SPANISH DISHES created for the American kitchen are the focus of the companion book to PBS television’s Made in Spain. Yet the beautifully photographed volume doesn’t make a reader as eager to get into the kitchen as it inspires searches for non-stop flights to Madrid and snacks at The Museum of Ham…

As chef Andrés writes, he and his wife are themselves culinary travelers who “don’t plan vacations thinking about what museums and monuments” to visit, but the restaurants and local delicacies worth trying.

In writing this book, the author’s wish was to whet the reader’s appetite for the best Spain has to offer. He has succeeded: you can practically taste the deep green extra-virgin olive oil dripping off seared piquillo peppers stuffed with Roncal cheese.

Even a simple veal consommé is photographed in elegant china tea cups and perfumed with a drop of sherry — as served at Madrid’s historic Lhardy restaurant and food shop.

Reading the chef’s comments about Lhardy filled me with nostalgia — and regret. It has been more than ten-years since I’ve been to the shop. At the time of my visit, so many of the foods I tried were difficult — if not impossible — to find back home in America. (My suitcase on the return flight was packed with saffron packets and paella pans.)

Today, with the help of importers like The Spanish Table and La Tienda, my kitchen cupboards are regularly stocked with the essential ingredients of Spanish cuisine ranging from smoked paprika to Jamon Iberico.

I wish I could hop on a plane right now, but I’ll have to settle for a kitchen-trip. I’ll pop the Made in Spain music CD into my boom box and sip a cool Sherry Lemonade cocktail.

Then I’ll follow tour guide Andrés for an edible walk down memory lane featuring tastes sampled long ago in Sevilla and Barcelona: Clementines with Chinchón, Anchovy and Black Olives, Soft and Crunchy White Asparagus Salad Ensalada de espárragos blancos and Manchego with Tomato, Thyme and Walnuts.

My dinner may be made in America, but after reading chef Andrés book, my heart is back in España.

SOME OF THE BEST local home cooks I know are of Portuguese ancestry — and I’m lucky enough to live in California’s Bay Area where we have a robust Portuguese community offering great restaurants (Sousa’s), bakeries, historical sites, festivals and museums.

Living in the Bay Area, I’ve already sampled a few of the cuisine’s high points:  Linguiça (a cured sausage seasoned with onions, garlic and paprika), hot red Piri-Piri pepper sauce, salt cod (aka bacalhau) and baked custard tarts (Pastéis de Nata). Yet I haven’t had the opportunity to visit Portugal.

Flipping through the pages of David Leite’s recent cookbook, The New Portugese Table, I felt like I’d arrived in Lisbon.

I had no idea the country consisted of eleven historical provinces with their own local food stuffs. Nor did I equate Portugal with the use of plums/prunes (Pork Tenderloin in a Port-Prune Sauce), duck (used in the Minho region), or kale (used in the Azores).

Photographer Nuno Correia’s photos are outstanding, and each richly illustrated page left me eager to recreate the dish — in fact, this is one of those rare cookbooks where I want to try every recipe.

Author Leite’s instructions are equally enticing — and annotated with helpful instructions for cooks who may not be as experienced as a practiced avó (Portugese grandmother).

Over the next few days I’m moving on from the fried cornmeal dish show above (which was studded with bits of kale and quite divine!) to Sweet Lemon & Black Olive Wafers, Seared Broccoli Rabe with Garlic, and Lemon-Mint Chicken Soup.

ONCE UPON A TIME I received a vintage, dog-eared copy of Mimi Sheraton’s The Seducer’s Cookbook as a gift from my mother.

The giving of this book from mother to child is, apparently, a time-honored tradition.

The note,

“Somehow I’ve got to get a daughter in law! Love to Michael from Mother, 1967″

is scribbled inside the used-book’s front cover…

I’m crossing my fingers that my own mother is simply appreciative of the fact that I admire Mimi’s work, the latest of which, The Bialy Eaters, reflects the author’s obsession with a salty, onion-flecked cousin of the bagel best eaten at Kosher bakeries on New York’s Lower East Side.

