I’m researching a new book that takes place in 18^th Century London and focuses (in part) on the curious world of gin. So, in the past week, I’ve checked out all the books on gin from the Seattle Library System. (The look on the librarian’s face was worth the hassle of carting 22 books home.) I’m working my way through the stack, but so far my favorite book is Craze: Gin and Debauchery in an Age of Reason. Author Jessica Warner offers thorough research combined with concise writing on the madness that took over the capitol in the early 1700s. It had so much good information that rather than mark up the library copy, I had to buy my own.

I had to track down a copy of London Eats Out: 500 Years of Capitol Dining published by the Museum of London, but it was so worth it. Organized by century, with break outs on early food writing, the dominance of beef steak dining clubs and loads of illustrations, it’s a thin volume that packs in a load of information. It kind of reminded me of one of those old Time-Life series books.

I also finished the galley of My Berlin Kitchen, the upcoming book by Luisa Weiss, creator of The Wednesday Chef. It’s terrific. I’ve been impressed by the clarity of her writing, her honesty, the story pacing and the gushy, wonderful love story. It comes out in September. Go pre-order it now.

I attended the launch party for Pike Place Market Recipes by Jess Thompson on Tuesday, so I’ve only had a chance to look through it but it’s a lovely book featuring purveyors and restaurants in and around Seattle’s iconic market along with 130 recipes. Talking to her the next day, I learned it will be one of four books she’ll have coming out in a two-year time period. I feel like such a slacker.

Every week, I rotate a couple of cookbooks onto my kitchen counter. This week (well, the past two weeks), one of them has been Cook Without a Book: Meatless Meals by the incomparable Pam Anderson. She writes recipes in such a useful way that I’m always recommending her books to people. This one features a clear “master recipe” and then countless variations on the main theme. I’ve used her book so much in the past couple of weeks that it’s actually changed our usual eating routine. I’m now making grain-based salads, versions of her grab-and-go breakfast tortillas and variations on Asian stir fry. If you’re trying to cut down on your meat consumption, give it a look. Pam has a knack for coming up with cooking strategies for busy people.

Finally, I’ve been entranced by Ripe: A Fresh, Colorful Approach to Fruit and Vegetables by Cheryl Sternman Rule with photography by Paulette Philipot. It provides a dose of gorgeous food porn plus pragmatic and useful ideas on how to use even the most obscure vegetables.

The latter has been useful in developing the class that I’ll be teaching at The Book Larder in Seattle next Tuesday. I think there are a couple slots left in you’re interested.

Health will be a determining factor in the future of food. People are increasingly concerned about maintaining their health and that is why they are demanding wholesome products adapted to their own personal needs.

Compare that to this line from a story on the same theme by Gary Hirshberg in the populist site The Huffington Post.

Americans care about the food we eat and feed our families, now more than ever. In the span of just a few weeks, “pink slime” became a consumer phenomenon, leading to the unprecedented rapid-fire removal of the product from major stores and schools, the closure of production plants and USDA approval of voluntary labeling. Talk about legislation through retail.

The group identified eight key trends, and assigned each an identifying moniker. The top one was “Food Telling” or “Food with a Message,” described as “a demand for transparent, attractive, accessible information.” I see that as being triggered by the likes of “pink slime.” I overheard people talking about it on plane to New York last week and the woman discussing it were not food people – they were both mothers of young kids and they were angry. Furious. Explosively so, and willing to vote out pink slime with their wallets.

Some of the other trends seemed extensions of existing ones, such as “Eater_tainment,” or food that’s doubles as entertainment or “EgoFood,” namely food that extends the personality of the individual. You can read the full story at Science Codex. Curious to see what others think of it.

Fear not the artichoke

Just a heads up that I will be teaching a class on how to cook all the various (and sometimes confusing) vegetables and fruits that show up in a Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) or show up at stands at farmer’s markets. Along with this, I’ll be talking about how we can all waste a lot less fresh produce. I’ll be doing this at the fabulous independent culinary bookstore The Book Larder here in Seattle.

