Books Worth Buying: October’s Best Food and Drink Releases

Cooking From The Heart

by John Besh

Among New Orleans’ more established restaurants, John Besh’s August has long offered relief from the city’s traditional food. It's not that August isn’t traditional; Besh, the owner of nine restaurants in New Orleans and elsewhere, is a bayou-born chef with a love for Louisiana foodways, and he cooks as good a trout Pontchartrain as anyone. But the elevated Continental bent of August’s menu has, for a dozen years, set it apart. With Besh’s new book, Cooking from the Heart, we learn how that sensibility took hold. The cookbook chronicles his European stages, detailing the skills his French and German mentors taught him, and offering the recipes he adopted from them. Reading Besh’s glowing portraits of German chef Karl-Josef Fuchs, Provencal chef Alain Assaud, and others, and cooking the dishes he learned from them, you understand him as a chef who has used the happy lessons of his European sojourns to refine his native cooking.

There’s a gorgeous rusticity and lustiness to recipes such as slow-cooked rabbit with creamy rosemary turnips or clams and sea snails marinière that speak to his Cajun sensibilities. (Besh likes to get his hands dirty; check out the photos of him making wild boar’s head pâté.) But behind each dish there are also well-honed haute techniques, which Besh passes on in carefully photographed step-by-steps for making classics such as potato gnocchi, soupe de poissons with rouille, and clafoutis. Like August, the book is a sophisticated crowd-pleaser. When I prepared the sardines escabeche, the dish turned out beautifully, all strewn with colorful just-pickled peppers and onions and full of a melange of flavors—briny, herbaceous, spicy, acidic, sweet. It felt both accomplished and effortless—and it tasted wonderful. There’s not much more you could want from cooking lessons with a great chef besides that. —Betsy Andrews

Available October 29 from Andrews McMeel Publishing; $40.00
Buy Cooking from the Heart: My Favorite Lessons Learned Along the Way

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Duck, Duck, Goose

by Hank Shaw

Waterfowl isn't something I cook at home; the thought of acquiring and preparing a duck or goose usually seems like a chore I don't want to undertake. In his newest cookbook, Hank Shaw, creator of the James Beard Award-winning food blog Hunter, Angler, Gardener, Cook, sets out to convince people like me otherwise. After perusing his step-by-step guides on breeds, tutorials on plucking and breaking down the birds, and recipes from all over the world, I've found myself much more willing to break free from “the tyranny of the chicken” and explore the realm of the fowl. Shaw regales us with tales from his hunting adventures—mishaps and all—as he shows us how to make recipes such as Laotian duck salad and succulent roasted goose breasts with orange and ouzo. Each recipe feels like a stepping stone to experimentation, inspiring me to cook these birds at home. —Helen Yin

Available October 1 from Ten Speed Press; $14.99.
Buy Duck, Duck, Goose: The Ultimate Guide to Cooking Waterfowl, Both Farmed and Wild

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Lidia’s Commonsense Italian Cooking

by Lidia Matticchio Bastianich and Tanya Bastianich Manuali

More often than not, I stay away from Italian cookbooks. Not because I don’t love Italian food, but rather because their promises of a rustic, convivial, family-style table tend to remain unfulfilled. But when I saw that Lidia Bastianich’s most recent cookbook had the word “commonsense” printed across its cover in big uppercase letters, I thought I’d give it a try. Lidia’s Commonsense Italian Cooking is a collection of 150 unpretentious recipes that stay true to Bastianich’s Italian heritage and make you feel like you're part of her family. Interspersed with cooking tips and anecdotes from her mother and grandmother’s kitchens, the easy-to-make recipes got me cooking in no time without requiring an absurd amount of skill—or money. Using nothing but basic ingredients, I whipped up the tastiest skillet eggs I’ve had in a long time, a tender eggplant and rice Parmigiana that was packed with flavor, a warming bread and basil soup, and a completely unexpected lettuce risotto. It's exactly what I've always wanted from an Italian cookbook. —Dominique Lemoine

Available October 15 from Knopf; $21.
Buy Lidia's Commonsense Italian Cooking: 150 Delicious and Simple Recipes Anyone Can Master

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Canal House Cooking, Volume 8: Pronto!

By Christopher Hirsheimer and Melissa Hamilton

As summer slides into early fall, the farmers' market is still teeming with invitations to cook: ripe-to-bursting last chance tomatoes, cheap zucchini by the armful, and eggplants piled to the sky. It’s also right around this time of year that I usually start to run out of ideas for what to do with it all, which is why I’m so thankful, this October, for the latest edition of Canal House Cooking, the cooking quarterly by Christopher Hirsheimer and Melissa Hamilton. The volume (titled Pronto!) is packed with simple, delicious recipes: tender cubes of eggplant in a bright, garlicky red wine vinegar marinade; tomatoes and basil cooked in olive oil then stirred into pasta with fresh mozzarella; zucchini tossed in an umami-rich anchovy and butter sauce—that are all perfectly tailored to the shifting season. —Karen Shimizu

Available October 29 from Andrews McMeel Publishing; $15.43.
Buy Canal House Cooking Volume No. 8: Pronto

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GQ Eats

Edited by Paul Henderson

It took me quite awhile to get past the cringeworthy subtitle of this cookbook ("The Cookbook for Men of Seriously Good Taste") and actually open it up. But I was pleasantly surprised to find that nothing in the book actually points to the ridiculous notion that our gender defines what we like to eat and cook; rather, it's a collection of exciting recipes from the best British restaurants. In a masterful two-page foreword, Heston Blumenthal points out that while British cuisine missed out on the creative explosion of the 1960s that put the U.K. on the cultural map, it caught up in the late 1980s, giving way to the sexy, fun and fashionable British food we know today. The rest of the 220 pages are an iconoclastic and inventive cookbook respectful of tradition and committed to British ingredients. The concise, creatively-written, and easy to follow recipes include truffled egg toast from Spuntino’s, bergamot-cured mackerel from Dinner, Wishbone's fantastic Japanese-inspired fried chicken nuggets, and coq au vin from Bar Boulud—all accompanied by ineffably cool photos from Romas Ford and Tom Schierlitz. With additional sections dedicated to desserts and cocktail hour, GQ EATS covers the essentials and then some. —Zainab Shah

Available October 8 from Mitchell Beazley; $22.
Buy GQ Eats

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Mast Brothers Chocolate

by Rick Mast and Michael Mast

Rick and Michael Mast, the bearded Iowa brothers behind Brooklyn bean-to-bar company Mast Brothers Chocolate, are probably the most famous faces in American artisan chocolate. In their first cookbook, Mast Brothers Chocolate: A Family Cookbook, they interweave personal narratives with recipes to take the reader through a journey about ethics, entrepreneurship, and of course, the cocoa bean. Minimalist photography accompanies simple, easy-to-follow recipes, from straightforward desserts including chocolate sauce and black & white cookies to more unexpected dishes, such as cocoa coq au vin and cacao nib scallops. I'll never look at chocolate the same way again. —Tesalia De Saram

Available October 22 from Little, Brown and Company; $24.
Buy Mast Brothers Chocolate: A Family Cookbook

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