How Ottolenghi changed my life, part 2/4: a review of The Cookbook and Jerusalem
Can I reasonably say this is the most thorough review in the whole world of these two Ottolenghi's books ? 😄
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Read the first part of my Ottolenghi series here.
This article was first published in French here. This article in English is based on the French books, so the names of the dishes may defer between my translation and the original books in English.
The quick review for the readers in a hurry
⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ Great books with very few defaults
❤️ The things I loved: highly precise recipes, impeccable flavors, the stories behind the two books, both about Jerusalem and the two author’s improbable friendship.
🍮 The recipes I made: more details in the next newsletter (suspense!)
😋 My favorite recipe: same, more details in the next newsletter - therefore, subscribe to receive the next newsletter!
💪 Level of accessibility: easy to follow recipes, but they can take time and the ingredients list may be intimidating, especially for people who are not used to cook with spices. But it’s really worth investing in them. Most ingredients are easy to find if you live near a Middle-Eastern shop (well, I do).
✌️ The long review for people who have time to kill
Why I became so fond of Ottolenghi? First because a lot of their recipes became instant classics for me.
I had started writing a first version of this newsletter by talking about all the "objective" reasons why I fell in love with The Cookbook and Jerusalem. Like how the recipes are so precise, detail-oriented and foolproof that it’s virtually impossible to screw them up. Or the fact that we can feel how much the two authors enjoyed sharing their knowledge and love for their food just by reading the books. And, well, there’s also this brilliant idea in The Cookbook, which devotes a complete sub-chapter to eggplant...
But I thought this was only the tip of the iceberg. Everything above, the most important part, was that the vast majority of the dishes I made from the books became instant classics, dishes that I would want to make again and again and never get tired of.
It's like movies. Lots of movies are great, but you only see them once in your life and that's enough. And then there are Sweet Bean by Naomi Kawase and Happy Times by Zhang Yimou, movies that I have watched again and again, and each time, I cry while hiccuping in an incomprehensible way 😅
Ottolenghi and Tamimi are the Zhang Yimou of my kitchen, and their Asparagus, Zucchini and Grilled Manouri (The Cookbook page 46) is my plate’s Happy Times that will continue to delight me even when I have it for the 30th time.
That's what makes these two books so different from many other cookbooks I liked, whose recipes were very good, but I wasn't particularly eager to try them again. And especially, if I had made 2 or 3 of their recipes over a period of ten days, I didn't feel like going back to the book in question for a while.
On the other hand, in the first months I discovered Ottolenghi, I must admit that I cooked their recipes so much that my companion was convinced that I had bought both books. When in fact, I only borrowed them regularly from the network of Parisian libraries, whether it was the library 15 minutes away by bicycle from my house or the one 45 minutes away by metro! If Paris librairies look at their statistics, they'll notice that a slightly obsessive user was responsible for most of the borrowing of these 2 books 😅
So of course, my partner ended up having an overdose of Ottolenghi’s food... So much so that now he always grumbles when I tell him that tonight “on mange Ottolenghi” (“we're eating Ottolenghi”, which is a weird sentence once translated!). But in the end, more often than not, he'll admit through gritted teeth that he quite enjoyed the meal… 😅
Why has Ottolenghi's taste convinced palates around the world (and mine at the same time)?
"Flavors [that] are bright and fresh", "a sense of "generosity and love", "the "feel-good" state engendered by cooking his food"... All of this is true. The bright colors of their plates, the joy of cooking and eating that infuses their books, the lack of fuss in their approach of food explains why a lot of people including me fell in love with these recipes. The word "wholesome" perfectly characterizes their recipes.
But I think my love for their recipes had a lot to do with the fact that their cuisine was both different from my habits and at the same time deeply familiar.
Different in the use of certain ingredients and spices previously unknown to me, like the winning duo of zaatar and sumac, pomegranate molasse or preserved lemons - yes, exactly the stuff mentioned in this article to "ottolenghize" your cupboards 😄
But this cuisine was also familiar because I found some of my favorite ingredients in it: garlic, lemon, olive oil, mint and cilantro for example.