Most of you know that I don’t teach a lot of classes these days due to book deadlines. (So far in 2012, I’ve taught just two.) So if you want to come cook with me, sign up! Although just announced, the 24 slots are filling up quickly.

In the meantime, tell me this: what fruit or vegetables confuse you the most? You know, the ones where you look at them and think, ”I really don’t know what to do with that…”

Next week, I head back to New York for something very exciting. I will be attending the awards ceremony for the American Society of Journalists and Authors (ASJA). The judges selected my latest book, The Kitchen Counter Cooking School as the winner in the non-fiction memoir/autobiography category. I feel very honored as ASJA is such a remarkable institution. Once I have a photo, I will be sure to post.

I return quickly to Seattle Saturday, April 28, in time to participate in The Children’s Trust Charity Event fundraiser To Prevent Child Abuse & Neglect. I’ll be teaching a cooking course with several other generous people from Seattle’s food loving community. If you are in Seattle, here are the details.

A Place at the Table

Master Your Cooking Skills

To Prevent Child Abuse & Neglect

Saturday, April 28, 6:30-10pm

Blue Ribbon Culinary Center, Seattle

Among the story’s specifics was that a writer, Julia Turshen, worked with Gwyneth Paltrow on her book, My Father’s Daughter.  It also lays claim that Rachel Ray and Jamie Oliver also employs the use of ghostwriters to develop at least some recipes. Both authors took aim at the paper’s assertion via Twitter, denying the allegations:

Jamie Oliver went about it the old-fashioned way; he had a staffer contact Moskin’s editor directly, a point illuminated when she released a follow-up to the story  early today. Apparently, the chefs were insulted by the word “ghost writer,” but I’m wondering if the issue here, especially in Gwyneth’s case, is more a semantic discussion.

When most readers see the recipe in a cookbook, they see a simple head note, some ingredients and instructions.  Writing those few hundreds words isn’t the time-consuming part. The real work of cookbooks is more complicated: finding the concept, developing a balanced framework for the content, expanding it into a cookbook proposal, then doing research into ingredients before testing, reworking and retesting the actual recipes — and that’s before you get into food photography. In the UK television series, “Fifteen,” I recall Jamie Oliver telling a student that he wrote his books by speaking into recorder; presumably someone else transcribed them, extracted what he was after and helped him hone and shape the final verbage.

In writing about the book as it was coming out, Turshen penned her own account of the collaboration on the book for Food & Wine. “Producing the book required long days of brainstorming, grocery shopping, cooking, testing, readjusting, accumulating tall stacks of dirty dishes and writing everything down,” Turshen wrote, adding it took a “year or so gathering  [Gwyneth's] recipes, and the stories behind them.”

Meanwhile, in her author’s note, Gwyneth writes Turshen ”quantified, tested, and retested every recipe, oversaw the production of the photos, helped brainstorm in a crisis, and above all was my intellectual and emotional support through the whole process.”

Collaboration? Sure. Ghost writing? Or, as Moskin referred to it in her follow-up story, “Ghost cooking?” That’s how you define it.

Generally, the phrase “ghost writing” describes someone who writes on behalf of other people who tend to take the credit. Or, sometimes they collaborate and they get an “as told to” or “with” kind of credit. Executives, politicians and celebrities of screen and sport do it all the time.  Sometimes the writer interviews the subject and writes every word, sometimes they take a mass of written notes and partly-conceived chapters and whip it into shape. Or, they may help with organization, read over the author’s work, haunting them to keep the project on track.

And so, a confession. In the 1990s, I was hired to ghostwrite a book for a U.S. congressman. A guy called me at my newspaper, praised my work and we negotiated a deal. He handed me a spiral notebook with a couple hundred pages of writing and notes from various sources, including the congressman. I met the congressman only once. My job was to organize it into a coherent format and write it into one voice. (For a variety of reasons, mainly political climate change, the book wasn’t published.)  Also, I once conducted research and wrote chapters in a book for a travel writer. That’s typical ghostwriting. You write, they take credit, you keep your mouth shut and cash your check.

