and celebrity chef Neven Maguire. Recipes include Seared Scallops with Black Pudding Crumb and Homemade Potato Bread, Poached Salmon with Irish Butter Sauce, and an Irish Mint Truffle Torte.
On February 7, Forge released An Irish Country Cookbook by Patrick Taylor. The book blends stories from the author’s Irish Country series with traditional recipes, all of which have been in Taylor’s wife’s family for generations.
Taylor, like Caron, sees common misconceptions of Irish food—that the Irish only eat potatoes, overcook their meats, and always eat corned beef on St. Patrick’s Day. “I'd never seen corned beef in my life until I came to North America,” said Taylor.
Instead, he said traditional Irish cuisine is “as tasty as anything else and less pretentious than some modern forms,” with recipes in his book also borrowing from global sources. “Chicken Liver Pate is English, Corned Beef Curry is a variant on an Indian dish, and Eton Mess is English,” said Taylor.
For those looking to whip up Irish dishes beyond the holiday, in May, HarperCollins will be releasing Recipes from My Mother by Rachel Allen (dubbed the “Irish Nigella” by the Evening Standard). The book, too, celebrates Ireland’s embrace of international cuisine. Allen herself is half-Irish and half-Icelandic, and gathers here recipes from her childhood—from Irish comfort food like Irish Stew with Pearl Barley, to Skyr, otherwise known as Icelandic curds.
When asked how she would craft the perfect St. Patrick’s Day meal, Allen said though it sounds “cliche,” she’d go with Irish bacon and buttered Spring cabbage, after “lots” of native oysters from the west of Ireland.
For Taylor, the ideal feast includes: Smoked Mackerel Pâté on Irish Wheaten Bread, Leek and Potato Soup, Glazed Roast Ham with Seasonal Vegetables and Potatoes, Sticky Toffee Pudding, and a draught Guinness or a dry Sauvignon Blanc. Adding, “And someone to push me home in a wheelbarrow afterward.”
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March 5, 2017
Boston Art Installation Doubles as Spanish-Language Bookstore
Since January 13, Boston has been home to New England’s only general Spanish-language bookstore, but Librería Donceles will soon close as swiftly as it opened. That’s part of the point for New York City artist, author, and educator Pablo Helguera, who created the used bookstore as an art installation intended to highlight both the disappearance of used bookstores and the widespread unavailability of Spanish-language books in the United States.
“In this landscape where we see small bookstores disappearing all the time, and we contemplate a future where there might not be bookstores at all, I felt that maybe the only way that this project would happen is as an artwork,” Helguera says.
The installation first opened at Manhattan’s Kent Fine Art Gallery in 2013, with 20,000 volumes culled from donations, purchases, and Helguera’s own library. Not long after, Helguera started getting calls to bring the bookstore to other cities. At first, he wasn’t sure it would be possible. “Imagine moving your house every two months,” he says. “And when you are moving, the worst part is the books.” In the end, however, he agreed.
Over the past four years the itinerant bookstore has made stops in numerous cities, including Chicago, Miami, San Francisco, and Seattle. By the time it reached Indianapolis in 2016, Helguera was ready to bring the project to an end. Those plans changed when Stella Aguirre McGregor, executive director of Boston’s literature- and arts-focused Urbano Project, urged him to bring the bookstore to Boston.
At first, Helguera demurred. Despite a longtime love for the city’s literary culture, he told McGregor that the logistics would be daunting. She would need to help ship books, shelves, furniture, lamps, and artwork from Indianapolis; 27 boxes of books would have to be retrieved from the Mexican Cultural Center in New York City; and donations would be needed to replenish the depleted stock.
Helguera agreed to listen to McGregor’s request once she had the logistics worked out, and in January, Librería Donceles opened in Boston for one final exhibition. It has been so successful that Helguera and McGregor decided in mid-February to extend its stay by a month. It will close in late April.
Librería Donceles draws from influences as varied as Helguera’s mother’s living room to the now-closed Bookman’s Alley in Evanston, Ill., which the artist frequented as a student. But the main inspiration is Calle de Donceles, a street in Mexico City’s historic district that boasts some of the most renowned bookstores in the Spanish-speaking world.
