Oysters: Recipes that Bring Home a Taste of the Sea by Cynthia Nims

My wife and I spend a lot of time vacationing on the coast of Washington State, and one of the local visitor bureaus was recently bragging about a Washington author's oyster cookbook, so when I found it in the library 500 miles away, I was surprised, and immediately checked it out to...check it out.


Nims provides a great deal of information on the history, biology, and cultivation of oysters, and the many ways they can be prepared. In my years in the restaurant business, I think I've tried most of them, but there are always a few new twists to be found. I think a few of the tips and recipes she showcased may end up on my personal menu pretty soon.


To rewrite an old cliché, there are two types of oyster eaters; those who enjoy the fresh taste of the sea, and the delicate texture of a newly shucked oyster, and those who enjoy smothering the oyster with enough other distractions to ensure that they can forget they're actually eating one.


Come to think of it, there are a number of foods people regard that way.


Nims, however, is of the first sort, and in most of the recipes the ingredients are simply there to enhance in subtle ways the experience of slurping a succulent oyster. Raw oysters with mignonettes, relishes and granites, baked, grilled and smoked oysters, fried and sautéed, steamed and poached, they're all here.


I think a copy of this book may make its way to my kitchen shelves pretty soon.

The Connoisseur's Guide to Sushi by Dave Lowry

This is probably the most comprehensive guide to the art of Sushi in existence today. It is filled with facts and stories and appears to be the result of many years of research (probably not onerous at all) on the subject, from a man who has also written a book about martial arts etiquette. He relates just how meticulous and particular a good Sushi chef must be, in order to properly present even the correct rice. I suspect the package I pick up in the grocery store doesn't meet these standards.

"Sushi rice has to be just glutinous enough to stick together, but with each grain retaining its own identity, kind of like kids at a junior high school dance...It should have a glowing luster (tsuya), a pleasant stickiness (nebari), and the correct taste (aji)."

Sushi has been around for about eight hundred years, give or take, in some form or another, but it's really taken off all around the world in the last twenty.

"The history of wrapped sushi rolls, or maki sushi, goes back to the vegetarian cookery that evolved in 13th-century Kyoto temples. Buddhist monks there lived lives of piety, austerity, and rigid discipline, but they were not averse to a decent meal. They created the technique of wrapping or rolling foods in sheets of dried nori seaweed."

I always run into little tidbits where my life experiences and reading cross each other in the oddest ways.  On the topic of Oshi Sushi (pressed sushi):

"The Portuguese arived in Osaka around 1545 in galleons, or bateira. Even though this method of sushi preparation existed for hundreds of years before the Portuguese ships appeared on the scene, that's where battera sushi gets its name. The molds used for making it look like the Portuguese galleons."

My wife and I have friends in Portugal, and spent time there a few years ago, so we've seen a few bateira.

Lowry has a wry humor. Wry is even part of his name:

"Several restaurants in that city (Kyoto) now claim to have been the original purveyors of the dish (battera sushi), or have the original recipe, or to be descendants of someone who was a really, really good friend of a dishwasher in the Imperial Palace, or some such."

and

"Much like an Andy Warhol print, commercially produced sheets of nori have two sides. Unlike the Warhol, it is possible to reliably distinguish one from the other."

I must confess, however, that I was unable to finish the entire book. I was really only looking for a guide that would help me as a sushi novice to order more confidently; I really didn't need the graduate level course. If you do, however, I highly recommend Lowry's masterpiece.

On Food and Cooking, by Harold McGee

I'm putting this one up as a "twofer" today, since the other review I'm posting is a little brief.

I saw a reference to this book on another website (I'll hat tip it if my memory functions at some point), and thought it sounded quite interesting. Indeed, it is, but it's not something you just pick up and read through in one sitting. In fact, after having it checked out from the library for six weeks, I managed to only finish the first chapter! Sixty nine pages about milk, its history, its chemistry and its uses as a food product. I was about to start the egg chapter when I got the overdue notice from the libary.


This would be a fantastic textbook for people in a culinary arts class, or perhaps more of a reference book.

Just a couple of snippets of "fun" facts.

"If it's not too far gone, you can sometimes rescue a tightening cheese sauce with a squeeze of lemon juice or a splash of white wine."

"Eating cheese slows tooth decay...eaten at the end of ta meal, when streptococcal acid production is on the rise, calcium and phosphate from cheese diffuse into the bacterial colonies and blunt the acid rise."

