Cookbook Review: the Art of Cooking with Vegetables, by Alain Passard

 

Jesse Sutton: Alain Passard is a badass.  That's a scientific fact.  He's a three-star chef in Paris, which is the most competitive city in the world for Michelin starred-restaurants. Only Tokyo has more, and Tokyo is like five times its size.  So there, I've done the math, Alain Passard is a badass.

However, this book honestly does not look particularly badass.  It's small, it's light, it has only 48 recipes, and its cover price is only $29.95.  Other contemporary three-star chefs have given us towering treatises on perfection (Thomas Keller), a comprehensive look behind the wizard's curtain (Grant Achatz), door-stopper tomes containing the keys to the haute cuisine castle (Alain Ducasse), mind-bending odes to scientifically charged playfulness (Heston Blumenthal), and exhaustive accounts of their entire oeuvre, season by season (Ferran Adria).  All awesome, and expensive, every one.  This, by comparison, looks like a matchbook, and was priced like a DVD It's Always Sunny boxed set at the used record store.

This is his only cookbook in English.  I'd gladly give over $75 for a real l'Arpege cookbook, but sadly, none is forthcoming.  Oh, well, at least this is only $29.99.  Wait, what?  It's out of print?  $280?!?!

Okay, so this book is rare.  I borrowed Nate's copy, read it, snapped a picture, and gave it the hell back.  I don't need someone else's $280 book in my kitchen.  But anyway, let's say you can find a copy kicking around for a reasonable price, at an estate sale, or whatever.  Is it any good?  Let's get into this.

The Concept: This book is, as the title may suggest, Passard giving favorite vegetable (and fruit) recipes.  He's always been known for his vegetable stylings (although it should be noted that his restaurant is not vegetarian, just vegetable-centric, which is a great way to be).  However, vexingly, there are no photos.  Instead, Passard has made a collage for every recipe.  You heard me right.  There's an image for each recipe, and zero information conveyed over any of them.  See the cover?  That's the illustration for the asparagus dish.  It's the most representational of all of them.  The rest look like a high school art student tried to make a picture of a salad, using rainbow construction paper and scissors.  They are pretty, but not at all helpful.  More on this later.  

The Specs: It's got 48 recipes, over 100 pages.  There are appetizers, salads, sides, and desserts.  Further extending the range, many dishes have simple steps to extend some dishes into entrees.  Not all of them, but enough that this book is actually quite versatile.  The recipes are arranged by season, which is a fantastic touch.  There is a beverage (usually wine) pairing with every recipe, another terrific touch.  There's stuff to love here.  However, it's all business.  There's not a lot about Passard's philosophy, or the restaurant, or much in the way of supplemental materials, i.e. the glossary is pretty thin.

What's Good: Actually, quite a bit.  I loved the seasonal set-up.  Great balance of different types of dishes (even if a quarter of them had beets in them).  As I said above, I love the fact that the dishes were arranged by seasonal appropriateness, and I loved the wine pairings.  (Even better, the wine pairings were esoteric and interesting.  Such esoteric pairings would have annoyed me in a more pedestrian cookbook, but this is Alain Passard, so I fully expected, and got, some really interesting pairing suggestions.  How about Cote Rotie with carrots glazed with soy, cinnamon, and basil?  How about Corsican Vermentino with baby turnips with lemon and pepper?  Or Condrieu with haricots verts dressed with white peaches and almonds?  Or a Pineau de Charentes [cognac-based liqueur] with melon and Fourme d'Ambert blue cheese?  And those were the ones I didn't even get to try!]. 

But beyond that, you know what was good?  The recipes!  Now, I was apprehensive at first.  They were vaguely written, sparse on detail, and generally pretty unorthodox.  That's a combination that has one anticipating doing a lot of adjusting on the fly, swearing, and throwing stuff away, but none of that ended up happening.  Instead, everything came out like it was supposed to.  I think.  No photos to check myself, but I was pleasantly surprised by some recipes, and downright amazed by others.  More on that below.

Note, and this isn't a knock, but these are definitely not 3-star recipes.  They are all relatively easy and simple, and don't have anything like the attention to detail you need to cook at that level.  However, I take no points off for this, because this book wasn't aspiring to be that at all.  

