At my ripe age, I acknowledge with some pleasure that my lifelong liaison with good food has gradually been creating a new me. Only four years ago, when I published Theory & Practice of Good Cooking, I had planned a recipe book as its complement—a needed one, since T & P’s detailed explanations of basic techniques left only just room enough for the recipes I’d picked to illustrate them. For you, the two books would add up to a fairly complete kitchen guide; for me, they would be the culmination of my long cooking career. My model for the second book was to be The James Beard Cookbook, a fat compendium first published in 1959, somewhat updated in 1970—with all the world’s cooks surging with activity and bursting with good ideas, it was sorely in need of a complete update. As I set to work, I thought of my recipe book as The Revised Standard Beard.
But something had been quietly happening, I came to realize: a shift straight across the whole spectrum of my cookery, all the way from menu making right down to how I now wrote recipes. Neither the form nor the content of The James Beard Cookbook would serve as a model. The new me had to write a new book, from scratch.
This is still a recipe compendium, as planned, and a practical guide. All the basic information you need is here—sometimes in detail, where I’m dealing with new ideas, but in brief form where the basic sauces are concerned—and for those see page 529. For marketing information, see the Concordance repeated from T & P, with helpful additions and references to both books. The recipes are detailed enough for any cook. I don’t think it’s fair to you to make one book depend on another, and you don’t need to own T & P to use this. (I do commend it to anyone in search of understanding, for the whys and wherefores of the basic processes like boiling, frying, sautéing, baking, and so on.) It does have delicious recipes, it has useful reminders for even the seasoned cook, and its instructions for the food processor and the heavy-duty mixer are up to date. This book includes, as well, newer equipment like pasta machines and microwave ovens, but if you don’t have any of these gadgets, both books explain hand methods.
Technique is modified by equipment, heat sources (e.g., charcoal vs. gas), and other factors, but the principles don’t change. Relatively stable, technique is the warp of good cooking. Ingredients are the woof, and the takeoff point of The New James Beard. I’ve dealt with novel ingredients like green peppercorns, new fruits, whole grains, improved flours and colorful pastas. I’ve taken a fresh look at some of this country’s resources like beef and re-evaluated them. Yogurt, which most people treat as something to be eaten on its own, is shown to be as adaptable in cooking as cream. My new style of seasoning involves less salt, more use of major ingredients that heighten each other—vegetable combinations, for instance—and more recourse to Far Eastern and South American flavor patterns. The recipes number plenty of old favorites, some modified, a few not: in every case the recipe has been newly scrutinized to see if it needed improvement. What I want to stress is a new, flexible approach to ingredients, to the way we put them together, and the way we plan a meal.
The chapters are arranged in an unorthodox order, a change in structure which corresponds to my new thinking about menus. Almost any dish in the first six chapters can be served either as an appetizer or as a main course, including most of the soups, the salads, and the vegetables. Put the emphasis where you please. Feel free.
In a number of chapters, I explore different flavor affinities, in the hope that you will adapt these suggestions in creating a dish of your own. The recipes themselves have other suggestions. Take a fresh look. My emphasis is on options, my motto is “Why not?” and my hope is to provide you with inspiration as well as practical guidance.
Take a Fresh Look
Old-fashioned cookbooks, including my early ones, used to treat recipes as formulas. But in cooking along with my friends, colleagues, and students, I came to find the formula style boring and rigid. Listening is much more useful than prescribing what, and everybody learns best through thinking, not just performing. More and more, in class, my students talk back and speak up, to my benefit and to their own, too. We finally thought up “tasting” classes as a route to real sharing. One evening, for instance, we tasted vinegars—thirty-two kinds—and made alternative versions of poulet au vinaigre. Then everyone was asked to imagine which kind of oil, what herb each vinegar “asked for” as a complement for a vinaigrette sauce. The resonances and harmonics were fascinating, useful, and highly individual. Every palate is different; every cook has a personal style. I want you to make “my” dishes your own, so nowadays my basic recipes usually suggest variations, which really amount to new dishes. In many cases, you’ll find the variation offers a new way of cutting down on fats and starches—restrictions, alas, that most of us are faced with at some point in our lives.
Let the quality of your ingredients speak to you. Taste things half-done, done—and overdone, if that happens; mistakes are to learn from, not to pine over. You may decide not to cook your meat or fish at all. I love paper-thin slices of a fine raw tenderloin, or a steak tartare when I feel like a higher seasoning, or sushi or sashimi if the fish is impeccably fresh. If the beef you brought home seems underaged, lacking in texture and flavor like most beef these days, check the meat chapter for ways of stepping it up a bit. If your horsy winter carrots seem a bit blah, don’t automatically head for the spice shelf or the salt; try puréing them with beets. Check the flavor charts, take off from there, but remember that you can’t always predict or imagine the effect of one flavor on another. Would you believe sardines with mint? I urge you to try it.
