Book Review — Happy in the Kitchen

I thought it might be fun to start a new review section of this blog, in which I sketch some thoughts on certain cookbooks that have caught my attention for whatever reason. Because this blog is all about breakaway cooking — that is, getting innovative, lively, and above all tasty dinners on the table with as little fuss as possible using flavors and ingredients from around the world — I will definitely look toward how well the books I choose to review fit into the breakaway scheme of things, but I’ll also look for ideas, techniques, gear, anything at all that might lead us down prominent-looking alleys.

So let’s kick it off with Michel Richard’s extraordinary Happy in the Kitchen, published by Artisan, surely the handsomest cookbook publisher in the world .

If we’re looking for a book for casual home cooks who just want to get dinner on the table with a minimum of hassle and time, it’s hard to imagine a more inappropriate book. Many, and possibly most, of the recipes in the book are almost ludicrously complicated, and are often comprised of nested recipes within recipes that ask the reader to prepare three or even four recipes found in the book as part of another recipe! Meta-recipes, if you will. Richard, chef-owner of DC’s Citronelle (among other restaurants) and one of the more innovative and prominent chefs working today, is obviously quite used to having an army of 20-year-olds perform the dozens of labor and time-intensive prep work required to make these fine and no-doubt delicious dishes. And, with many recipes calling for 4 to 16 tablespoons of butter, plenty of heavy cream, bacon, bacon fat, and melted cheese, this is not a book the American Heart Association is going to get behind.

So why do I like this book so much, and why bother with a review? Because Richard is an utter maniac in the kitchen, where he is quite clearly deliriously happy. The book is full of so many unique ideas it’s hard to summarize them, but, of the dozens of new (to me) ideas, consider just a few:

• Tomato water — puree five pounds of bruised, overripe tomatoes, place in a fine colander, and let it all drip for a day. Reduce by half in a saucepan. Or, even better, if you need a small amount of tomato water in a hurry, place the tomato puree in a French coffee press and press the solids to the bottom! Use the water to poach fish, as a light stock, etc. I’m betting it would make terrific rice.
• Miso broth — 2 cups miso, 10 cups water, simmer and strain, let it settle, only use the clear broth.
• Ginger remoulade
• Wacky cuttlefish schnitzel: puree the cuttlefish, shape it with plastic wrap (one of his favorite kitchen tools), bread it, and fry it!
• Roll meat and veggies in plastic wrap to form logs (one of his favorite shapes), freeze, and slice in new ways (he loves his meat slicer for this purpose)
• Use a benriner to finely dice potatoes
• “Virtual” fried rice, made with potatoes
• Sweet pea, basil, potato puree
• Snow pea linguine (no pasta)

And on and on! Happy in the Kitchen reinvents just about everything, but he especially delights in completely new ways to think about the most mundane of vegetables, in particular potatoes (he seems obsessed, in the best possible way, with potatoes), but also carrots, corn, beets, and tomatoes. Same goes for chicken, fish, beef, lamb, and pork.

The photography, by the incomparable Deborah Jones, is so inviting and fresh it’s surreal. She somehow is able to convey Richard’s ideas, innovations, playfulness, and sheer love of his craft. How does she do it?

One last reason I’m attracted to Michel Richard and his style of cooking, impossible as it might be to the great majority of home cooks — he exemplifies and personifies the best of all reasons to bother with cooking at all: it makes him very happy to do so, and the love spills out on every page. It’s almost Buddha-like in its devotion to sweetness and light. No matter if you never make a single dish from the book: you’ll walk away with the most important cooking lesson of all — that cooking with love is really the only way to make really great food. That love, plus his insane techniques, risk-taking, and breathtaking innovation all add up to a rather heady reading experience. We could all get a little happier in the kitchen by reading this book.