One of these days, if I run across a copy of this book at a used book store, I'll have to grab it for my personal reference collection.

Great stuff, but not a quick ready by any stretch of the imagination.

My Life in France, by Julia Child

This autobiographical work by Julia Child is an absolutely fascinating look at an era and a cuisine that time has left far behind. Julia and her husband, Paul, who worked for the state department, were stationed in Paris, France for several years, beginning in 1948. While she was there, she developed an insatiable curiousity about French cuisine that lasted the rest of her lifetime. She studied at the Cordon Bleu first, then she and two of her friends started teaching their own classes, and began to write a book together, which became Mastering the Art of French Cooking, Volume I.

Child and her husband were later sent to Marseilles, where she continued to research the cuisine of that region, and eventually were pulled out of France and sent to Germany, then Norway before Paul's retirement in 1962. Everywhere she went, Julia made friends and enjoyed learning about their food and customs.
It helps a bit to either know a bit about French cuisine or read a bit of French while reading this book, as there are a number of phrases or names of dishes left untranslated from the language in the book, and it's fun to sort of puzzle them out as you go along.

I learned interesting little facts I would never have suspected, such as "the French have a 'crus' of butter, special regions that produce individually flavored butters. Beurre de Charentes is a full-bodied butter, usually recommended for pastry dough or general cooking; beurre d'Isigny is a fine light table butter."

Julia and her husband met so many interesting people. For example, she speaks of Hadley Mowrer, the "former Mrs. Ernest Hemingway...the mother of Jack Hemingway, who had been in the OSS during the war and was called Bumby." I have a friend who owns Jack Hemingway's ranch on the breaks of the Grande Ronde River, so this caught my eye. Then, a little later, "On June 25, Bumby Hemingway married Puck Whitlock...an attractive Idaho girl...she and Bumby had met in Sun Valley, Idaho, in 1946." An interesting little tie-in to Idaho history with a personal connection.

I also found out that a cheese such as Camembert must be served at exactly the right time. "If you asked for a Camembert, she would cock an eyebrow and ask at what time you wished to serve it: would you be eating it for lunch today, or at dinner tonight, or woudl you be enjoying it a few days hence? Once you had answered, she'd open several boxes, press each cheese intently with her thumbs, take a big sniff, and - voila! - she'd hand you just the right one. I marveled at her ability to calibrate a cheese's readiness down to the hour..."

Julia and I had certain experiences in common. When I was first married, I'd spent all day long creating a vegetable stock for a soup I was going to make later on. I called my wife on the phone and asked her to pour off the stock, straining out the vegetables, after it cooled. When I arrived home from work, I looked in the fridge for the stock, and it wasn't there. When I queried my wife, she said, "I poured it off. the vegetables are still in the strainer." She'd poured my stock down the drain! After one dinner party, when Julia allowed "the boys" to clean up, they mistook a large pot filled with veal stock she'd left on the floor for a garbage can, and scraped all the plates into it!

I rather liked a phrase of Paul's she quoted, when they were moving from France.  "If variety is the spice of life, then my life must be one of the spiciest you ever heard of. A curry of a life"

There's actually several good recipes included in this book, for three sauces, Hollandaise, Mayonnaise Leger, and Beurre Blanc. I'm going to have to try them out sometime. The hollandaise recipe has a little twist I've never tried before that might make it a bit quicker to make in large quantities, as when you have folks over for Eggs Benedict.

As a book nut, I found the following passage most amusing. "in the ...village of Moustier, we delivered - on behalf of the consulate - a stack of books to an elderly, self-taught librarian who had been patiently requesting printed matter for years. He kept all of the volumes in his musty, dark, one-room operation 'protected' by wrapping them in plain brown paper (thus obscuring the titles). The books were shelved on rough, hand-hewn planks, which reached to the ceiling and were accessible only by a rickety ladder that not even he dared to climb. Lacking a card catalogue, he had devised his own system: 'I organize the books by size!'' he proudly announced."

The book covers all the time the Childs spent abroad, as well as the period when Julia was developing her cooking show on tv, The French Chef, which I remember watching as a child, and time spent writing volume II of her cookbook. There are a ton of fascinating stories in here about people she met and befriended, places she visited and loved, and dishes she created and consumed. I think you'll love it, and as Julia always used to say, "Bon Appetit!"