Paper Palate

Three new books promise to satiate all the foodies who clip recipes from newspapers, print off endless pages from food blogs, and clutter their kitchens with piles of magazines and cookbooks. The stalwart Best American Series (the final word on everything from short stories to nonrequired reading) has put out The Best American Recipes each year since 2000; now the editors Fran McCullough and Molly Stevens have distilled their all-time favorites from those books into The 150 Best American Recipes: Indispensable Dishes from Legendary Chefs and Undiscovered Cooks. Another new compilation that touches on the same subject but with a personality all its own is Digital Dish: Five Seasons of the Freshest Recipes and Writing from Food Blogs Around the World, the first book from independent publisher Press for Change. The Travelers’ Tales books (which compile essays, reports, and love letters about foreign lands) have given The Best American Travel Writing a run for its money for several years, and TT’s new collection The World Is a Kitchen: Cooking Your Way Through Culture deserves some shelf space next to the world’s great anthologies.

The 150 Best American Recipes is a cornucopia of glossy pages, artfully styled photographs, and faultless recipes that were painstakingly tested in the home kitchens of the book’s two James Beard Award-winning editors. The Best American team shelled out for a fancy presentation, but this is hardly an elitist publication. McCullough and Stevens culled recipes from websites like The Food Maven and free flyers like the Whole Foods Holiday Entertaining Guide, as well as high-profile cookbooks like Suzanne Goin’s Sunday Suppers at Lucques and major magazines like Bon Appetit and Gourmet. I was delighted to see caterer Mindy Heiferling, a long-time family friend, featured for her “Amazing Five-Hour Roast Duck.” Other readers will surely find great satisfaction with Alice Waters’s coleslaw, Mark Bittman’s Spanish-style shrimp, or some of the dozens of additional recipes from the “undiscovered cooks” touted on the book’s cover.

The laudable recipe collection Digital Dish has a narrower focus: only recipes published on food blogs are included. Publisher and Editor Linderholm selected the passionate online ramblings of twenty-four bloggers, including the writers of Accidental Hedonist, Il Forno, Meathenge, and Spiceblog. The book’s back cover boldly displays the statement, “Once the best food writing and recipes were in cookbooks and magazines. Not anymore.” Considering the inclusiveness of mainstream publications like The 150 Best American Recipes, the us-against-them attitude may be unnecessary. Still, food blogs are a medium unto themselves, and Digital Dish marvelously captures their confidently casual character. The book takes a linear approach, following stand-out blog posts from the summer of 2003 until the summer of 2004. Recipes ranging from Gumbo du Monde to Scotch Fillet in a Blue Cheese and Beer Marinade to Grapefruit Marmalade show the breadth of the featured bloggers, but each post has in common a refreshingly personal relationship between writer and reader.

In her touching introduction to The World Is a Kitchen, Susan Brady (a food blogger herself) explains that when she was hired by Travelers’ Tales fourteen years ago, she had hardly traveled at all. As an editor during those early days at the publishing company, she relied on exotic recipes to understand foreign cultures. Since then, Brady’s culinary and editorial endeavors have taken her everywhere from New Orleans to Taipei, and her coeditor, Michele Anna Jordan, is a whirlwind who developed a love for rare prime rib on the California Zephyr, led her family to San Francisco to taste Dungeness crab as a small child, and learned very early on how to make authentic chapattis in India. Together, Brady, Jordan, and thirty-six other food writers (from first time authors to heavy-weights like Gourmet’s Kemp Minifie) have created a culinary atlas that reveals the indigenous plants of Mexico, the all-powerful spices of India, and the other-worldly shellfish of Australia. The entries in The World Is a Kitchen are presented as essays (some with accompanying recipes, some without), making the book a wonderful literary supplement to The 150 Best American Recipes and Digital Dish. The final chapter, outlining cooking schools and culinary tours, sends readers to look for more world-class meals on their own.