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.
I was first introduced to Anthony Bourdain in his show on CNN, Parts Unknown; later, I gobbled up his memoirs Kitchen Confidential and Medium Raw, as well as the Travel Channel’s No Reservations. While deciding which of my many cookbooks to devote myself to for cook-thru projects last year, Appetites was a shoo-in.
Though he spent years traveling the globe to explore and occasionally educate about global cuisines and his shows sometimes featured some really wild dishes, this cookbook is a little bit more down-to-earth than what you might expect based on all that. It features things like biscuits and gravy, macaroni and cheese, and Thanksgiving turkey. It also leans heavily on French and Italian foods, probably reflecting the culinary trends of the author’s early training and career, classic things like ratatouille and risotto. That said, it does also feature a few items that might be unfamiliar to many Americans, like Korean budae jjigae and Malaysian laksa and Vietnamese nuoc mam cham.
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 15 recipes from this book, but — I am somewhat perplexed to say — only a couple of them were really stand-outs for me. The pomodoro recipe produced a simple sauce with a really great effort-to-impact ratio, and I don’t even feel the need to try any other tomato sauce recipe for the rest of my life. And, the osso buco was frankly a flavor revelation; this was my first time eating marrow directly out of the bone.
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.
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.
If you would like to see a few photos from my adventure through this book and several others, check out my Cookbook Cook-Thru Project Page:
If you want to follow along in my continued culinary experiments, please feel free to visit my foodie Instagram:
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.