Cookbooks That Have Strongly Influenced Breakaway Cooking

I somehow forgot to mention here that a month or so ago the surreally talented Heidi Swanson of 101 Cookbooks ran a short piece on a handful of the cookbooks that have had an unusually strong influence on my cooking. The full article can be read here, but let me paste the main part below for quick reference. There are in fact many more cookbooks I cherish and use, and one day I’ll get around to cataloging them, but for now here are a few. As an exercise I would love to expand on each one, and may do that if I hear from you that that would be a worthwhile endeavor.

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• Gray Kunz (with Peter Kaminsky), The Elements of Taste. My vote for the most creative, interesting, and ground-breaking cookbook of all time. Kunz considers thinking about taste in the traditional five ways – sweet, sour, salt, bitter, and umami ­– to be a pathetically primitive way to understand great food, especially the preparation of it. He has about 15 ways to think about taste, complete with groupings like Tastes that Pull (tangy, vinted, bulby, floral/herbal, spice aromatic, funky), Tastes that Push (salty, sweet, picante), Tastes that Punctuate (sharp, bitter), and Taste Platforms (garden, meaty, oceanic, starchy).

• Deborah Madison and Ed Brown, The Greens Cookbook. I cut my teeth on zen cooking, and really recommend it. I grew up in a meat-centric (actually wild-game-centric) household, and when I learned about how zen monks cook and eat vegetables and grains, it changed everything for me. I consider this book the best of the lot, which would include all the Tassajara books and other zen cuisine books.

• Jeremiah Tower, Jeremiah Tower Cooks — It’s not so much the recipes in this collection that inspire, it’s Tower’s utter conviction in absolutely everything he does and says. There is no falliblism with Tower; it’s unthinkable to him to cook a dish in any way but the way he has devised, tinkered with, and thought about. There is a great deal of information for people who really want to learn how to cook well, all infused with Tower’s considerable panache.

• Robert Wemischner, The Vivid Flavors Cookbook. This guy has broken away so far he’s coming out the other side! A wildly creative, boundary-smashing, bold and daring book full dishes that pop, pop, and pop some more. His writing style (not to mention recipe titles) can be cloying, and many of the recipes are very labor-intensive, but my hat is off to his originality and sheer nerve.

• Jerry Traunfeld, The Herbfarm Cookbook, and the The Herbal Kitchen. Traunfeld is the undisputed King of Herbs — he uses them, usually in large quantities, in everything, and everything seems to taste better as a result. The main influence in my own heavy reliance on herbs to deliver flavor and to keep things on the lighter side.

• Michael Field, All Manner of Food. The fussiness and sheer arrogance of Field’s books make Tower look like a wilting wallflower, but there is so much to learn from him that it’s like a complete culinary school education wrapped in one volume. Long out of print but easily found on the net.