On the surface, the current installation has all the appearances of a community bookshop. There are weekly events and books piling up on the counter. But there is no inventory or formal pricing scheme, and there is an unusual rule for customers: readers are limited to one book purchase per day. “We want to place a lot of emphasis on the selection process,” Helguera says. “We want to value the book as an object.”
As a result, some readers come back daily. Alongside native Spanish speakers are many English speakers looking to work on their Spanish. For Helguera, who sees monolingualism as “a big problem in this culture,” that outpouring of interest has been a source of excitement.
With its success, Librería Donceles has brought attention to the scarcity of Spanish-language bookstores across the country. Data are limited, but in a recent interview with the magazine Houstonia, Tony Diaz, owner of Houston’s newly opened Nuestra Palabra Art & Books, claimed that there are only five “Latino-focused” bookstores in America.
In New England, the recent closure of Schoenhof’s Foreign Books, the nation’s largest foreign-language bookstore, raised questions about whether an all-Spanish-language general trade bookstore could succeed in the region. Helguera believes that it could. He points to the nation’s growing Latino population and the success of other Spanish-language media as signs that there is a market for print media as well.
McGregor agrees. At the very least, she thinks, “it could be viable to have a more substantial section in the Spanish language” in one of the area’s existing bookstores.
Librería Donceles has already helped add to the permanent roster of Spanish-language bookshops elsewhere in the country. After visiting the Librería during its stay at Arizona State University in 2014, Phoenix bookseller Rosie Magaña opened Palabras Librería Bookstore. She credits Librería Donceles for inspiring her to do it.
In Boston, the Librería is talking with children’s publisher Candlewick Press about possibly working together. The publisher, based in nearby Somerville, Mass., is releasing a growing number of Spanish-language and dual-language titles and participating in efforts to help get more Spanish-language titles into the hands of young readers, according to Phoebe Kosman, Candlewick’s assistant director of marketing, publicity, and events. When Candlewick president and publisher Karen Lotz heard about Helguera’s project, she reached out to the Urbano Project’s McGregor right away. The two are currently in conversations about working together in some capacity on an aspect of the Librería. Interest in the project also has McGregor considering ways to keep a small book selection at the front of the Urbano Project after the Librería closes at the end of April.
At the heart of it, says Helguera, that’s why he created the Librería. Books are “critical to becoming a global citizen in this globalized world,” he notes. “It’s very important to see how other worlds think and how other realities can be perceived.”
A version of this article appeared in the 03/06/2017 issue of Publishers Weekly under the headline: For a Few Months, A Spanish-Language Bookstore in Boston
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Casting a Literary Lens on Women and Power
‘SOJOURNER TRUTH: A LIFE, A SYMBOL,’ BY NELL IRVIN PAINTER (1996) Tracing the life of the former slave and abolitionist preacher Sojourner Truth, Ms. Painter tries to separate fact from myth, questioning even the famous “Ar’n’t I a woman” line that Truth reportedly delivered at the Ohio Women’s Rights Convention in 1851. The author writes that Truth has been such a monumental symbol in American culture that the “complicated historic person” is in danger of being lost.
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‘PERSONAL HISTORY,’ BY KATHARINE GRAHAM (1997) As publisher of The Washington Post, Graham presided over the newspaper’s crucial coverage of both the Pentagon Papers and Watergate, and her memoir describes the times as well as her life. Covered as well are her unhappy childhood, troubled marriage and the shock of her husband’s suicide. As Nora Ephron wrote in The New York Times Book Review, “Kay Graham has lived in a world so circumscribed that her candor and forthrightness are all the more affecting.”
‘ABIGAIL ADAMS,’ BY WOODY HOLTON (2009) The voluminous correspondence exchanged by Abigail and John Adams during the Revolutionary War tells us much about the marriage between two highly opinionated individuals. We learn, in Mr. Holton’s illuminating biography, that Abigail Adams was more than her husband’s helpmeet; she was candid with her thoughts on gender discrimination, advocated women’s education and — in what was radical for the time — amassed a fortune and wrote her own will.