What Stinks:  Couple things.  First, the prose is awfully flowery.  A lot of Passard's menu descriptions read like a stoned 17-year-old art student’s descriptions of Monet, while trying to impress a Sarah Lawrence admissions official.  Luckily, they're short.  Also, the instructions are occasionally unclear.  It's kind of like trying to read the manual to a Nintendo game from 1989.  A fair, but not perfect, job has been done on translating it.  "Cut turnips into boat shapes."  That's it.  No photo.  One cryptic sentence.  There's a good bit of that.

Also, the recipes are oddly specific on some points, and totally vague on others.  They tell you how much butter to use, to the gram, every time.  But then you'll find it calling for '5 squares of chocolate.'  What size square?  Another recipe calls for one large melon.'  What kind of melon?  From the picture, it's either a Charentais or a canteloupe, but a large Charentais is half the size of a large canteloupe.  He tells you exactly how many millimeters to slice the eggplant, and then has you stewing whole plums and transferring them to the plate, without ever giving indication whether, or when, they should be pitted.  Give me something to work with, here, Al.

But the worst thing about this book, the worst, is the lack of photos.  I can't knock them for lack of effort.  The collages probably took more time than photos would have, especially when you consider that he has access to a professional kitchen.  But they aren't functional.  Photos in cookbooks look nice, but they also serve a function, especially in a high-end cookbook.  Sometimes a recipe has an instruction that is very difficult to put into words.  For instance, there was one instance where he called for a vegetable called 'red arrocha.'  What's that, you ask?  No idea.  The only reference I could find for it online was other readers of this book, looking for the same information.  Maybe it has another English name?  Perhaps a photo might have helped.  The asparagus and pear salad on page 24 just calls for 'asparagus.'  Not white asparagus.  There is a reference to it being 'ivory colored' in the recipe itself, but the collage was inconclusive.  Perhaps a photo could have helped?  The aforementioned turnips, cut into boat shapes.  A photo sure would have been helpful.  Cut pineapple into 'near-pyramid' shapes?  What the hell is a near-pyramid?  If you're going to be this vague in the recipe, photos are a must.  I could go on, but you get it.

Recipes Tested

New Potatoes with Arugula and Raspberry Vinegar:  I tried this recipe because of the intriguing combination of cumin, soy sauce, and raspberry vinegar.  What an odd combination!  It worked absolutely perfectly.  A brilliantly harmonized flavor chord.  Oh, and if you think the amount of butter I used is insane, don't knock it till you tried it.  The recipe called for 12 'egg-sized' potatoes, and 150g butter.  Do the math.  That's half an ounce of butter per potato.  Okay, Al, twist my arm.  If this seems excessive, remember that this is a fraction of the ratio of butter:potato you'll find in restaurant mashed potatoes.

Eggplant with Green Curry: This dish doesn't look like much, but it's got it where it counts.  A small eggplant or two, split in half, scored, and roasted, before being lightly seasoned and served with a quenelle of a kinda peculiar 'green curry'... I guess the word would be 'chutney?'  It doesn't really resemble Indian or Southeast Asian curry.  It consisted of olive oil, onion, parsley, cilantro, lemongrass, garlic, green chile, Madras curry powder, skin-on lime, and salt, cooked to a compote.  The phrase 'green curry' is a little aspirational, in this case.  It was more like 'greenish-brown' curry, but it tasted fantastic.  

This recipe illustrates one of my issues with this book that I haven't touched on yet.  Any cook worth their salt knows that if you're roasting eggplant, you score it and season it in advance, and then squeeze out the excess moisture.  Otherwise, the final product can be kind of astringent.  That's the kind of step that's not missing from the French Laundry-type cookbooks.  However, these recipes are really briefly written.  They seem to be designed to amplify the simplicity, at the expense of attention to detail.  The book said nothing about preseasoning the eggplant, so I didn't.  And it was a little astringent.  Not a big deal, just an itchy tongue, but still, it's a hole in the book's game.

Stand-up Asparagus:  I saw this recipe, and was spoiling for a fight.  Don't peel it?  Blasphemy.  Cook asparagus in dry heat?  Heresy.  Cook it for an hour and a halt?  Apostasy.  Outright madness.  The method was this: tie 2 bundles of jumbo asparagus (trimmed of woody ends) and stand them in a pan with 100g of clarified butter.  Then, put it on low heat, basting occasionally.  For 90 minutes.  After, serve it with a poached egg and chervil leaves (or micro arugula, if grocery stores in your area flatly refuse to stock chervil, as mine do), and serve with the cooking butter and flaky sea salt on the side.  It's a pretty easy dish.  Very low maintenance until the end, when the rapidly deteriorating structural integrity of the bottoms of the spears causes the bundle to want to fall over.  (Had I not tried to cut the recipe in half, this would have been less of a problem.  My mistake.)

