For those dedicated home cooks, those artisanal bakers, those barbecue devotees, did we or our loved ones rush out to buy the hottest cookbook about pies, the latest tome about pit-smoking?
Did we search high and low for titles at the library to perfect our French éclairs or our pasta Bolognese?
No. In 2013, we dove into Practical Paleo: A customized approach to health and a whole-foods lifestyle, by Dianne San Filippo and Wheat Belly Cookbook: 150 recipes to help you lose the wheat, lose the weight and find your path back to health, by William Davis.
We came back again and again for The Fresh Energy Cookbook: Detox recipes to supercharge your life, by Natalie Rose and The Longevity Kitchen: Satisfying big-flavor recipes featuring the top 16 age-busting power foods, by Rebecca Katz.
Only in Durango.
Of the top 10 best-selling and best-lending food books at Maria’s Bookshop and the local library, seven were books to show us the way to better health and a smaller booty.
While the rest of the country is busy buying cookbooks about the best chocolate desserts and 100 ways to cook flavorful pork, we’re obsessed with learning about the super-restrictive paleo diet and how to cook without either wheat or sugar, a near impossibility (The Joy of Gluten-Free, Sugar-Free Baking: 80 low-carb recipes that offer solutions for celiac disease, diabetes, and weight loss by Peter Reinheart.)
In food books and in life, we choose the healthy, the lean and the age-defying. It’s who we are.
Don’t believe me? Herewith, the library’s top five food books of 2013: Wheat Belly; Cooked: A natural history of transformation, by Michael Pollan; Fresh Energy Cookbook; Of Vinaigrettes and Other Dressings: 60 sensational recipes to liven up greens, grains, slaws and every kind of salad, by Michelle Anna Jordan; and The Longevity Kitchen.
Here are Maria’s most popular titles about food: Plenty: Vibrant recipes from London’s Yotam Ottolenghi, by Yotam Ottolenghi; Practical Paleo; Pioneer Woman Cooks a Year of Holidays, by Ree Drummond; Wheat Belly; The Joy of Cooking, 75th anniversary edition and a late-breaker, The China Study Cookbook: Over 120 whole food, plant-based recipes.
“Cookbooks do well in our store,” said Bobbi Maiers, Maria’s community relations manager. “People still really appreciate the tangible cookbook with great pictures and good design. It’s a tangible, hands-on thing.
“I could never, ever part with my hard-copy cookbooks,” she added.
At the library, local folks checked out cookbooks almost 700 times, choosing from its collection of 926 titles and ensuring the category will get bumped up for more purchases in 2014.
At Natural Grocers, Tiffany Godwin, a nutrition expert and health coach, extolled the virtues of Practical Paleo.
“It’s a great help,” she said of the book that explains how to live without dairy, grains or sugar, a diet she follows herself. “It has great information, great recipes and great tips for planning meals.”
At her store on Camino del Rio, it’s the best-seller by far. Of course.
For those of us seeking to learn the secrets of famed pastry chef Francois Payard (Payard Desserts) or the absolute best method for cooking bacon, that most nutritionally challenged of meats (Bacon Nation by Peter Kaminsky and Marie Rama), we’ll have to order online or sneak it out of the library under cover of darkness.
But some local fellows are bold enough to boast of buying and using cookbooks that offer no diet advice or fitness salvos.
“I’m into the food heritage of every culture on the planet,” said Josh Klarer, a local butcher who owns the shop The Missing Link and claims German and Cherokee as his own ancestry.
For him, Sauces and Shapes: Pasta the Italian way, by Oretta Zanini De Vita, is the book of the moment, teaching him how to make such beloved and belly-busting sauces as carbonara and Alfredo as well as the proper noodle to accompany them (which he makes and sells at his store, shared with Flying Fish Co.).
Jesse Villanueba, also a butcher, keeps his favorite cookbook, Ruhlman’s Twenty: 20 techniques, 100 recipes, a cook’s manifesto, by food writer and television celebrity Michael Ruhlman, at his workplace, Sunnyside Farms Market, so he can consult it at will.
Each chapter details a cooking technique or ingredient, such as salt or water or mise en place, the practice of getting everything ready before actually cooking. Villanueba highly recommends the weekday coq au vin (a hearty, flavorful dish of chicken stewed with wine and bacon) and the French onion soup, in which you cook onions over a slow fire to carmelize them and bring out their sweetness.
“That was killer,” he said of the soup.
One local cook did allow that she was poring over the bread-baking bible Artisan Bread in Five Minutes a Day: The discovery that revolutionizes home baking, by Jeff Hertzburg and Zoe Francis. Another mentioned she’s enjoying former New York Times food columnist Molly O’Neil’s One Big Table: A portrait of American cooking, with its tales of foraging for dandelion greens in Vermont and cooking tamales in a New Mexican horno. She is, however, also rereading Jeanne Jones’ Cook It Light, hoping to ferret out her secrets for tasty, lower-calorie dishes.
Me? I’m off to buy The Four and Twenty Blackbirds Pie Book, by Emily and Melissa Elsen, and Smoke and Pickles: Recipes and stories from a New Southern Kitchen, by Edward Lee. After all, cooking is all about preparing good food, and food is all about pleasure.
phasterok@durangoherald.com