Unlike the well-researched and often moving Bialy Eaters, Sheraton’s The Seducer’s Cookbook (published in 1963) features food as mere appetizer, or more specifically, bait:

“Just as a mouse trap sits

with its lure of cheese,

waiting for the hungry mouse to bound over

to be captured forever.”

“EVER SINCE I WAS FIFTEEN, and persuaded to neck with a boy who gave me a frozen Milky Way,” begins the author, “I have been aware of the seductive powers of food.” Even the legendary lover Casanova, she continues, used food as “the main weapon in his personal war on female chastity.” After all, Mimi winks, how could a girl not trust a man providing her with wonderful things to eat?

I MET UP WITH MY OWN Casanova in Ferrara, Italy, not far from Bologna. He was a respected (married) professor who looked like Woody Allen, spoke little English, and laughed uproariously at everything I said. A bit naive, I missed signals telegraphed throughout twelve-courses of truffle-enriched madness, and agreed to let the little professor drive me back to my hotel — a long drive during which he continued to roar with laughter as I hissed the word, “NO!”

I may have been “intoxicated and confused” by the “provocative and lascivious” fonduta served in Ferrara, yet I somehow managed to keep my clothes on.

In The Seducer’s Cookbook, a wiser Auntie Mimi leads equally inexperienced innocents through such perplexing moments: “If you cannot get frankfurters or sausages that are truly skinless,” she warns, “peel them before slicing.”

Sage advice is also provided for planning a menu to seduce another woman’s husband. Baked oysters and beef in lemon-parsley butter are necessary — along with restraint — because, Mimi wisecracks, “he can get home-cooked food anytime and maybe that’s what he’s bored with.” After the filet, “he may feel so at home he’ll slip right into bed with you without ever noticing the difference.”

Ouch!

As for the seduction of ones’ own spouse, Mimi yawns, “God knows it’s convenient — no running around at odd hours with strangers, no need for subterfuge, no getting out of warm beds on cold nights to go home… ”

HAVE YOU HEARD THE ONE about the traveling salesman and the beet farmer’s daughter? Yes, all of this does have a certain ‘take my wife, please’ quality — yet Mimi Sheraton is a meticulous and very tasty (pun intended) food writer. She can be elegant and specific: “Give her a big balloon-shaped goblet full of a golden dry vermouth, with one piece of ice and a long curl of orange peel… ” and “…untended meat burned black as charcoal, so that it looked like some fossil unearthed from the ruins of Pompeii.”

Sheraton also provides full menus lovingly laid out as a course of action for weakening the resistance of your prey — as well as reviving those who have suffered “a surfeit of food, attention, and you.”

SUNDAY BREAKFAST
Grilled orange slices with brown sugar and butter
Scrambled eggs with caraway seeds and pan-fried ham slices aromatic with ginger
Freshly baked corn sticks with sweet butter and cottage cheese,
honey or orange marmalade
Coffee, and plenty of it

Surprisingly, Sheraton’s most instructive — and endearing — writing appears buried in the text of her recipes with recommendations to apply toppings “over the asparagus, spreading nuts with the back of a spoon;” “dry the meat and wipe it with a cloth dipped in brandy;” and, “sprinkle with a few chopped pecans if you have them around.”

From Sheraton’s In My Mother’s Kitchen: Recipes & Reminiscences, the charming note that “soup should cook at a smile,” is a personal favorite.

MIMI SHERATON IS A SERIOUS WRITER. The provocative and commercial quality of her early work accurately reflects a time when suggestive (if not downright dirty-minded) artists like Lenny Bruce and Alan Sherman became money-making recording stars in the league of a 1960s-era Barbra Streisand.