So how was this heretical asparagus cooking method?  Absolutely fantastic.  The base of the stems lost their color, and became that olive-drab color you never want your green veg to turn, that canned-green-bean color, but the tender tips were still perfectly bright, forest green, just glazed in butter.  Butter that now tasted strongly of asparagus, reinforcing the flavor and giving it an amazing more-asparagus-than-asparagus quality.  The real brilliance of this recipe was that each section of asparagus was cooked perfectly, in a way that optimized its potential.  The tips were still raw, barely warmed.  The upper part of the shafts were just barely cooked, the middle parts were nicely al dente, and the fibrous lower section were cooked into absolute submission, the formerly tough, now-tender skin the only thing that was holding it together.  And when you cook a green vegetable long enough under dry heat, interesting stuff happens.  The maillard reactions take place, and you really start to get some sweet and caramelized flavors from the soft, almost pudding-like interior of the lower stalk.  Simply brilliant.

The asparagus-infused butter as a sauce was a nice touch, too.  In a restaurant setting, I may even have made that into a hollandaise for the dish.

Avocado Souffle with Chocolate: This was a weird one.  When Nate loaned me the book, he told me he wanted to try it, but was suspicious it wouldn't work.  Well after that, I couldn't resist.  The recipe has you placing 5 squares of chocolate (or something) into a scooped-out avocado shell, and then pureeing the avocado flesh with sugar, a scraped vanilla bean, a little piece of pistachio marzipan, and some sugar, before folding that all together with some meringue and baking it.  Here's my prepared shell:

You'll note I had three squares of chocolate in there, not 5.  5 would have been half the shell.  'Square' is not a standard unit of measure, A.P.

Did it work?  Sure did.  The souffles didn't puff all that high, but they did puff, and were light, delicate, and flavorful.  The trick was to drag the spoon down and get a little of the melted chocolate on the bottom with each bite.  Chocolate and avocado is a really great combination.  Oh, and we baked an extra souffle off, to see how they held.  It stayed puffed for over 5 minutes, which, in the grand scheme of things, is pretty good.

One note: the pistachio flavor kind of got lost.  Also, pistachio marzipan is kinda hard to track down in the US. I ended up getting a $15 assorted box of marzipan online, which was a waste.  For the same $15, I could have gotten a little bottle of pistachio extract, and gotten something I could use again and again, instead of yet another project wherein I end up with a surplus of crappy internet candy.

How were the wine pairings?   Complimentary, every time.  The potatoes with arugula, cumin, soy, and raspberry vinaigrette were paired with an Alsatian pinot noir, which was perfect.  A cooler-weather pinot has the acidity to hang with the vinegar, but still possesses enough berry notes to play nice with the raspberry.  The eggplant and curry was paired with Corbieres, which is a strange choice for curry (you'd think an off-dry chenin, or maybe a riesling), but it worked admirably well.  It's a strange choice for curry, but a perfectly natural choice for eggplant.  The asparagus went with a chasselas from Alsace, which touched on the delicate grassy notes perfectly.  For dessert, the avocado souffle with with a Banyuls, which is one of the rare wines that works with chocolate.  Since avocado is pretty wine-neutral, the pairing worked just fine.  I would have complete confidence in the rest of the pairings in this book.  

The Verdict:  I was really, really, pleasantly surprised.  I thought this book was going to be another in a long line of three-star books by French chefs (they tend to like this move), where they give you an idea of their cuisine, but don't actually give you the means to make it.  This book is kinda the inverse: he gives you recipes that work really well, but you don't really get an idea of his real cuisine.  Yeah, it's got a little bit of an excess of pretentious puffery, but it's ok.  In the end, the fact that the recipes are surprising, interesting, delicious, and actually work is worth a lot of style points.

At $30, it's a steal.  At $280?  Not on your life.  Borrow it from a friend, copy out what you want, and never look back.  This book's not gonna get reissued.  It's stuck in that half-life, where it didn't do well enough to get a second printing, so it's a valuable commodity.  Odd, when that happens.  When something is a valuable commodity, specifically because it isn't.  But if you can get your hands on a copy at a decent price, or find one at the library, it's certainly worth a look.

-JS