As the previous post suggests, it may be sour times for the publishing industry, what with built in bookcases being foreclosed on, and a tank of gas running as much as an artfully smutty coffee table book. The Gurgling Cod is about solutions, and to that end, the side content has been tweaked -- new food books that come in the mail, which I have not had time to review yet, will go in the helpfully descriptive list "New Books."
To start chipping away at the backlog, I'll start with one of the weirdest -- Things Cooks Love. The name Marie Simmons appears on the cover, but not as prominently as Sur La Table, which is the animating spirit behind this rather beefy tome.
The premise of Things Cooks Love is perverse. Most cookbooks operate on the premise that there is something you want to do -- make tasty Moroccan dishes at home, or baguettes that are not chewy and flaccid, or use all the tomatoes you grew. Most cookbooks will then indicate the ingredients, techniques, and equipment you need to reach these goals. Because Sur La Table is in the equipment business, the approach is backwards -- what can you do with that mandoline of yours? Thus there are sections with names like "mortar and pestle recipes," and "immersion blender recipes."
On a planet where one stands in the middle of the kitchen, mezzaluna in hand, and cries aloud "what is to be done?" TCL makes perfect sense. Come to think of it, there is such a world -- the world of the newlywed. If you know young lovers who have run hog wild on the registry at Sur La Table, or Williams-Sonoma, or a similar place, this book might help allay the guilt at having asked for a bunch of stuff they are not quite sure what to do with.The receipts themselves seem fine -- a little bit jazzy, in the manner of the big orange Bon Appetit cookbook that dropped a Christmas or two ago -- to sell a few more molcajetes and tagines, there are various ethnic subsections. A newly affianced friend of mine was fond of the expression "wedding-industrial complex," and TCL is the ultimate realization of a corrolary philosophy of the kitchen-as-Pentagon.
*It is bad luck, but maybe not undeserved, while this book was in press that Stuff White People Like became the most popular site on the internet not featuring pictures of ex-mousketeer vaginas. Certainly "stuff from Sur La Table" merits the SWPL seal.
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