The Foodist: Cookbook Reviews

Rozanne Gold comes from the enough is enough school. Enough with all the piled food, she says. Enough with food handled a dozen times before it gets to the plate. Enough with the sauce layered on sauce, with ingredient fighting with ingredient, ethnicity fighting with ethnicity. As she says in her introduction to the James Beard Award winning Recipes 1-2-3, she committed all those sins. But then she came to her senses. And she started to study food at baseline levels, like what exactly is the flavor of any given product, and how can that be encouraged?

Recipes 1-2-3, Gold is careful to point out, is not about minimalism even though she limits her recipes to three ingredients. "Consider a slow-braising leg of lamb with forty cloves of garlic in a wine-dark broth of Côtes du Rhone," she writes. "It takes only a few components of a recipe to trigger a cavalcade of flavors, sensations, and long-lost recollections - and once that is accomplished we should learn that enough is truly enough…"

Recipes 1-2-3 is not an I-hate-to-cook-book. Nor is it about fast food, or quick and easy dining. It is about shopping for the finest ingredients you can find and afford. When there's less it works more. It is about building up a pantry of flavor enhancers. By aiming for intense flavor while limiting herself to three components, Gold has been forced to eliminate any extra fat. So many of the dishes in Recipes 1-2-3 are low calorie.

The author divides her book by course, with all the recipes listed in the front of the book. Because seasonality and flavor go hand in hand, she provides menus according to the month. With each recipe she suggests little extras that might be added on, as well as wine suggestions.

You can serve elegant meals to the most sophisticated of guests from this book, and you can cook yourself a delicious dinner, too. It's all here. Delectable appetizers, intriguing soups and salads, main courses, desserts. And they all stop at three ingredients. The Brine-Cured Cornish Hens, Glazed Shallots and Parsnip Puree calls for cornish hens, shallots and parsnips. It's what you do with these ingredients that counts, and how you present them. Rosemary Roasted Potatoes calls for potatoes, fresh rosemary and olive oil (salt, pepper, and water are considered freebies).

This is an unusual book, and probably liberating for anyone who cares to take it in hand and work seriously with the author. A whole new range of intellectual possibilities can be found within these pages.
Schuyler Ingle ...