About the time I graduated from college, my Wise and Perspicacious Aunt gave me a copy of Mark Bittman’s The Minimalist Cooks at Home, a modest-sized collection of recipes based on Mr. Bittman’s columns in the New York Times. If you have a friend or relative who is about to join the “real world”, I would urge you to follow my aunt’s example and to give that person a copy of this compact and utterly practical book. I can think of no better way to help an amateur cook just get in the kitchen and start cooking.
Mark Bittman’s entire schtick is that everyday, three times a day, food needs to get on the table. If you cook it yourself, you’ll save money, you’ll be healthier, you’ll be happier, you’ll develop a new hobby that you will enjoy, you’ll share a special bond with family members—in short, your life will improve tremendously. But you and I and Bittman are not professionally trained chefs, and we don’t have infinite supplies of time and money to spend on a Tuesday night dinner. And here’s where The Minimalist is brilliant: Good food, according to Bittman, doesn’t depend on esoteric knowledge or expensive ingredients or even a lot of work. It involves understanding a few principles, mastering a few simple techniques, using a few tools correctly, having a willingness to experiment, and most of all, just getting in the kitchen and cooking.
Bittman is honest about not making any claims to authenticity: It is somewhat insulting, he says, to reduce Thai cuisine, for example, to a few flavorful ingredients (coconut milk, lemongrass, fish sauce). But you can go to any supermarket now, buy coconut milk, lemongrass and fish sauce, add them to some dish which you might otherwise be tired of making (chicken breasts, say), and create something new and exciting and completely different from your everyday fare. It might not be good enough to win the kaffir lime showdown on Iron Chef, but that’s hardly the point, isn’t it? The point is that you’re happy eating something that you have cooked for yourself and your family.
The Minimalist Cooks at Home is not an encyclopedic work like Bittman’s How to Cook Everything and its various spinoffs. In some ways, this makes it more useful for a beginning cook: It has a variety of clearly explained recipes, each of which has a section named “With Minimal Effort” detailing possible ways to vary the dish, depending on your inclination and the ingredients at hand. Flexibility, simplicity, making the best use of what you have—all of these are virtues in the world of The Minimalist.
I think that I’ve made 50% of the recipes in this book to the letter, and I’ve used the other 50% as a source of inspiration and ideas. Some of his pasta recipes, such as penne with butternut squash or tomato-melon gazpacho, have become staples for me and my Lovely Vegetarian Wife. It is not a particularly vegetarian-friendly book (there are sections on fish and shellfish, poultry and meat), although Bittman has gone on to publish a vegetarian cookbook (which I own) and to become a strong proponent of Americans reducing their meat consumption. However, in the spirit of adaptability and creativity, many of the recipes in The Minimalist Cooks at Home allow for the addition and substitution of meat into and out of recipes, opening up the possibility for carnivorous and vegetarian variations. (Garlic soup can have shrimp added at the end, for example, and pasta with potatoes can be made with or without half a cup of diced pancetta.)
I have two other cookbooks by Mark Bittman, and I assiduously read his weekly columns and watch his videos on The New York Times online. However, I always keep coming back to this book, the one that first helped me learn how to cook.
[…] East Coast. For those who are sweltering and suffering, I offer this cold soup, based on one in The Minimalist Cooks at Home. (I added some garlic and sherry vinegar to make this soup more like a gazpacho and less like a […]