Appetites by Anthony Bourdain | 2016 | HarperCollins | Hardcover $ 45
Anthony Bourdain is a man of many appetites. And for many years, first as a chef, later as a world-traveling chronicler of food and culture on TV, he has made a profession of understanding the appetites of others. These days, however, if he’s cooking, it’s for family and friends.
Appetites, his first cookbook in more than ten years, boils down forty-plus years of professional cooking and globe-trotting to a tight repertoire of personal favorites — dishes that everyone should know how to cook (at least in Mr. Bourdain’s opinion). The result is a home-cooking, home-entertaining cookbook like no other, with personal favorites from his own kitchen and from his travels, translated into an effective battle plan that will help you terrify your guests with your breathtaking efficiency.
Anthony Bourdain is perhaps best known as a chef-memoirist and host of culinary travel shows on TV. His caustic and crude yet sincere and sympathetic on-page and on-screen personality made him a unique fan favorite among a host of more glitzy celebrity chefs.
The real appeal of this book is in its author’s voice and its off-the-wall style. The photos run the gamut from messy-fun to entirely unhinged. Many of the recipes are old staples of the kind of cuisine you’d expect from a professional on the line cook to culinary school grad spectrum, though some are clearly influenced by the author’s later world travels and other personal experiences. (To be honest, I wish there had been a few more recipes of the latter type.)
Many recipes include photographs, but these are some of the most unique photos I’ve ever seen in a cookbook. They’re artsy rather than practical, yes, but rather than being the kind of glamorous, awe- or salivation-inspiring images you’d expect in a cookbook, they’re mostly either purposefully messy or silly. We’re talking about sandwiches with overflowing fillings wrapped in greasy paper with empty ketchup packets scattered around, or a big bladder blown up like a balloon complete with festive curly ribbon. Many pages are also printed to look pre-stained, as though to encourage you to go ahead and make more of a mess of the book in your own kitchen without guilt. Though I do typically prefer more practical illustrations for techniques and finished products in my cookbooks, this unabashedly chaotic vibe is just so Anthony Bourdain — I can’t be mad at it.
I tried about 12 recipes from this book, but — I am somewhat perplexed to say — only a couple of them were really stand-outs for me. There weren’t any badly written recipes or terrible end products, to be clear, not at all. It’s a servicable, clearly very well-tested collection. I guess that the author’s outsized personality and influence on culinary popular culture over the last several years had given me way over-inflated expectations for this cookbook.
Unfortunately, this cookbook just has a bog standard hardback binding, meaning the pages won’t stay open flat on a countertop unless you use page weights or break the spine a little bit. The pages also have a slight gloss, which makes it a little easier to wipe off stray bits of ingredients, but isn’t ideal for writing on, if you like to annotate your cookbooks.
I’ll say this is a solid choice for people who are already fairly comfortable in the kitchen (not for beginners!), but who want to experiment a little bit under the guidance of a kind of expert madman.
Do chua salad with nuoc mam cham
Delightfully fresh and crunchy, and an interesting deviation from my typical choice of vinaigrette salad dressing.
Osso buco
I do realize that this isn’t the most impressive presentation, but the meat was so tender that it was quite literally falling to pieces. Also, this was my first experience of eating that precious manna called marrow right out of the bone. It won’t be the last.
Pomodoro
Anthony Bourdain’s tomato sauce philosophy is basically just simpler is better. The tomatoes are the point. Sadly it can be kind of hard to find really good quality sauce tomatoes for much of the year here in Houston; we actually have two shorter growing seasons that limits the varieties that will be successful here, due to the high nighttime temps for like half the year. Anyway, point is, I am admitting to totally cheating and using canned tomatoes instead of fresh.
Portuguese kale soup
Despite the recipe name, the real source of flavor in this soup is the marrowbone and two different kinds of sausage. The kale is basically just there for texture, I guess.
Roasted baby beets with oranges
It’s pretty! But it’s also just another failure in a long line of attempts to get myself to actually enjoy beets.
Saffron risotto
A little bit labor-intensive, and I didn’t get the texture exactly perfect. But I was still pretty proud of the end product.
Spaghetti with anchovies, garlic, and parsley
This was my first time using anchovies as a you’re-supposed-to-actually-taste-it ingredient (instead of just a secret umami bomb in a sauce or something). Now I’m slightly obsessed.
Tuna salad
Simple, yes, but sometimes a simple little tuna salad sandwich is just what you need.
There are a couple of additional recipes that we tried and more or less liked, but didn’t get decent photos:
- Boston lettuce salad with yogurt-chive dressing
- Roasted cauliflower with sesame
I also tried the following recipes, but just didn’t really care for them TBH:
- Belgian endive with curried chicken salad
- Budae jjigae
To be clear, I’m not trying to discourage you from trying these recipes if they sound appealing to you; this is all down to personal taste, really.
If I were to dive back into this cookbook again, I think these are some other recipes that’d be worth trying:
- Chicken satay with fake-ass spicy peanut sauce
- Cream of tomato soup
- Korean-style radish pickles
- Kuching-style laksa
- Pan bagnat
- Spaghetti alla bottarga
If you would like to see more of my adventures through this book and several others, check out my Cookbook Cook-Thru Project Page:
Links:
Publication information: Bourdain, Anthony. Appetites. New York, NY: HarperCollins, 2016. Print.
Source: Personal library.
Disclaimer: I am not compensated, monetarily or otherwise, for reviews of books or other products.
I am a uber Bourdain fan and have all his books, including this one but I haven’t delved into it as much as I should. Great review and I will look up that Pomodoro recipe.
Sometimes with a cookbook like this it’s hard to tell whether my expectations are too high because of the author being a celeb, or whether I’m rating the recipes with rose-colored glasses because of my super-positive experience the author’s other works — so I’d love to see another cookbookish person’s perspective on it, if you decide to share!