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As a rule Julia Child was not an ungenerous person, but she could be less than bighearted when a favorite project was challenged. Such a project was the IACP (the International Assn. of Culinary Professionals) and its annual book awards. One year, first prize for best in field went to a book about how to make bread "in half the time" by using a microwave and food processor. Edward Behr, the Vermont-based founder, editor and principal contributor to the Art of Eating, a magazine devoted to the best in food and wine, wrote an unfavorable review, pointing out that the finest bread is made very, very slowly, building flavor over a period of days. Julia's judgment -- on Ed, not the book -- was unforgiving and dismissive: "Ed Behr is a cultist," she sniffed to me. "And he bakes cultist bread, too."
Cultist he may well be, but Ed has spent an astonishing 25 years turning out issue after issue, four times a year, of the Art of Eating, an endeavor that began life as an entirely self-composed newsletter and has morphed slowly, building flavor you might say, over the years into a full-scale quarterly magazine with contributions from others (including, occasionally, this writer). That publication is the source of this collection of recipes, selected by Behr and his wife, Kim, as the best and most representative over the years, and presented in a handsomely designed book "the Art of Eating Cookbook: Essential Recipes From the First 25 Years." What distinguishes the recipes is the same quality that sets the Art of Eating apart from all other food publications: a relentless focus on the qualities of good food (as well as wine, and occasionally beer) and how to achieve those qualities in a home kitchen. And like good, flavorful bread, that kind of focus takes time.
Recipes aren't molecular but ...
This is not food for the masses, although Welsh Rabbit, "the way [it] was prepared by my grandfather," is something familiar in American homes. Nor is it food from the culinary laboratories of molecular gastonomists -- Fish Quenelles are as close as he gets to the elaborate constructions of kitchen teams with Thermomix blenders and nitrogen tanks. But these are Quenelles de Brochet, made as in an old-fashioned haute-bourgeois restaurant or well-staffed home, with a panade and forcemeat, a puréed mousseline of fresh fish served with a coulis of crayfish or lobster. And the recipe for Rose Ice might require a full garden workforce to assemble two "lightly compressed" cups of highly scented rose petals from bushes grown without toxic chemicals.
Apart from fantasies like these, however, this is real food for real people, whether plain or fancy. It originates very specifically in Ed's Vermont kitchen, though its inspiration may come from restaurant chefs, domestic cooks and food producers (cheese-makers, wine and olive oil producers, et al.) whom he has met in his travels. I don't know this for a fact, but I suspect each recipe has been cooked over and over again, over a period of many years, and slowly elaborated into what is presented here with a confidence that it works and works right, that it makes the best whatever: Soupe a l'Oignon or Purée de Petits Pois (you can't get more basic than that), Caponata or Sautéed Chicken With Tomatoes and Olives, stemperata of swordfish or Pears Poached in Red Wine. He includes instructions for the very great focaccia from the Ligurian seaside town of Recco with its dough stretched as thin as any Greek phyllo, a difficult dish to achieve but worthy of the effort, as well as for Maryland Crab Cakes ("a purist's recipe," he says, and he should know since he grew up in Maryland) and a fundamentalist New England recipe for salt cod and potato cakes.
Collaboration with French-trained chef and master baker
A note about James MacGuire: He is not an "as told to" contributor but a Montreal-based French-trained chef and master baker, who has developed much of the information and the recipes for the section on charcuterie. It's an example of Ed's generosity that he gives this close friend full credit on the book's title page.
The Art of Eating has always been marked by Ed's scrupulous editorial hand. In each issue he turns a meticulous eye on dishes, ingredients, methods, people, ways of making cheese, of producing wine, of processing olive oil, of harvesting fish, of grazing animals whether beef cattle or humble chickens, in short, on everything that we put in our mouths that has pretensions to being delicious. And when I say "we," I mean, unashamedly, we descendants of a western European tradition of fine food, and especially the food of France and Italy, with an occasional excursion into England or Spain, and a more than occasional survey of what's going on in America.
While not everyone will want to struggle with the demanding steps of Quenelles de Brochet au Coulis d'Ecrevisses, or spend hours foraging the neighborhood for unsprayed rose petals, for those who love a kitchen challenge, these recipes are ideal. And for the rest of us, just reading about them is delicious!
Part cookbook, part autobiography
I love the fact that the book includes a recipe for calçots, Catalan blanched onion shoots that are only available for about three weeks in early spring and don't exist anywhere else in the world. I imagine the words exchanged with the editor of this book -- "well, if Americans can't get them, why the heck are you putting this in?" Simply, I hope Ed answered, "because they're interesting." And they are. Like the entire book. Even though it's presented as a conventional cookbook, this is really an autobiography, a life history of 25 years (and possibly many more) spent digging for fascinating stories and great recipes. I wish Ed 25 more years by which time he may be reduced to writing about pablum, but it will be the best pablum he can find and prepared in the most authentic manner to bring out the fine, true flavors of great pablum.
Cultist, perhaps, but the world of food writing would be well served with more cultists like Edward Behr.
Zester Daily contributor Nancy Harmon Jenkins is the author of several books, including "Cucina del Sole: A Celebration of the Cuisines of Southern Italy" and "The Essential Mediterranean." Her last piece for Zester was about Ligurian Pesto.
Photo: "The Art of Eating Cookbook" cover. Credit: Margot Dougherty
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