Bottom line first: Anyone interested in American food today, or over the past century and a half, is going to find much good cooking along with flashes of historical insight in "The New York Times Essential Cookbook," Amanda Hesser's ambitious if scatter-shot new compilation based on copious research in the paper's archives. (Full disclosure: I'm professionally acquainted with Hesser, had one longish discussion and a few e-mail exchanges with her during the writing, and see myself cited several times in the book.)
The scope of the Times "Essential" project is almost too big to take in. Hesser relates she first envisioned "a kind of 150-year flip book of American cooking" and ended up with "a cookbook that is genuinely unlike any other." (No false claim.) En route, she asked readers for favorite Times recipes, ransacked the archives from 1851 on, emerged with a huge spectrum of possibilities, whittled down the total through several years of testing together with assistant (later partner) Merrill Stubbs, and gathered the chosen material into 18 chapters. The recipes (each with the original author's byline) are arranged in chronological sequence with dates of publication carefully noted, so that a chapter may begin with, say, an 1877 "Orange Ice" and end with a 2009 "Tangerine Sherbet." Other attractions include a somewhat capricious historical timeline ("1957: Sweet‘N Low is trademarked"), snippets from readers' reminiscences, a section of menu suggestions (from "French Bistro" to "Southern Brunch") and lists of sources for hard-to-find items.
The flaws of the mammoth result are many and serious. In the end, though its merits are even greater.
Who's this 'we'?
Bad news up front: Only fitfully does Hesser acknowledge that Times food coverage and its purveyors can be depressingly parochial and naive; as she concedes at one point, "we have sometimes ignored — or even turned up our noses at — the way most Americans are cooking. "We," a pronoun she's fond of invoking, too often seems to be an insular coterie of food writers and editors, and the fashion-conscious readers attuned to every nuance of their dictates ("Without Brie, we might never have been ready for robiola, Epoisses, and the like ...").
Culinary chroniclers' glib appeals to some hazy "we" usually skate over unacknowledged us-versus-them divides that call to mind Tonto's "What do you mean we, white man?" And so it is here. American cookbook writers striving today for wide contemporary inclusiveness and long historical reach must be able to think themselves out of their own skins and into someone else's — to immerse themselves in a broad range of past and present sensibilities without condescending to other people. That capacity strikes me as Hesser's and "Essential's" biggest lack.
Case in point: It would be hard to guess from this Gotham-centric document either that first- and second-generation immigrants will shortly outnumber other New Yorkers (non-white residents already outnumber whites), or that the fact has anything to do with how people cook in the city. In recent years, Times food coverage, which used to be pretty weak on anything outside Manhattan foodie circles, has started acknowledging a more inclusive gastronomic "us" and paying far deeper attention to New York's demographically transformed culinary scene than Hesser does here.
The book's roughly 1,100 recipes cheerily bypass the breads or flatbreads of non-Western cuisines — no arepas, no nan, no pita. They wholly or nearly ignore the staff-of-life foods belonging to many ethnicities: yuca, true yams, plantains (one lone recipe), and plainly cooked rice, as opposed to a supposedly basic formula with a bouquet garni and three cups of chicken stock. They scarcely nod to lively immigrant enclaves sprung from Southeast and Central Asia, Korea, Russia, West and East Africa, Central and South America, the West Indies. When Hesser does gingerly venture into such unfamiliar territory as the archives' Chinese recipes, her instincts are unsure. Why patronize chicken wings in oyster sauce — a fine 1979 version whose only flaw is an easily remedied overdose of cornstarch — as a "comically Westernized" relic of dumber times, instead of the screamingly bizarre 1969 chicken breasts doused in an ounce of lemon extract?
A cultural astigmatism
When it comes to visiting more distant eras and their denizens, again Hesser often seems to have trouble taking "them" seriously. Deaf to the condescension implicit in such judgments as "crude but lovable" (of Indian pudding), she also has a habit of giggling over things that she hasn't taken the trouble to understand, like the idea of breakfasting on kidneys with mushrooms. (The dish wasn't some ghastly 1940s "flight of fancy," but for more than half a century a savory American, English and European favorite sometimes glorified as rognons aux champignons.)
Closer to the present, similar failures to check "our" perspective against other people's produce moments like a smug paean to the "new subtleties of preparation" with which restaurant chefs supposedly helped transform "home cooking as we neared the twenty-first century." Here "we" looks like anyone willing (on a chef's say-so in 1998) to use a whole bottle of dry white wine as a poaching medium for salmon and then throw it away.
There are rewards to be found
Luckily "Essential" also offers wonderful counterweights to its various failings. First of all, Hesser has unflinchingly risen to the task of combing through the paper's archives from stem to stern in search of worthwhile dishes. Though she firmly proclaims, "I'm not a food historian," her lack of chops in the scholarly research department oddly turns out to be an asset here, the sort of original spice that card-carrying specialists don't always bring to such materials.
