The 2009 SAVEUR 100
50, 51 Cook's Library
For all things fish related, we've found no better source than RICK STEIN'S COMPLETE SEAFOOD (Ten Speed Press, 2004), a handsome, amply illustrated volume that details the selecting, handling, and cooking of every species imaginable. Stein, a British chef and teacher, has helped us become as comfortable with hake and lobster as we are with carrots and potatoes.
Good technique is rooted in an understanding of ingredients and how they work; no book teaches that better than LA VARENNE PRATIQUE (Crown, 1989) by the renowned cooking teacher Anne Willan. From showing how to peel a mango to how to slice onions the right way, this is an empowering tome, illustrated with hundreds of step-by-step photographs. — Nach Waxman
owner of the Kitchen Arts & Letters bookstore in New York City
52, 53, 54, 55, 56, 57, 58 Tools
The proper kitchen implement can transform even the most banal cooking task into a pleasurable activity. Here are seven that deserve to be permanent residents of every home cook's tool drawer.
The thin, flexible NOGENT CLASSIC KITCHEN SPATULA slips easily under delicate items like fish filets and turns them without breaking them. Since it's both slotted and heatproof, it's also ideal for extracting food from frying oil.
The utilitarian, Swiss-made R. H. FORSCHNER BY VICTORINOX CHEF'S KNIFE sells for about half the price of other popular chef's knives. The rosewood handle is lightweight, and the high-carbon stainless-steel blade is easy to sharpen.
Invented by a Swiss army veteran named Alfred Neweczeral in the 1940s, the ZENA STAR ECONOMY PEELER is still the sharpest and most comfortable one we've found. A nifty U-shaped attachment near the blade removes potatoes' eyes with a flick of the wrist.
Long-lasting stainless-steel WÜSTHOF KITCHEN SHEARS are indispensable for a wide range of kitchen tasks. They're muscular enough to separate a whole chicken into its parts and refined enough to snip delicate herbs and salad greens.
When we need a perfect julienne, we turn to the German-made BÖRNER THIN JULIENNE CUTTER, which is far safer to use than a traditional mandoline, rests securely atop a bowl, and produces utterly uniform pieces.
The heavy-duty silicone RUBBERMAID HIGH HEAT SCRAPER AND SPATULA can be used for tasks like scraping out a bowl, frosting a cake, or folding egg whites into a batter, and with its exceptional heat resistance (up to 500 degrees), it also comes in handy while you're sautéing.
A simple stainless-steel coil wrapped around a curved wire, the diminutive COMBRICHON "MAGIC" SPOON MINI WHISK is dandy for scraping up caramelized bits from a saucepan's hard-to-reach corners and for whisking drizzles of cream or eggs into sauces.
59, 60 Cook's Library
For dependable recipes for the basic breads of the world (more than 300 of them, from Russian black bread to French sourdough), we cherish Bernard Clayton's The COMPLETE BOOK OF BREADS, first published by Simon & Schuster in 1973 and available in a revised edition from 2003. We've always found Clayton, a retired magazine reporter and serious hobbyist baker who turns 95 this year, a wise and comforting guide.
We know of no dessert book more comprehensive, helpful, and assured than IN THE SWEET KITCHEN by the Canadian pastry chef Regan Daley (Random House, 2000). Daley demystifies ingredients—there are 14 pages on eggs, 25 on flour, 19 on fats—and the mastery of techniques. The recipes are outstanding, from one for shortbread to one for an exquisite nectarine tart.— Nach Waxman
owner of the Kitchen Arts & Letters bookstore in New York City
62 Seasoned Start
The French have their mirepoix, a flavor base of minced onions, carrots, and celery sweated in butter and oil. The Italians rely on a similar mixture, called battuto. But few flavoring bases are so intensely flavored as Puerto Rico's SOFRITO, a piquant paste of onions, peppers, chiles, garlic, and herbs that cooks fry in oil before adding other ingredients to make soups, stews, and dishes like rice with pigeon peas. The seasoned starter becomes a vehicle for flavor, carrying the essence of the chiles and herbs throughout the dish. We're so crazy for sofrito that we make large batches to keep in our refrigerator, at the ready for stirring into sauces, adding to vinaigrettes, or rubbing over chicken before roasting. We also take cues from Puerto Rican cooks who freeze it in ice cube trays, then thaw a portion whenever they need it to add depth and spice to a dish.
