Off the Shelf: Ingredient Love

I just finished reading The Artful Eater by Edward Behr, and I was really impressed.  Some of the material in the book my be outdated (it was published almost twenty years ago), but I am sure I will be using it as reference for a long time.

The book is a compilation of essays about individual ingredients, most of which appeared in a quarterly newsletter Behr had previously published.  So many of the books I read are about cooking or chefs, that it is refreshing to have a good read that focuses on the quality and variety of individual ingredients.

The selection of topics provides an interesting cross-section of ingredients.  Some are universal (salt), while some are very localized (aged country ham).  The essays do not follow a standardized model, but for each ingredient, Behr provides information about its history, its uses, and determinants of its quality.  He seems particularly interested in ingredients that represent a range of species or varieties (pepper, salmon, vanilla, coffee), and he does a great job of explaining the range of varieties and their respective strengths and uses.

Some ingredients clearly hold a special place in Behr's heart - his essay on cream is more of an ode to un-pasteurized, un-homogenized, high-fat dairy products.  For other ingredients, he leaves little room for sentimentality.  When discussing tomatoes, he allows that people's recollections of tomatoes past may be tinged with a bit of fantasy - and old-time favorites would not necessarily be preferred today.  (It is fascinating to learn that even twenty years ago, people were lamenting the state of the tomato.)  Furthermore, he claims that good farmed salmon tastes the same as wild.  This sense of realism really led me to enjoy the book - rather than waxing rhapsodic about obscure or impractical ingredients for their own sakes, Behr provides practical information that can truly be used for improving one's cooking (and eating!).

Given that the book was published in the early 90s (in the essay on coffee, Behr discusses an up-and-coming coffeeshop chain from Seattle that currently had 90(!) stores - and based on the discussion of roasting, I feel vindicated in my belief that their coffee tastes burnt.  But I digress), I would be interested to do some additional research into the current state of some products.  Particularly in the past few years and given the increasing interest in food, I suspect that some of the top-quality ingredients may be making a reappearance.

This book does include a few recipes, provided at the end of the book rather than along with each chapter, as well as sources for some of the ingredients discussed in the book (though I'm not sure whether they are still relevant, given the amount of time that has passed since the book was published).  Behr also provides a fantastic bibliography that provides sources for additional reading on individual topics as well as general food books and cookbooks.