Christopher Kimball - Milk Street: Cookish: Throw It Together: Big Flavors. Simple Techniques. 200 Ways to Reinvent Dinner.

Historically, Ive had little love for cookbooks that promise meals in minutes or sport titles along the lines of 5-Ingredient Cookbook! They too often deliver recipes that taste like they didnt get much love and attentionsomebody smeared mustard on chicken parts and threw them into the oven. My rule of thumb was you get what you deserve with speed cooking.

That was before I founded Milk Street, which completely changed how I cook. The classic American recipe handbook is based on a Northern European tradition that depends on time and heat to build flavor from mostly dull ingredientsbig hunks of meat, root vegetables, etc. The rest of the world, however, takes a different tack. Time is no longer the key ingredientits the ingredients themselves that make the difference. An approach which, it turns out, can be surprisingly speedy.

A bottle of fish sauce, a bit of miso, a good sherry vinegar, some smoked paprika, a tablespoon of Aleppo pepper, and a few of the many cooking techniques found in Sichuan cooking, for example, are transformative. Start there and you are almost at the finish line. And while you are at it, mix and match. Put sweet with sour. Mix creamy with crunchy. Add a touch of bitter when least expected. All of a sudden, that 30-minute supper looks a whole lot better. This is the heart of Cookish.

Cookishdoes have a few rules. It is a lot more than quick cooking. We depend on a powerhouse supermarket pantry, ingredients that do the work for us, like orange marmalade, miso, garam masala, black bean garlic sauce, harissa, Thai red curry paste, pickled ginger, ground turmeric. We offer alternatives for hard-to-find ingredients, though pretty much anything is now a click away.

We have limited ingredients to six, other than salt, pepper, oil, and water. Most recipes call for no more than one piece of cookware. And cooking techniques are dead simple, many of them borrowed from what we have learned on our travels. For those of us who grew up in New England, it is a world of cooking that offers myriad solutions to getting dinner on the table quickly.