63 Fire with Flavor
Supermarkets these days sell hot sauces of every hue and Scoville heat unit rating, with names like Mad Dog's Revenge and Wanza's Wicked Temptation. Some are good; others sacrifice flavor for heat. Our recipe for HOMEMADE HOT SAUCE, however, is in a league of its own. A purée of chiles and salt aged in vinegar, this fiery yet fruity condiment made in the manner of the traditional Louisiana version, a 19th-century invention that evolved out of Mexican, English, West African, and Caribbean preparations popular since the colonial era. We drizzle it on eggs and grits, stir it into gumbo, spike salsa with it, and run out of it way too fast.
64 Giving Back
I was 11. Gerald Ford was in office. We were in a restaurant on Second Avenue in New York City. The place was empty except for another couple and their kids. "It's Newman," my mother whispered. "Don't stare, for God's sake," my father said. I slurped my fettuccine alfredo. "Don't slurp," my father said. "But they're slurping," I replied, motioning to the kids at Newman's table. They could have been any family, but they weren't. And their father wasn't just any man. And yet, to those who knew him, PAUL NEWMAN, who passed away in 2008, was just a regular guy, deeply devoted to his adopted hometown of Westport, Connecticut, where he lived for nearly 50 years. A tinkerer in the kitchen who liked to do his own grocery shopping, the Hollywood actor seated across from my family all those years ago would go on to become one the world's greatest culinary philanthropists—and a staunch ally of millions of harried home cooks with taste but no time. One Christmas, the story goes, he gave his neighbors bottles of homemade salad dressing, and Newman's Own was invented. What followed was a line of ready-made pasta sauces, salsas, marinades, and more, all born of Newman's love of simple food and his abiding belief in giving as good as you get. Newman didn't need the money, so he donated all his profits to charity—over $250 million, to date. In 2006 Newman cofounded a restaurant in Westport called the Dressing Room. His favorite meal there? "The PL Newman burger," the Dressing Room's chef, Michel Nischan, told me recently. "Cooked medium rare, with cheddar and grilled onions." Regular grub for a regular guy who turned food into pleasure for millions. —Elissa Altman, a blogger at the Huffingtonpost.com
65 Brave New World
We love our broken-backed cookbooks and our recipe boxes stuffed with index cards, but the truth is that these days many home cooks are taking inspiration from the Internet as often as they are from paper and ink. And that poses an interesting problem: short of printing out and filing away every online recipe that piques your interest or creating a bookmark drop-down menu on your browser that's a mile long, how do you conveniently store, organize, and share your electronic recipes? Enter our favorite Web development in recent memory: ONLINE RECIPE-MANAGEMENT TOOLS. Software packages such as MacGourmet (macgourmet.com) and BigOven (bigoven.com) save and catalogue recipes in formats that allow users to sort and search by theme ("family meal", say) or ingredient ("fennel bulbs"); to e-mail recipes with ease; to print recipes onto index cards or preformatted recipe book pages; and, in some cases, to upload recipes to an iPod or a PDA. Some of them let you rescale recipes to make bigger or smaller quantities, convert measurements to or from metric, and compile shopping lists of ingredients you'll need. We've also gotten hooked on Delicious (delicious.com); no, it's not a food blog or a recipe tool. It's a "social bookmarking" site that lets you collect online bookmarks (in our case, for recipe pages) from all over cyberspace, share them with others, and see what recipes like-minded users have discovered out there in the boundless banquet that is the World Wide Web.
Warren Bobrow
http://www.wildriverreview.com/wildtable
Contributing Editor