The reason is that a cookbook is more complicated due to its many working pieces. The story rightly notes that doing grunt work for better-known personalities is a fairly common job for food writers. Many chefs don’t develop recipes or cook in a way that translates well enough for home cooks to follow.

Working on one of my first food stories, a well-known chef assured me that he had a recipe written down so I didn’t need to take notes as he cooked. Thankfully, I did anyway. When he finally got me the recipe a week later, it was written in Portugese and designed to feed 50. So, I had to figure out the language, scale it down, track down substitutions for commercial ingredients and make the dish no less than eight times, tweaking and fixing it. But you know what? That recipe gave him the credit. After all, it was his dish. I was merely the conduit – admittedly with a byline. Later, when the restaurant contributed “his” recipe to a compilation cookbook, neither me or my newspaper got a mention. That happens far more often than you think.   

So I think that Gwyneth is right when she says she “wrote every word;” and I think the Times’ writer Julia Moskins is right when they say she had “a collaborator” who did a lot of heavy lifting on her project. (A caption calling Turshen a “ghostwriter” for Paltrow seems a bit strong; as a writer, Moskin likely didn’t even see that until the paper came out.) 

At the end of all this, I’m less interested (or surprised) that Bobby Flay has someone develop a spice rub section (he admits that he does), and more curious about the many delicious “blind items” in the story, as noted by Eater, including one note about a “famed chef” who wrote a tome on regional cooking that was actually developed by a New York-based food writer and another left under house arrest in Columbia when the chef wandered off…

Months later, she’s making strides with her French. Her husband travels all the time for business, so she’s alone a lot but she makes the best of it she can, given that she’s a newlywed and all. On Wednesday, she found out that she had been accepted to the Le Cordon Bleu to study patisserie. That same afternoon, I found out that my recent book had won first place in the memoir/autobiography  category from the American Society of Journalists & Authors. To celebrate, we went for a long lunch and then happened by a stall selling the first of the season strawberries. “You know what we need?” I asked. “Champagne.” We happened on a great wine shop where a woman recommended a bottle of bubbles. At precisely 3:44, we opened the champagne and started on the strawberries. The soft, gentle bubbles of the champagne offset the tartness of the strawberries. They were a lovely color if a bit tough, but it’s March, what do you expect?

We sat in our apartment and looked out over the French rooftops, chatting about her upcoming education and missing our husbands. (My own Mike has been in London for three days.) Her husband comes home on Sunday. “To our husbands,” she proposed.

“… and to their wives,” I said. We clinked glasses. Sometimes, you need champagne to remind you of the things you need to celebrate, such as remembering how much you love your husband or cementing a new friendship.

Monica Bhide at a Paris market

My dear writer friend Monica Bhide came to Paris a couple of days ago as part of a press trip for food writers. I had already planned to be in Paris for other reasons, including the Paris Cookbook Fair. I joined her for a day of her whirlwind excursion at Cook’n with Class, a lovely recreational cooking school in Montmartre.

Goats cheese at a Quarterhomme, a Paris cheese shop.

Dorade at the fish market

As part of their morning market tour class, we started the day with a tour of the local specialty food shops led by Chef Constance. Really, any day that starts in a Parisian cheese shop is destined to be pretty great. We inhaled the stinky goodness as she talked the group through the varieties of cow, goat and sheep’s milk cheeses and explained how the AOC system in France works. Next, we stopped at a butcher where we lost half the group. One of the food writers had a deep-seated fear of birds and thus rendered poultry as a non-option. Another was a vegetarian who couldn’t take the sight of plastic-wrapped meat in a supermarket much less the brutality of an authentic Parisian boucherie with items such as rabbits and chickens with the head and feet intact proudly displayed in a front cooler pushed out on the sidewalk. The pair rejoined us sometime after we hit a fish market to purchase a whole salmon from Norway and some fresh squid, something that neither Monica or I had ever prepped. In my case, it’s from being raised in Florida, where squid is usually sold frozen — as fish bait.