Sheraton is now the respected author of sentimental cookbook shelf classics like Visions of Sugarplums, The German Cookbook, and The Whole World Loves Chicken Soup — but she also co-wrote Borscht-Belt comedian Alan King’s bio, Is Salami & Eggs Better Than Sex?

After discovering Sheraton’s The Seducer’s Cookbook, I’m wondering if her sequel to The Bialy Eaters might not turn out to be Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Borscht, But Were Afraid To Ask.

After all, good food, served in appropriate ways, never goes out of style; and no matter what’s on the menu, Mimi Sheraton scores.

[Originally written for Jeannette Ferrary's workshop: Food for Thought]

BOULEVARD: The Cookbook had been on my “gotta get one” list for several years, and my dear friends Dorie and Greg just gifted me with a copy of the beautiful looking book.

Chef Nancy Oakes’ elegant restaurant is located in San Francisco’s Financial District and I can never turn down an opportunity to dine on the kitchen’s exceptional pork chops or handmade ravioli. This over-sized book’s luscious photographs make me eager to return for another meal, which seems to be the concept behind the book’s creation. As co-authored by Oakes and Pamela Mazzola, I am not inspired to make this food at home. The text for the author’s Spiny Lobster Paella even admits that “at Boulevard we have complicated this simple, rustic dish by applying our own restaurant logic… ” “Complicated” is exactly the word for recipes written in dauntingly convoluted paragraph form. Even when the technique is fairly straightforward, as with the recipe for Cider-Brined Berkshire Pork Loin Chops (one of my favorite dishes on the restaurant’s menu), gathering all 36 separate ingredients together is off-putting.

The authors go on to state that “for us, one of the great pleasures of dining out is finding a dish on a menu that we would never, ever think of preparing at home.” Fine dining is, indeed, one of life’s most pleasing extravagant pleasures. Yet going back home and succeeding in creating something just a bit close to the original can be equally rewarding. We learn from eating in good restaurants just as we learn from reading good books — and those lessons learned can continue to enrich our lives for decades.

So while I am happy that my private cookbook library now includes Boulevard: The Cookbook, I doubt I will ever cook from it. I will, however, continue to add food stains to these great restaurant cookbooks which are indispensable in any home cook’s kitchen:

Henry Chung’s Hunan Style Chinese Cookbook

The Chez Panisse Cafe Cookbook

Fog City Diner Cookbook

The Olives Table

Back to Square One

City Cuisine

Moro

Brennan’s New Orleans Cookbook

The Green’s Cookbook

Coyote Cafe

I HAVE A WEAKNESS for cookbooks that go beyond simply explaining how to make chicken soup. If the author includes family or cultural memories, I’m usually ready to hand over my credit card.

Judy Bart Kancigor’s Cooking Jewish: 532 Great Recipes from the Rabinowitz Family is a cultural goldmine. The author interviewed over 300 family members who contributed both recipes and memories to her literary mixing bowl.

Admittedly, before picking up this book, my experience with Jewish cooking was limited to matzo ball soup mix and occasional forays into New York City’s lower east side or the Fairfax district in LA. After reading Judy’s words, I now know that leaving pine nuts untoasted is “lifeless and dull… like a limp handshake,” a “mishpuchah” is a member of your extended family (whom you break a glass with), and salmon makes an excellent gefilte — ground and seasoned — fish.

I can’t wait to try the author’s recipes for “Hoppel-Poppel” (eggs with browned salami and onion), “Schmaltz & Gribenes” (chicken fat and onion), and “Beef Gulyas” with more chicken fat, onions, paprika and caraway seeds!

You won’t soon find me, however, whipping up a bowl of Rabinowitz Family Tumult:

Recipe for Tumult*
1. Take one young husband with ripe young wife,

2. Fill with desire and knead for a son,

3. Add one tiny daughter, repeat 3x,

4. Crush hope well after each addition.

5. Expectations rising, at long last a son!

6. Results so delicious, double the batch.

*Copyright 2007, Judy Bart Kancigor/Workman Publishing Company, Inc.