‘WHEN EVERYTHING CHANGED: THE AMAZING JOURNEY OF AMERICAN WOMEN FROM 1960 TO THE PRESENT,’ BY GAIL COLLINS (2009) Ms. Collins, an Op-Ed columnist for The New York Times, presents 1960 as an inflection point in American history. “Everything from America’s legal system to its television programs reinforced the perception that women were, in almost every way, the weaker sex,” she writes, in a book that describes what happened in the next five decades. ”When Everything Changed” recounts the exhilarating accomplishments of the women’s movement while making clear that much still needs to be done.
‘HARD CHOICES,’ BY HILLARY RODHAM CLINTON (2014) With previous memoirs to her name, Mrs. Clinton presented this book as an account of her four years as Secretary of State, though the timing of its publication — less than a year before she announced her candidacy for the 2016 presidential election — makes it a political document too. She recalls a testy relationship with Vladimir V. Putin, who blamed her for protests that ensued after the 2011 Russian parliamentary election. “She set the tone for some actors in our country and gave them a signal,” he contended. She insisted otherwise: “If only I had such power!”
‘BECAUSE OF SEX: ONE LAW, TEN CASES, AND FIFTY YEARS THAT CHANGED AMERICAN WOMEN’S LIVES AT WORK,’ BY GILLIAN THOMAS (2016) A survey of Title VII cases about sex discrimination in the workplace might sound dry — if it weren’t for Ms. Thomas’s skills as a storyteller, as well as the drama inherent in the cases themselves. One woman was denied a job because she had a preschool-age child; another brought a lawsuit for sexual harassment at a time when judges tended to view such abuses as “ill-advised come-ons,” Ms. Thomas writes.
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‘THE HIGHEST GLASS CEILING: WOMEN’S QUEST FOR THE AMERICAN PRESIDENCY,’ BY ELLEN FITZPATRICK (2016) Hillary Clinton may have been the first female presidential nominee of a major party, but more than 200 women have run for America’s highest office. Ms. Fitzpatrick presents the memorable stories of three: the stockbroker and soi-disant clairvoyant Victoria Woodhull; Margaret Chase Smith, who for years was the only woman in the Senate; and the inimitable Shirley Chisholm, the first black woman elected to Congress.
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Southeast Asian Cooking: Spring 2017 Cookbooks
Dishes from Southeast Asia have become more prevalent on American restaurant menus and, increasingly, in Americans’ cookbook collections. Thai and Vietnamese cuisine have garnered the most attention, and Ten Speed has been a standout in this area, with recent successes such as Pok Pok by Andy Ricker with J.J. Goode (2013; 51,000 print copies sold, per BookScan) and Vietnamese Home Cooking by Charles Fan (2012; 34,000 print units sold).
In March, the publisher is turning to a different Southeast Asian nation, with Burma Superstar by Desmond Tan, owner of three Bay Area restaurants of the same name, and food writer Kate Leahy. “Myanmar [formerly Burma] is a fascinating country with an extremely diverse cuisine,” says Jenny Wapner, executive editor at Ten Speed. Because the food is informed by neighboring China, India, and Thailand, and the country’s former British colonial rule, it’s “truly a melting pot of culinary traditions.” Tan includes, among the 80 recipes, restaurant favorites such as tea leaf salad and samosa soup and visits the home kitchens of Burmese cooks.
Malaysian cuisine, too, incorporates an array of Asian and European influences, which Houghton Mifflin Harcourt editor Stephanie Fletcher believes gives it broad appeal. “If you’re already a fan of other cuisines that feature these flavors, then Malaysian food will feel familiar,” she says. “Bold international flavors naturally become assimilated into our food culture over time.” Christina Arokiasamy’s The Malaysian Kitchen (HMH, Mar.) harnesses those flavors for the home cook, drawing on her Kuala Lumpur upbringing, the cooking classes she teaches in Seattle and the surrounding area, and the culinary tours of Southeast Asia she leads.