The fun she has in the act of discovery is contagious. For instance her delighted realization that Boston baked beans (a 1937 version) used to be a sturdy, toothsome main dish instead of over-sweetened glop. Or that there's a lot to be said for rice croquettes (1877), tomato "jelly" (1907; actually a refreshing summer aspic) and unembellished succotash (1947). It's impossible not to share her delight at coming across "tomato figs" (1877; they're ripe tomatoes sugared and sun-dried to the consistency of dried figs) or a "peach salad" (1893) of sliced fruit tossed with Madeira, sugar and a few simple seasonings: "I discovered that you don't need pastry dough or cobbler or shortcakes to make peaches a full-fledged dessert."
Timid though "Essential" may be in its approach to non-Western cooking traditions, it does venture onto the larger scene long enough to explore the likes of Iraqi Passover beef stew with green herbs (1982), Vietnamese beef soup noodles (2004), Sri Lankan "hoppers" (crepe-like shells for various sauced dishes) and tuna curry (both 2004), and Laotian minced fish salad (2005). These examples scarcely represent the tremendous immigration-fueled culinary transformation of the city and the nation as increasingly recognized by the Times, but they're at least a sincere try.
More encouragingly, Hesser is a throwback to times when good cooks didn't apologize for loving cream and eggs. She also has a gift for unearthing old friends in unexpected guises: Saratoga potatoes in a 1902 version surprisingly using olive oil as the frying medium, lentil soup punched up with fresh ginger (1996), "sweet potatoes Anna" (2001) or a Chinese-descended Mississippi Delta family's stir-fried collard greens (2003).
Though "Essential" is essentially a recipe book, it wanders as far into other reportorial terrain as an 1878 log of a week's breakfast and dinner menus to the tune of $19.15 for "a Family of Four Persons with One Servant," or a hilarious description of Huey Long expostulating on the evils of the New Deal and the proper making of a Ramos gin fizz, followed by a reader's letter politely setting him straight on the second (1935). Hesser also clearly enjoys introducing readers to colorful or eminent long-ago contributors like the talkative though pseudonymous "Bob the Sea Cook" circa 1880 and the dedicated teacher Juliet Corson, head of the New York Cooking School at about the same time. (She does not aim for overly striking detail in describing most contributors of the last few generations, a lineup of personalities and egos that must have the makings of at least six novels.)
Destination: kitchen
The book's biggest reward is in the cooking and eating. Speaking as one who's long given up expecting anything but piffle from most new recipe books, I can gladly report that "Essential" more than proves itself in the kitchen. (This in spite of wishing to see more light shed on adaptations of early recipes that can't originally have specified "fleur de sel" or "72% (or higher) cacao chocolate.") Anybody could cook for it for months on end without monotony.
The aforementioned baked beans were a lesson in how baked beans ought to taste. Two Claiborne-era contributions were also winners: a creamy blender mousse of canned salmon (1961) and a useful spinach-enhanced meatloaf that I well remember from its original appearance as a tasty, cheap alternative to posher cousins in the recession-vexed year of 1974.
A quasi-Moroccan cold tomato soup (1991) marred by a harsh overload of raw celery would be well worth revisiting with a smaller dose. (Users should heed the author's advice to interpret directions with some personal horse sense.) Less problematic were an unctuous version of deviled eggs (1957; ignore the stated nine minutes cooking time and follow your own method) and a weird-sounding but glorious Australian take on scrambled — well, make that cream-suffused — eggs (2002). And please don't miss those "comically Westernized" Chinese chicken wings, which in fact are neither comical nor especially Westernized. The next of about a dozen items on my agenda: lamb hash from the old Delmonico's (1877) and a Turkish-inspired minted split pea soup (1997).
As you may have gathered, "The Essential New York Times Cookbook" is just about inexhaustible as a source of cooking ideas and remarkably rich as a portrait of New York's (and to an extent America's) varied kitchens over a long stretch of time. Hesser's success is a monument not to flawless historical perspective or the broadest possible cultural sympathies but to sheer undaunted, beyond-the-call perseverance in working her way through a great newspaper's confusing and unmapped culinary archives.
Anne Mendelson is a freelance writer and culinary historian who has written for various newspapers and magazines. She is the author of "Stand Facing the Stove" (a biography of the authors of "The Joy of Cooking"; Holt, 1996) and "Milk" (Knopf, 2008). The past recipient of honors including a fellowship at the Cullman Center of the New York Public Library and the Oxford Symposium's Sophie Coe Prize in Food History, she is currently working on a book about Chinese food in America with the assistance of a Guggenheim Fellowship.
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