At Cook'n with Class in Paris

With our purchases intact, we went back to the school, a lovely bright space on a side street in Montmartre opened a couple of years ago by Chef Eric Fraudeau. The school’s primary focus is to teach authentic French techniques to foreigners via genial half-day and evening classes. Interesting side note: While Americans remain their strongest clientele, Chef Eric reports that enough Chinese now request classes that he hired Chinese-speaking chefs to accommodate the demand, now about 15% of their business. 

The school is a welcoming, efficient operation, and I was impressed by Chef Constance. She kept up a good pace with a patient, yet commanding authority as we prepared a cake batter, prepped red peppers, sliced onions, pulled bones from the salmon, cleaned the squid and sautéed chopped apples in butter.

Chef Constance instructs Monica on saute technique

 “For the market class, the menu is always different because you never really know what we end up buying,” Constance explained. (She emailed full recipes for each dish the following day.) Our menu included: a foamy soup made from purple carrots and a creamy cauliflower velouté; poached eggs atop a bed of sautéed red peppers and onions garnished with fried walnut bread; pan-seared salmon and spiced sautéed calamari with roasted cauliflower; a selection of cheeses; and sponge cake topped with apples in a caramel cream sauce for dessert. All of it was terrific.

Among other things, Chef Constance taught us a great trick: poaching eggs in heat-resistant plastic. She pulled a sheet of plastic over a small bowl, cracked the egg into it, squeezed out the air and then secured it with a knot. The eggs were then placed in hot water for a few minutes until cooked. The result: a perfect poached egg.

Jonell and Monica

After lunch, Monica and I met up with Geneva-based writer Jonell Galloway, who runs the blog The Rambling Epicure, and hit the famous Mariage Freres teahouse on rue des Grands-Augustins on the Left Bank. For two hours, we chatted about cooking, Paris and food writing as the white-gloved attendants kept refilling our cups. Such a lovely day, and I’m thankful to have spent it with Monica, one of my favorite people.

Recipe adapted with permission from the Cook’n with Class school in Paris and my teacher, Chef Constance Deledalle. By the way, Constance has a fun blog which she pens in English about her culinary adventures in Paris and beyond. For the bread, she used a hearty walnut-studded wheat, but you could likely use any day-old bread with good results. Serves six.

6 eggs
8 bell peppers, a mix of red and yellow
3 medium yellow onions, sliced thin
1 big chunk of chorizo, about 6 oz.
3 tablespoons olive oil
Few sprigs fresh thyme or at least 1 teaspoon dried
4 cloves garlic, chopped
3 tablespoon white wine vinegar
Six small slices of day-old bread
Coarse salt, fresh-ground pepper

A student cuts up peppers

Prepare the basquise: Slice the peppers in half, remove the white membrane and any seeds, then slice them into thin slices (julienne). and scoop out the seeds. Peel and slice the onions. Dice the chorizo into one-inch cubes, or if using a sausage-style chorizo, slice into thick rounds. Add the olive oil to a skillet over medium heat and cook the onions until softened. Then add the peppers, the chorizo, thyme, and garlic. Cover the pot, turn down the heat and let it cook slowly until the peppers soften, about 15 to 20 minutes.

Prepare the eggs: In a sauce pan large enough to hold six eggs, add water along with the vinegar and bring to a boil. If you have heat-resistant plastic, you can try Chef Constance’s technique by preparing the eggs by enclosing in plastic, (see below) pressing out as much air as possible and then securing with a knot. If not, poach them the traditional way. Poach to desired doneness, preferably to the point where a bit of yolk runs when cut in half.

Make croutons: Baste each side of the bread slices with olive oil and pepper and briefly roast in the oven for about five minutes or until crisp.

To serve, remove the thyme sprigs (if using), heap the cooked peppers in the middle of a plate or bowl, top with the egg and serve with the crouton.

Cooking Technique: Poaching eggs in plastic

 Chef Constance taught us a great trick: poaching eggs in heat-resistant plastic. She pulled a sheet of plastic over a small bowl, cracked the egg into it, squeezed out the air and then secured it with a knot. The eggs were then placed in hot water for a few minutes until cooked. Result: a perfect poached egg.