In April, Weldon Owen will release Malaysia by Ping Coombes, 2014 winner of the U.K. cooking competition television show MasterChef. The author takes inspiration from her hometown of Ipoh, sharing descriptions of the “bustling night-market food scene and stories of her mom’s curries and soups simmering all day to await her homecoming from school,” says Amy Marr, associate publisher at Weldon Owen.
Below, other forthcoming cookbooks that invite readers into the home kitchens, street stalls, and restaurants that serve up Southeast Asian cuisine.
Adventures in Starry Kitchen by Nguyen Tran (HarperOne, June). Tran and his wife launched Starry Kitchen as an underground pop-up in their studio apartment, and now helm the kitchen at Los Angeles arcade/bar Button Mash, where dishes inspired by Tran’s Vietnamese heritage include cha gio (Vietnamese egg rolls) and bun cha Hanoi (pork in fish sauce with rice noodles).
Amazing Malaysian by Norman Musa (Square Peg, dist. by IPG; June). The Penang-born cofounder of Ning restaurant and cooking school in Manchester, England, shares recipes for popular dishes such as nasi lemak (coconut rice) and roti canai (Malaysian flatbread) as well as the more idiosyncratic “My Dad’s Noodles” and “My Mum’s Chicken Rendang.”
Bangkok by Leela Punyaratabandhu (Ten Speed, May). In an ode to Thailand’s capital city, Punyaratabandhu, author of 2014’s Simple Thai Food, covers home-style family dishes, casual street snacks, and restaurant classics. Our starred review called it “a remarkable collection of cleverly selected recipes.”
Luke Nguyen’s Street Food Asia by Luke Nguyen (Hardie Grant, Mar.). In Nguyen’s seventh book, he translates the hawker stall dishes of Bangkok, Jakarta, Kuala Lumpur, and Saigon for the home cook.
Made in Vietnam by Tracey Lister and Andreas Pohl (Hardie Grant, Aug.). Lister, who runs a cooking school in Hanoi, and her husband take a culinary voyage across Vietnam, covering the hearty food of the north, the imperial cuisine of the capital region, and the spicy tastes of the tropical south.
A version of this article appeared in the 03/06/2017 issue of Publishers Weekly under the headline: Bold Flavors with Broad Appeal: Southeast Asian Cookbooks
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Stocking the Shelves: Spring 2017 Cookbooks
New titles teach the fundamentals, deep-dive into single ingredients, help home cooks save time and money, and more.
The Fundamentals
The Baker’s Appendix
Jessica Reed (Clarkson Potter, Mar.)
Reed starts with 18 basic recipes for chocolate cake, buttercream, quick breads, and more, then offers variations and mix-ins.
Master Recipes
The editors of Food & Wine
(Food & Wine, May)
Based on the magazine’s “Gastronaut” column, step-by-step photos take readers through 70 cooking projects, guided by experts including Jacques Pépin, David Chang, and Dominique Ansel.
Zeroing In
The Book of Cheese
Liz Thorpe (Flatiron, June)
Organized by what the book calls the nine familiar favorites—think Swiss, blue, and Brie—Thorpe, of Murray’s Cheese in New York City, offers storage strategies and tips on putting together a cheese plate.
Lucky Peach All About Eggs
Rachel Khong and the editors of Lucky Peach (Clarkson Potter, Apr.)
The team behind the bestselling quarterly turns its attention to the common egg—starting with science and production and leading into recipes for dishes from breakfast to dessert.
Know Thy Tools
Cast Iron Pies
Dominique DeVito (Cider Mill, Apr.)
More than 100 sweet and savory pies, all served out of the humble but sturdy cast iron skillet.
The New Pressure Cooker Cookbook
Jake Grogan (Cider Mill, May)
A guide to using the pressure cooker, with more than 200 recipes and information on cleaning, storing, and setting the appliance.
Spiralize Everyday
Denise Smart (Hamlyn, Apr.)
The fascination with this carb-cutting tool continues; recipes here include apple and blueberry buckwheat pancakes, Moroccan beetroot tabbouleh with pomegranate and chicken, and miso baked cod with daikon noodles.
The Ultimate Instant Pot Pressure Cooker Cookbook
Ella Sanders (Castle Point, Apr.)
