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Restaurants are not home kitchens. An obvious statement, yet a pertinent one in the cookbook ecosphere.
Too many cookbooks from restaurants or chefs are impassable for the everyday cook. Their recipes, in order to conjure a restaurant’s dishes, often require an array of complicated sub-recipes. This tracks for restaurant cooking, where much of the preparation is done in advance so that the cooking done during lunch or dinner service is more akin to assembling. More working ahead equals food getting to the guests faster.
Home cooking, on the other hand, demands real-time success with minimal — if any — advance cooking. “Six Seasons: A New Way with Vegetables,” by Joshua McFadden and Martha Holmberg, is one of the rare chef books that provides a window into why restaurant food is so delicious, with applicable tools you can exercise in your own kitchen.
Season like you mean it
The cooking at the best restaurants tastes good. That is because chefs have acquired tricks and a personal style to bring out the best in their ingredients. One of McFadden’s signature moves, for example, is to season his salads with salt and acid before adding oil. This is a 180-turn from the standard salad-making format, in which you dress the salad with salt and oil first, then add either vinegar or citrus to taste.
McFadden’s salads whir with vibrant life. Consider the celery salad with dates, almonds and Parmigiano. The celery stalks are sliced on an angle and then soaked in ice water so they become all-the-crisper. They are then drained and added to a bowl with chopped toasted almonds, chile flakes, chopped dates and a thump of lemon juice. The reader is instructed to season the mixture with salt and pepper and adjust the seasonings so that, as the intro to the “Six Seasons” notes, the salad tastes “like a potato chip. Meaning so tasty and savory that you can’t help but take one more bite … and another.” Then and only then is the olive oil and shaved Parmesan added. This kind of salad-making detonates, an eruption of bright vegetable fireworks.
McFadden’s innovative techniques appear in endless guises across the book, which is organized into six sections that correspond to his framing of the six growing seasons: spring; early summer; midsummer; late summer; fall; and winter. Each chapter is then divided into subchapters by the vegetables that grow during that season and recipes to illuminate those vegetables. Cauliflower is roasted and mixed with plums, yogurt and sesame seeds. Fresh corn is tossed with walnuts, scallions, mint, lime and Pecorino Romano. Potatoes are baked, then crushed and fried with garlic, rosemary and thyme and finished with lemon juice.
An able assist
McFadden is a virtuosic cook; that means nothing to a reader without an agile translator. His co-author, Martha Holmberg, is a veteran food writer who has been entrenched in the recipe world for decades. Her ability to convert technique into practicability is the book’s covert weapon.
She insists on precise measurements when appropriate; other times she calls for a “healthy glug” of olive oil. She tells you all the cues you need to know when the garlic for wilted kale is ready: “cook slowly to toast the garlic so it’s very soft, fragrant and nicely brown — but not burnt.”
With Holmberg’s sure hand and McFadden’s exceptional vegetable prowess, you can cook your way across six seasons, 41 vegetables and nearly 400 pages and never encounter a single recipe that flops.