Secure with knot

Gently poach

What’s striking about the Gourmand Awards is the vastness of the competition, more than 30,000 books from 162 countries. When you’re a finalist in that kind of company, it makes sense that 80 percent of the finalists actually make the trip to attend the awards event in Paris. In the course of two hours, people from at least four dozen countries as diverse as Peru, China, India, United States, Finland, Canada, Malaysia and St. Martin hit the stage to collect their awards.

Equally spectacular is the presentation. Monsieur Cointreau sits on the stage narrating every aspect of the awards. He knows all the finalists intimately and can describe each entry in detail. He went beyond the names of the finalists, but also shared knowledge gleaned as one of the few people in the world with an enduring and encompassing view on the world of culinary publishing for 17 years. “In some categories, we have hundreds of books submitted so it’s really not quite fair to compare them and come to four finalists,” he told the crowd in the red velvet-paneled theater. “So anyone who makes the finals should be proud.”

The evening started with awards for wine books, a category that Cointreau noted is now one of the best sectors in culinary publishing, “with even better demand for them than cookbooks.” You’d think that the French would dominate a wine category, but one of the intriguing notes to the evening was a striking number of American first places in this division, including See, Mix, Drink by Brian Murphy by US publisher Little Brown in the cocktail category; The Seasons of Veuve Cliquot by Stephanie Gerchel and Seasons of the Finger Lake Winery by John C. Hartsock ; The Food Lover’s Guide to Wine by Karen Page and Andrew Dornenberg and The Oxford Companion to Beer by Horst Dornbusch.

In the past couple of years, the awards have included a prize for culinary apps, an area that Cointreau noted has a lot of interesting entries but still seems to be working itself out. The top spot went to the “Cooking with Dorie Greenspan” app, developed by Culinapp.

One of the evening’s highlights was the award of Cookbook of the Year to a team led by Francisco Fantini from Chile for their book Patagonian Cuisine. The group of five hit the stage with shouts and high fives wearing matching racing jackets emblazoned with the name of their book on the back. In a passionate speech, one of the authors noted that while the book was about food, it was also a political move to encourage environmental and cultural respect for Patagonia. “We wanted to show this cuisine to save this area. A book is an everlasting message that has no borders.”

Chris Ying took the stage next to claim the top prize on behalf ofU.S.-based celebrity chef, David Chang‘s quirky publication Lucky Peach in the magazine division. Clutching his red folder, he said simply, “Thank You, and Patagonia Free!”

Books focused on “easy recipes” make up about half of all books sold worldwide, Cointreau noted, making that category one of the most difficult to judge. The prize went to La Cuisine, a book packed with 1,000 simple French recipes, by Francoise Bernard, a 91-year-old legend in the French culinary world.

The first book category was won by seemingly the most improbable title on the whole program: The Angry Birds Cookbook (Finland).

Cointreau noted a growing trend for vegetarian books worldwide. “It’s an area of huge demand.” One of the special awards of the evening went to Meat Free Monday by Paul, Stella and Mary McCartney. (Yes, that McCartney clan.) In one of the most surprising offhand tidbit of the evening, Cointreau noted that fund-raising, charity and community cookbooks are probably the most widely created and distributed forms of books worldwide, with thousands produced each year. “It’s something that started in North America, but we’ve seen it blossom across the globe and now it’s become arguably among the most difficult areas to win in these awards.”

Of all the books mentioned in the evening, four of the winners in the other geographic region have now become the next food books I want to track down. They are: How to Cook a Crocodile by Bonnie Lee Black (Peace Corps Writers group), North America; Tibet, A Culinary Journey (China Tibetology Publishing); One Egg is a Fortune by Nina Jacobson and Judy Kempler; and Cook with Kids by Rob Kirby (Absolute Press).  Books raising funds for refugees of the earthquake in Haiti took top prizes for the Caribbean entry.