A guide to the latest cooking gadget craze with recipes for starters, mains, and desserts.
Will It Skillet?
Daniel Shumski (Workman, Apr.)
Inventive uses of the cast iron pan, including a skilled-sized blueberry muffin for Sunday brunch, melty pizza dip, and popcorn with clarified butter. From the author of 2014’s Will It Waffle?, which has sold 62,000 copies in paperback, per NPD BookScan.
Saving Time and Money
Feeding a Family
Sarah Waldman (Roost, Apr.)
Nutritionist and parent Waldman aims to reclaim the family dinner, with tips on how to stretch leftovers and feed babies (and other picky eaters).
Five Ways to Cook Asparagus (and Other Recipes)
Peter Miller (Abrams, Apr.)
A list of essential ingredients, and five recipes for preparing each, to get dinner on the table quickly.
Old-Fashioned Economical Cooking
Winifred S. Gibbs (Racehorse, Apr.)
Saving money doesn’t go out of style—this book, originally published in 1912, has recipes and hints for shopping and cooking economically. Some advice may be dated (like that about how and when to build your own “fireless cooker”) but other tips, like how to preserve food to make it last longer, stand the test of time.
Perfect Plates in 5 Ingredients
John Whaite (Kyle, Apr.)
Pared-down recipes from a winner of The Great British Bake Off aim for less-stressful home cooking.
Ready or Not!
Michelle Tam and Henry Fong (Andrews McMeel, Aug.)
From the authors of 2013 bestseller Nom Nom Paleo, this book of quick recipes includes make-ahead dishes (pressure cooker bo ssäm) and emergency meal savers (savory stir-fries and sheet-pan suppers).
A version of this article appeared in the 03/06/2017 issue of Publishers Weekly under the headline: Stocking the Shelves: More Spring 2017 Cookbooks
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Torn Ballet Shoes, and a Life Upended
She was arrested and charged with supporting terrorism, not because of her novels but as a result of her affiliation, as an adviser, with a newspaper linked to the Kurdish movement that has since been shut down. She still faces a trial that could land her back in prison, and with that hanging over her, she has been living with her mother, sleeping late, not writing much and dealing with the new fame that her case has brought.
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Nowadays, on the streets of Istanbul, people recognize her.
“It is moving. Sometimes people put their arms on me and cry,” she said. “I receive lots of love. That is a big responsibility.”
There is a downside. “I also receive negative reactions, too: curses and lectures on patriotism,” she said.
That can feel harrowing in Turkey, which has a long tradition of not just locking up writers and journalists but of violence against them, wielded by vigilantes who seem to take their cues from officials who brand as traitors those writers who go beyond what the government deems acceptable language.
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In the 1940s, the leftist writer Sabahattin Ali was believed to have been murdered by a state agent. In 2007, the Turkish-Armenian journalist Hrant Dink was assassinated by a nationalist gunman who may have been acting on the orders of the so-called deep state. And, last year, a man outside a courtroom fired a shot at Can Dundar, a newspaper editor accused of publishing state secrets.
Once, Ms. Erdogan said, she “was an outcast in literary circles” in Turkey for her existentialist writings, which appealed more to a European audience. “I have more readers in Sweden than here,” she said.
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Growing up in a household that valued education — her father is an engineer, her mother an economist — she attended the prestigious Bosporus University. Trained as a physicist, she began writing seriously on the side in the early 1990s while pursuing graduate studies in Switzerland.
There, in a tiny room in Geneva, she wrote all night after full days in the research lab, eventually producing the story collection “The Miraculous Mandarin.” A few years later, while studying for her doctorate in Brazil, she gave up physics for good. “One morning I woke up and didn’t go to my exams,” she said.
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Now, as her fame in Turkey grows, her books have been selling more, and her publisher has issued new printings. One volume of short stories, “The Stone Building and Other Places,” has become a best seller in Turkey.
