Cookbook review: Truly, ‘How to Cook Everything’

No more the timid cook.

Mark Bittman isn't kidding when he calls his book "How to Cook Everything." Now revised and reissued for its 10th-anniversary edition, it is a book no beginning or intermediate cook should be without.

Well, either it or "Joy of Cooking."

This is a massive undertaking, with 2,000 recipes covering practically every kind of food. But that is only part of what makes this tome so indispensable. It is also full of information, like "Joy of Cooking" is, explaining everything from how to string a pea to how to cream butter.

Looking to find out how much pasta to cook? Which potato to use for salads? How to carve a chicken or remove the bones from a quail? It's all in there, along with much, much more ("Plain Talk About Beans and Gas" is one topic).

The book isn't just encyclopedic in its scope, it also encourages the reader to experiment with food, to build on the basics that it provides. After giving basic and simple directions for roasting a chicken, Bittman then offers 10 more ways of adding flavor to it.

Bittman is a wizard with lists. He has 13 additions to virtually any quick bread, muffins, biscuits or scone (minced jalapeños, dried cherries); 28 side dishes for Thanksgiving you may not have considered (baked beans, fennel baked in stock); 16 variations on pancakes (use coconut milk, add ground ginger); 27 vegetable and legume dishes to toss with pasta (braised artichoke hearts, Tuscan style white beans).

So the book is important and an extraordinary help in the kitchen. But is the food any good?

Well, it's good. But we can't say it's great. Maybe great comes when you start improvising and adding to his recipes.

Admittedly, we've only tried three of the recipes so far, and that means there are 1,997 left. All three were cooked properly and, when needed, were tender and juicy. But they all had the same problem: not quite enough flavor. Perhaps Bittman, in his effort to serve as a building block for apprehensive chefs, decided to cut back on the herbs and spices to avoid scaring anybody.

The Pan-Cooked Salmon Fillets with Lentils, which is one of his more advanced recipes, yielded perfectly cooked salmon on a bed of lentils that was appealing, but bland. The lentils, apparently, needed more of the thyme, parsley and chives than the book recommends ("a few sprigs" to go with 2-3 cups of dried lentils, enough to feed four).

We braised leeks in red wine, a variation on his recipe that involves braising leeks in stock. The wine tasted too winey; frankly, the stock would have been better (that recipe, however, should be delicious).

Our best success was with the Oven-"Fried" Chicken, a method of baking chicken with panko, a Japanese version of breadcrumbs. The result was moist and juicy on the inside and crunchy on the outside. It had everything you'd want in fried chicken except the flavor.

But like the other recipes, it was good. It was good enough.

Which makes "How to Cook Everything" such an odd find. It's wonderful; it's invaluable. But if you're a proficient cook, maybe you shouldn't make anything from it.

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