Bittman - The Best Recipes in the World

Home cooking has never been easier, more exciting, or filled with as much potential. A mere generation agoin many parts of the country a mere ten years agoif you wanted soy sauce or miso, you went to an Asian market; if you wanted decent olive oil or mozzarella, you went to an Italian market; and if you wanted bulgur or phyllo, you went to a Middle Eastern market. Now all those ingredients, and many more, are routinely available at supermarkets throughout North America. Creating a well-stocked international pantry may still require some time and workyour supermarket may not carry miso, curry paste, or chipotles (though many do)but lots of formerly exotic items are widely available. And the international pantrywhich requires only occasional replenishmentenables the home cook to vary his or her cuisine with almost no work.

Every bit as important as ingredients, however, is knowledge: what do we do with this miso, these chipotles, this curry paste? Here again we're in luck. More information about the cooking of other lands is available than ever before, and the planet becomes smaller every year. With or without this cookbook, if you had never cooked Vietnamese food before and wanted to do so tonight, you could dig up a few recipes, head over to the supermarket, spend a couple of hours in the kitchen, and be wolfing down that caramelized shrimp before dark.

So. We have the ingredients and we have the knowledge. My goal in this book is to help you become familiar with the ingredients, to distill the knowledge, and to make the recipes as accessible as possible and as American as I can, without robbing them of their souls.

This is not as challenging as it sounds. In my other boldly titled book, How to Cook Everything, I focused on the techniques of basic cooking. I recognized that there was a crying need for a book that covered the basicsone written primarily for the couple of generations of cooks that we had lost to so-called fast and convenience foods, to the lure of restaurants, to lack of interest and the family of two wage earners. (In fact, there are a dozen reasons why many Americans began to stop cooking in the fifties and sixties and have only recently resumed or taken it up for the first time.)

But the voyages I took for this book convinced me of something I'd already known: ingredients change, but technique does not. It's all basic. I have traveled consistently for three decades, always with food as the focus, but beginning in 1999 I began to travel internationally with increasing frequency, with the aim of making the recipes included in this book as authentic as possible at home. As I said, my trips confirmed that cooking techniques simply don't vary from one place to the next.

At least not much. Some techniques, of course, are unique to a given culture, and others are tweaked from one culture to the next. One might wrap food in banana leaves before steaming; another might use corn husks or paper (or, for that matter, aluminum foil)but this hardly makes a difference. In the broad scheme of things, for home cooks who are not looking to become expert at any given cuisine, these differences are irrelevant. It turns out that the techniques of cookingapplying heat to food with the goal of making it more digestible, palatable, and, ultimately, deliciousare pretty much the same wherever you go. (Think about it; how many ways can you actually cook?) It's the flavors that change.

The world's cuisines have far more in common than not. Think about bits of food wrapped in pastry and baked, fried, or steamed. You might call them dumplings, pot stickers, ravioli, or empanadas, gyoza, manti, or pierogi (I could go on). They're universal. I recently held a dumpling up in front of a class of students at a local community college, where the ethnic groups were as diverse as they are at the JFK International Arrivals Terminal. I asked whether anyone came from a country where such a thing didn't exist. No hands were raised. The differences are more about whether you season them with parsley and Parmesan or garlic and soy sauce and ginger than about how you put them together.