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“The City in Crimson Cloak” is perhaps her most-known book, and the only one that has been published in English. It is a recreation of the myth of Orpheus set in the gritty and violent back streets of Rio de Janeiro, where Ms. Erdogan once lived. She describes her writing as “sublime language plus crude metaphors” that has had only a limited appeal in Turkey, where readers tend to flock to realistic works steeped in Ottoman history or nostalgia, like the books of Orhan Pamuk, Turkey’s Nobel-winning novelist.
“There’s nothing realistic in my books,” she said. “I am a difficult writer.”
The darkness of her writing is a reflection of her personality. She has always lived “a life of extreme loneliness,” she said, and the prevailing theme of her work is the brokenness of human beings, what she refers to as their “wounds.”
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“Asli Erdogan’s literature is dark, pessimistic,” said Sema Kaygusuz, a Turkish novelist. “The world in Erdogan’s mind is a wounded body. A body constantly bleeding, a body in anguish. She carries this body both linguistically and psychologically. She identifies with the wound. The pain the author is in is not a personal one in this sense, but it is the pain of the world.”
Even in Europe, in the earlier days of Ms. Erdogan’s writing career, her work was a tough sell, defying the expectations the outside world places on Turkish novelists.
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“So many publishers told me, ‘Oh your writing is great, it’s impressive, but, you see, this existentialist stuff, we have done already,’” she said. “‘But why don’t you write us about your own little village?’”
With her arrest and time in prison, Ms. Erdogan has joined many of her Turkish literary contemporaries, and forebears, in a common experience.
Most of the country’s great writers have, at one time or another, run up against Turkey’s restrictions of freedom of expression. The reasons differ in different eras. Ms. Erdogan was arrested for her association with a Kurdish movement that the government now considers a terrorist group. Mr. Pamuk once faced criminal charges for “insulting Turkishness.” Elif Shafak, another of Turkey’s internationally known novelists, once ran afoul of Turkish authorities for writing about the Armenian genocide, still denied by the Turkish government.
“Every writer, every poet and every journalist in Turkey knows that words can get us into serious trouble any day, any moment,” Ms. Shafak wrote in a recent email. “When we write,” she added, “there is this ominous knowledge at the back of our minds.”
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At every turn, Ms. Erdogan’s story comes back to books: the books she has already written and the ones she plans to write, the books the police seized from her apartment, the books she read while in prison. To describe the entire experience — navigating the Turkish law and prison bureaucracy — she leans on a literary reference, saying it has been “more than Kafkaesque.”
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In prison, which included several days in solitary confinement sleeping, she said, on a bed that smelled of urine, she passed the time and drew comfort from books brought to her by her lawyers, or mailed to her by friends. She read volumes on world history, and novels by J. M. Coetzee, Iris Murdoch, Henry James, Marcel Proust and Kafka, and the poems of Rainer Maria Rilke and Paul Celan, a favorite of hers. From the prison library, she read “Shoah,” the text to the acclaimed 1985 documentary by Claude Lanzman.
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So far, Ms. Erdogan said she has resisted calls to write a memoir of her time in prison, saying she is not ready. “I know I could write a best seller very easily about my prison days,” she said.
She still might, although it will most likely take a long time. Sometimes, she said, it takes her six or seven years to write a hundred pages.
“When I hear the right voice, and I catch it, it carries me,” she said. “If I don’t, forget it.”
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‘Cleopatra’s Wedding Present’ by Robert Tewdwr Moss
This intimate travelogue is a haunting story, not least because the author claims that Mark Antony gave Syria to Cleopatra as a wedding present. How fabulous is that? The author was a young gay English journalist who recounts his journey through the Syria of the 1990s, observing the country, “Our route crossed the great agricultural plains of north-east Syria, studded with villages of square baked-mud houses, which looked like blocks of chocolate,” and commenting on the politics, "We sat next to a fat man with a gun stuck in his pocket—a member of the Bath. the east of Syria, rich in pro-Iraq anti-government feeling, was infested with Party members and informers,” and indulging in love and romance, “I tried to dismiss from my mind a vivid passage from The Perfumed Garden, as translated by Burton, devoted to the seduction of sleeping Arab boys in communal quarters... “ Colorful and picaresque, Tewdwr Moss’s story reads like diary, open and intimate. Sadly, he was murdered in London right after he finished this book. He was 35 years old.
