Cookbooks of the Year

What I see when I look at that cream salad dressing recipe is freedom. If you're a sophisticated enough cook, you'll look at that and intuit a lifetime of variations. If you've never cooked a lick, well, I envy you—if this was your first cookbook, it would lead to such a nice and easy only-two-knives sort of life. If you don't want a nice and easy life, The Basics also distills the essence of the world's most au courant cooking techniques in 10 simple pages, explaining how to make a foie gras foam (using a nitrogen-charged whipped-cream maker), an agar-agar-based, Ferran Adria-style spinach jelly, and so on. The Basics has even changed the way I make pancakes, and I've been making pancakes since grade school. Is there any higher praise I could give a cookbook?

If there is, I will give it to Pork & Sons, by Stephane Reynaud. A lot of people agree this is a great book—in fact, it was recognized as the most important cookbook of the year in France in 2005, when it won the Grand Prix de la Gastronomie Francaise (it was issued in an English version just last spring). However, everything I want to say about this book would likely shock the beret off a Frenchman, because what I like most is that it's so essentially Minnesotan.

Really, it's so Minnesotan it makes my heart sing. Bear with me. For 10 years now I've been trying to get my head around what an essentially Minnesotan cuisine would look like. Other people have been wrestling with this, too. I think I've heard three or four restaurateurs dancing with naming their place some variation on "45th Parallel," which would connect Minnesota by latitude with some of the most fertile parts of France. I've slowly come around to thinking that a true Minnesotan cuisine would be largely based on the handful of things we can get year round, like pork, cream, butter, eggs, and cold-climate grains like wheat and rye. (Of course there would be other things in there, too—walleye, wild rice, bison, apples, wild plums, and so on—but we'll save discussion of those for another time.) It has occurred to me that the countries with heritage cuisines that strongly resemble this core flavor palate are England, northern France, Alsace, southern Germany, and so on.

But never has Minnesota's similarity to anywhere else walloped me so forcefully as it did while I was paging through Pork & Sons, which has lots of pictures of the farmland of Ardèche, where the author is from, just west of the French Alps. I mean, it's just jaw-dropping. There's a picture of Reynaud's hometown Saint-Agrève in February that you could look at for an hour and never believe it isn't Nerstrand, New Prague, or Proctor. The mix of pines and oaks, the corn stubble poking up through snowdrifts, the white sky and nothing-to-look-at working farm sheds.

And the people! While the author is a restaurant chef, this book is largely a tribute to the people who help kill and butcher a pig in his hometown, and the pictures of these guys in their knit caps, down vests, wind-scoured faces, and no-kidding work pants look like they could have been snapped at any grain elevator between Winona and Moorhead. (Okay, one of them has a dog named Florette, but we won't hold that against him.)

The thing I love most about this book, though, is that it makes head-to-tail eating seem possible in actual day-to-day life. I've read lots of charcuterie books, lots of nose-to-tail eating books, and while I admire them, they leave the home cook in the dust. This book, however, specializes in rustic, peasant-style cooking. Hey, I'm a peasant! Who knew? And if you only have an hour to devote to the actual cooking time of getting something on the table, you may well be a peasant, too. And if you're a peasant who wants to eat like a king, here's the book.

The pork rillettes, for instance, require little more than putting meat in a pot and cooking at low heat for four hours. The section explaining the nutritional benefits of ham ("rich in iron and potassium") and the fact that every French person eats 11 pounds of ham a year should make any Hormel executive smile—at least as much as the idea for a ham sandwich made with chopped cornichons and butter made me smile. But it's the various pork roasts, pork pot roasts, pork blanquettes (creamy pot roast), ragouts, pot au feus, and things to do with Boston butts that really made this book a revelation to me. So this is how to do some interesting cooking with the rest of the pig that isn't bacon, ham, sausage, or pork loin!

I have wanted, for six or seven years now, some idea of what good, authentic, tasty home cooking with integrity would look like that was based on the products of the northern farmland, and it took a Frenchman and a Belgian to show me.