Oh, what memories flood back when I saw the flock of Le Cordon Bleu students pouring flutes and picking up glasses at the after party, each in their student uniforms; the girls still stuck with masculine tailoring, it seems. (Edouard is brother to Andre Cointreau, who owns the Le Cordon Bleu.) By then, it was midnight. As interesting as it all was, after 2 ½ hours, Mike and I realized we were drinking free champagne on an empty stomach, never a good plan. We had not located our tickets and instead of going to dinner, we went to the theater early in case we had to grovel for entrance, but it turned out our names were on the list. At that hour, we both knew that there was only one option in our minds, Au Pied de Cochon in Les Halles. We grabbed a taxi and finished the night with a couple bowls of their speciality, soup a l’oginon. The perfect way to end a culinary evening.

Check out the full summary of all the finalists and winners at the World Gourmand Awards site.

Note: An early version of this post noted that David Chang collected the award in Paris.

I’m a fan of this recipe for a number of reasons. It’s easy enough for non-bakers, plus flexible enough for any taste. If you whip up a batch of these on a Sunday morning, you’ve got a lovely weekend treat, plus something to grab-and-go inexpensive breakfasts for the rest of the week. These keep best if left on the counter covered with a dish towel. They’re good at room temperature, but warm up best in a low oven or toaster oven.

Sandy’s Scones

Grating frozen butter into the batter and then chilling the completed dough again after mixing is the secret to a flaky, soft scone so don’t skip this crucial step.

A great thing about scones is that they’re flexible when it comes to flavoring. Try studding them with frozen blueberries, chopped peaches, chocolate chips, chopped apples, chopped dried figs, crushed almonds — the possibilities are endless. Just be sure not to use any fruit that’s too wet such as fresh blueberries as that can introduce too much liquid into the dough and to thoroughly chill whatever you add in the freezer. You can also boost the flavor by spreading a light layer of jam or marmalade once the rolled out flour.

My sister uses fat-free milk and sour cream; I use low-fat as they tend to have less artificial ingredients. Yields about 15 scones.

8 tablespoons butter (1 stick), frozen
1 teaspoon of grated lemon or orange peel
2 cups white unbleached flour
¼ teaspoon baking soda
2 teaspoons baking powder
½ teaspoon salt
½ cup + 1 tablespoon sugar
½ cup low-fat milk
½ cup low-fat sour cream
1 egg, beaten

¼ cup dried cranberries
2 tablespoons orange marmelade

Before starting, put your butter in the freezer for at least 15 minutes. Preheat the oven to 425 F degrees. Then, grate the frozen butter with a cheese grater. Place it back in the freezer.

In a bowl, whisk the milk and sour cream together and then put into the fridge. Grate the skin off a lemon or orange into a large bowl. Add in the the flour, baking soda, baking powder, salt and ½ cup sugar and stir together. Lightly dust the countertop with flour.

Get the grated frozen butter and toss it with the flour mixture until all the butter is coated. Fold in the child milk and sour cream mixture and combine until the batter is quite wet. Turn out onto the floured countertop and with floured hands, knead it about six times. Do not over knead it.

Roll the dough with a rolling pin into a 12-inch square. Fold it in half, and then fold again, like folding a napkin. Put it on a plate or similar and put into the freezer for about five minutes. This will rest the dough plus slightly refreeze the butter, yielding a more flaky pastry.

While its in the freezer, dust your countertop with flour again and put a heavy cookie sheet or baking stone into your preheated oven to get it warm. (You might want to use these few minutes to make yourself a cup of tea.)

After five minutes, remove the doll and roll your square flat into a 12-inch square. Push the dried cranberries into flattened batter, then spoon the marmalade into a light layer over top. Roll up the dough and turn it over if necessary so the seam is on the bottom. Gently push the roll down until it’s about three inches wide.

With a sharp knife, cut the roll into a series of triangles. Brush the top with the beaten up and sprinkle lightly with the remaining sugar. Place the triangles on the preheated cookie sheet and bake for 15 minutes or until medium brown. Let the scones rest at least 15 minutes before serving.

You might also be interested in…
- GlutenFreeGourmand: Gluten-free scone recipe
- Jeanette’s Healthy Living: Vegan/gluten-free cinammon-spiced scones