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The Shortlist: Argentine Fiction
New fiction by Argentine writers uses horror to address ecological disaster and keeps circling back to The Dirty War.
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Cookbook Authors Offer Tricks of the Trade
Cooking 101: Patricia Wells
My Master Recipes
(Morrow, Mar.)
What’s the most essential kitchen tool?
I would say the chef’s head: an ability to stay organized and clean in the kitchen.
What skills do you admire most in other chefs?
Knife skills, creative abilities, modesty.
What’s your top tip for novice cooks?
Begin with a repertoire of 10 recipes and make them over and over again, until you are satisfied that you have mastered them. Practice, practice, practice.
Cooking 101: Samin Nosrat
Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat
(Simon & Schuster, May)
What’s the best basic recipe to have in your back pocket?
A roast chicken. [Nosrat’s go-to version is the buttermilk brined roast chicken featured in her book.]
What’s the toughest skill to master?
Being patient in the kitchen.
What skills do you admire most in other chefs?
Generosity and kindness.
What’s your top tip for novice cooks?
Taste everything!
Cooking 101: Rachael Mamane
Mastering Stocks and Broths
(Chelsea Green, June)
What’s the most essential kitchen tool?
While a chef’s knife might be the most practical answer, my grandmother would insist that a well-seasoned pan is the most essential kitchen tool. In Moroccan culture, tagines are considered family heirlooms, handed down from generation to generation, from mother to bride and so on.
A well-seasoned pan is not only indicative of heritage, but years of use and care will add flavor to your food.
What’s your top tip for novice cooks?
Be patient, not only with yourself but also with ingredients. Sometimes we learn more from making a mistake than executing with success
on the first try. If a dish doesn’t come out the way you expect, turn it into something else first, and then try the original again.
Cooking 101: Izy Hossack
The Savvy Cook
(Mitchell Beazley, July)
What is the most essential kitchen tool?
Your senses. Visual, flavor, textural, and scent cues will guide you through making a dish better than any stopwatch or recipe will.
What is the toughest skill to master?
Adapting or changing baking recipes is pretty tough to do well. Once you the hang of basic baking it becomes a bit less daunting to swap ingredients around, but it can still be tricky to get right.
What’s a tip you always give a novice cook?
Read all the way through a recipe before starting. It’s always useful to see whether you’ll need to watch a video beforehand if there are special skills needed. You can also then see if the recipe requires a large amount of waiting time, like chilling it in the fridge for an hour, so you don’t get caught out later. You’re also less likely to mess a recipe up as you won’t accidentally skip a step.
Cooking 101: Alison Cayne
The Haven’s Kitchen Cooking School
(Artisan, Apr.)
What is the most essential kitchen tool?
Nothing can happen in the kitchen without a sturdy, supersharp chef’s knife.
What’s the toughest skill to master?
I find butchering a chicken challenging. I watch [Haven’s Kitchen] culinary director David Mawhinney break down several chickens in just a few minutes, and he makes it look so simple and effortless—his knife glides right through, separating the birds into eighths. It’s never that easy for me, but I’m working on it.
What’s your top tip for novice cooks?
Learn one or two sauces. I don’t mean an Escoffier sauce, but a salsa verde, tahini sauce, pesto. You can use them on all sorts of dishes to change up the flavors and presentations.
A version of this article appeared in the 03/06/2017 issue of Publishers Weekly under the headline: Cooking 101: Cookbook Authors Offer Tricks of the Trade
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A Painting Stolen First by the Nazis, Then by Persons Unknown
Credit
Marta Monteiro
THE FORTUNATE ONES
By Ellen Umansky
324 pp. William Morrow/HarperCollins Publishers. $26.99.
There is often a requisite magic to fiction involving lost masterpieces. Two memorable examples, Donna Tartt’s “The Goldfinch” and Dara Horn’s “The World to Come,” use a scaffold of mystery to contain the logic of fairy tales. Something similar holds for stories about music (the film “The Red Violin” comes to mind, as does David Mitchell’s epic “Cloud Atlas”). In each of these variations, the masterpiece at the center serves as a kind of literary baton, passing between different sets of hands, linking divergent fates and disparate eras. At the end we’re left with an overwhelming sense of art’s transcendent nature, its quasi-magical power to wash the dust of daily life off our souls, as the old saying has it.