Taste every time you cook, and take nothing for granted—not even your own palate, for it can change. Mine has. I seem to be leaning toward lighter food in general—less meat, lighter sauces, fewer items on my plate and in my menus. Fish and vegetables I always loved, and not just as carriers for sauces; but now my appreciation has evolved toward simplicity. Since doing time on a salt-free diet, I approach a plain baked potato reverently. Maybe I’ve been missing the truth—the nutty, delicate earthiness of a perfect baked potato. Salt only masks it. In a fancy mood, I heighten it with caviar; in a plain mood, I just give it several grinds of fresh black pepper. Again, during that diet I sometimes craved intense aromas, so this book has a new trove of recipes for root vegetables.
Feel Free
Cooking has entered a grand era of liberation, not just in how we cook, but whether we cook, and what. People are making a lot of things from scratch instead of buying them. The commercial product is sometimes disappointing, and besides, with modern equipment you can make your own sausage, pasta, bread, cookies, pastries, mayonnaise, sorbets, etc., in less time than it takes to run over to the supermarket. So this book includes recipes for what were formerly “store” items. Do try them all and vary them: my students say it’s like entering another world to find that bread, for instance, isn’t just a standard-brand slab to put butter on, but that every loaf has character of its own. (This book contains only my newest bread ideas, plus a basic loaf for beginners; the world of bread is so vast I gave it a book of its own, Beard on Bread.)
On the other hand, people nowadays feel free to serve store-bought items if they’re good. I’ve always loved composing a picnic right on the spot in a market or delicatessen. Look in the appetizer chapter, especially, for delicious ways to use sardines and herring and pickles—not just at picnics, but at dinner parties. Serve anything you really like, any way you like, any time you like. Culinary snobbery used to stress expense and show: the filet de boeuf en bellevue, the larded saddle of venison, the pheasant en plumage. Now it’s moved toward ingenuity and surprise—and incidentally, toward cheaper cuts and neglected fish. In the present gastronomic furor, restaurant chefs the world over are reaching in all directions for novelty—often with good results. We are not thinking in the same stiff categories that we used to. Meat can be a seasoning, not a prime ingredient. A main dish of grains, or a robust combination of vegetables, sufficiently anchors a meal. More and more we’re composing menus by instinct rather than by rule.
In my youth, a “proper” dinner had to have something light at each end, like consommé to begin and fruit to finish—you could call the menu diamond-shaped, with a big bulge at the main course, after the fish and before the made dessert. Usually it was a roast, with something starchy and several vegetables. By the middle of the century, with hosts and hostesses doing everything themselves, the number of courses had shrunk, but the big bulge had remained: at home meals, on one big greedy overloaded plate. At restaurants you were kept as busy as a one-man band, flailing to right and to left of you at the little bread-and-butter plate (already filled up with relishes that had been passed the minute you sat down), the little oval bowl—or what were called fish bowls in a restaurant kitchen—of, say, creamed onions, and the other little bowl, which usually contained peas and carrots. If you happened to have ordered corn, a large ear was invariably crowded onto that same dinner plate. How can you really enjoy corn like that? I like to serve it all by itself. And when it’s really fresh and perfect I serve it first, for emphasis.
In other words, the main course is whatever you want to star—the nicest thing, perhaps, that you are offering at that meal. For some cooks, it may well be dessert, though not for me; I’m not a great dessert man. (Nevertheless, I recommend my grand Sharlotka (page 525) and my broad array of cheesecakes to cooks who take the Viennese, or delayed-climax, point of view about menus.)
I like to express emphasis by copiousness, not elaboration. I’ve never had any regard for sugar roses or orange cups or lemon frills or noodle baskets—for food that imitates something else. Yes, I garnish platters with parsley, but the parsley is to eat if you like it. I do. (I even like a salad of pure parsley—see page 80.) This year for my annual celebration of the first shad roe, we had a luscious pair of sautéed roe apiece—with parsley—then very small paillards of veal with a little cucumber salad—together on the plate, so the juices would mingle, which used to be heresy—and wound up with just a taste of fresh strawberry sorbet. A wedge-shaped dinner, then. And why not? It tasted wonderful, and taste is the only rule a cook need acknowledge, in this happy time of freshness and freedom.
The culinary world was never livelier than now, restaurants were never more experimental, and great cooks were never more appreciated. Taste responds to feedback—well named, because it does nourish the imagination. The razzle-dazzle is a great stimulant. But what truly stimulates, sustains, and rewards good cooking is honor at home. It gives me joy to see so many couples cooking together these days, and to watch their children growing up where they belong, right in the kitchen, as I did long ago.
One last word: During the preparation of this book and others over the years, I have been assisted by José Wilson. Not only was she a wonderful collaborator but she was a beloved friend. Her untimely death is a great loss to me, and I consider this book a monument to her memory.