Ellen Umansky’s first novel, “The Fortunate Ones,” borrows the architecture of the art mystery, but leaves aside the obligatory magic in favor of a quieter and more earthly examination of how art serves us in the here and now. The lost painting at the heart of the book is “The Bellhop,” a fictional amalgam of Chaim Soutine’s bellboys and hotel porters. In the eyes of 11-year-old Rose Zimmer, the boy in the painting “was too skinny in his red uniform, his face pasty and elongated. The paint was thick, thrown on . . . as if the painter couldn’t be bothered to slow down and pay attention. Rose didn’t understand why her mother loved it so.”
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The canvas disappears when the Nazis plunder the Zimmers’ apartment in Vienna after the Anschluss. Rose and her older brother are spared their parents’ brutal fate, escaping to England on the Kindertransport. Sixty-six years later we encounter Rose in Los Angeles, now a chic, no-nonsense woman attending the wake of a friend, Joseph, who acquired her family’s lost Soutine after it mysteriously turned up in New York. But the painting no longer hangs on Joseph’s walls, having disappeared years ago on the night his rebellious daughter Lizzie threw a wild party in his absence. Lizzie, now 37 and at a crossroads in life, meets Rose at Joseph’s funeral, and feels a powerful affinity. As the two grow closer, Rose permits Lizzie to reopen the case of the lost painting.
Often in historical fiction the character who is haloed in history is the one who feels more urgent and real than her present-day counterpart. This may be simply because the “historical” character is carving a path forward, while the present-day one keeps returning to the past. Both Rose and Lizzie feel a burden of guilt toward their departed parents: Lizzie for her ingratitude toward Joseph’s belated attempts to be a good father, and Rose for failing to find jobs for her parents in Britain, so that they too could escape Vienna. Umansky captures the stubbornness of childhood guilt, the way it can haunt later in life, even as the adult recognizes the limits of the child’s power. Years earlier, when Joseph offered to buy Lizzie a work of art on her birthday, she thwarted him by demanding something that wasn’t for sale, a derivative Arbus-like photograph that included a child clutching a toy grenade (which Joseph nonetheless maneuvered to get her). Now an orphan in her 30s, she yearns for a kind of initiation into adulthood that connoisseurship can bring — the pride and humility of appreciation, which her father tried but failed to instill in her.
The lessons Lizzie seems desperate to learn we watch Rose learning, six decades earlier, in a Russian literature course in college. In the Russians, she discovers a comforting resonance with “the ugliness of the human condition” and “unavenged suffering.” Rose’s girlfriends, fellow refugees who attend class to find husbands, mock her for taking her studies so seriously. “But here was the trick,” Umansky writes. “Rose didn’t care. She felt a small but heady rush; Rose knew what she wanted, and what she wanted was tantalizingly, incredibly hers.” Unlike her extroverted brother, Rose never feels truly at home among the English. Finally comprehending the magnitude of her loss, she senses that through literature and art she can make uneasy peace with her fundamental aloneness.
On occasion, the novel falls into its own aesthetic traps. The dialogue sometimes feels too cinematically coy, and there is a veneer of politeness to the prose even in moments of conflict. But the ideas at its core are deceptively deep. “The Fortunate Ones” is a subtle, emotionally layered novel about the ways art and other objects of beauty can make tangible the invisible, undocumented moments in our lives, the portion of experience that exists without an audience but must be preserved if we are to remain whole. There is a scene that’s easy to miss in which Lizzie admires a picture hanging over Rose’s armchair: a framed stretch of silk decorated with a pattern of birds in flight. Rose informs her that this is the scarf her mother gave her before saying goodbye. By giving this symbol of her loss a permanent place, Rose shows Lizzie, and the reader, that connoisseurship isn’t always about bringing art’s magic into our lives, but about what we choose to give a frame.
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