Above all, I was amazed by the straightforward, strong flavors that together could work magic: the aromatic complexity of a dozen spices skillfully combined, the liveliness of the herbs, the acidity of the lemon or the Greek yogurt... Ottolenghi's cuisine was perfectly spiced, fresh, exciting, never blend or one-dimensional. Each mouthful could have different layers of flavors. Somehow it reminded me of the same Southeast Asian cuisine markers I grew up with and had learnt to cook as an adult.
The best of both worlds: food that is both delicious and with a story
I finally realized that what had not worked for me when I tried to reduce my meat consumption was that most of the vegetarian recipes I had tried were too simplistic. It was basic quiches and boring vegetable soups. Or worse, it was a kind of “global cuisine” without identity, where 1 tablespoon of soy sauce or cumin are used in a shallow way to make bland dishes interesting.
In fact, I didn’t miss meat itself. It was the powerful flavor of meat dishes that I craved for. And I missed the fact that most of the meat dishes I liked had a true identity or a story behind them, like pho and duck confit I wrote about in the last newsletter.
Ottolenghi's cooking, on the other hand, combined the best of both worlds: it was not only delicious and proudly subtle, but it was also rooted in its territory. Their cuisine was telling the story of a region and its multiple connections to food in a wonderful way, sometimes with fascinating precision, like when Ottolenghi and Tamimi recount all the debates around hummus in Jerusalem.
So there were the flavors, but there was also the pleasure of bringing home a cuisine that had a deep identity and a thousand-year-old history. And these dishes based on vegetables and grains didn’t seem forcefully vegetarian: they made sense in the culture and History around them.
How the books’ tables of contents are built also lead you to pay more attention to vegetables and grains.
So thanks to the flavors, I started to eat less meat, but without effort and too much thinking.
But the way the books are built also helped me. To give you an example, in The Cookbook, the chapter "Vegetables, dried legumes and cereals" is 93-pages long, while the chapter "Meat and fish", which comes after the chapter on vegetables, is “only” 47-pages long. It’s exactly the opposite of many cookbooks, which put meat first and generally devote few pages to vegetables, often considered as side dishes.
Afterwards, I obviously explored other cuisines to discover or rediscover vegetarian dishes, but even now, this Levantine cuisine as translated and reinvented by Ottolenghi and Tamimi remains the "vegetable and grain-friendly" cuisine that I most enjoy exploring at home. Even though, as you will see in the newsletter dedicated to the tested recipes, I also enjoyed testing some of their meat dishes.
This being said, let’s dive into the details of the The Cookbook and Jerusalem.
These two books are the first two that Yotam Ottolenghi and Sami Tamimi published. After checking out other more recent books from the group, like Flavour or Simple, these two remain my favorites. I also really liked Falastin, co-written by Sami Tamimi and Sara Wigley. This is obviously a personal preference, the other books are very good too, and I really like the fact that you can see how their editorial line has evolved through their books.
Why these two books are my favorite in all Ottolenghi’s books ?
I prefer them mainly because both books remain deeply rooted in the authors’ home region and the flavors of their childhood, whereas some of the following books have a more international vibe and some of their recipes speak to me less. For example, kimchi and gruyere rice fritters, meh.
But let me be clear: nothing annoys me more when someone is confined to their origins or those of the generations before them. When I talk about my work in charcuterie, I get a little mad every time someone says: "will you offer in your future shop some Asian charcuterie?" Well, maybe I will, or maybe I won’t, and that I'm more interested in selling Belgium fricadelle or Spanish chorizo! I know it's usually well-meaning, but honestly, it feels like asking a recently married woman: "so when is the baby due?" as if mariage = baby!
All this to say that if Ottolenghi and Tamimi feel like coming up with a recipe for black-pepper tofu or a Mexican-inspired chicken, I mean, why not - even if "Mexican-inspired chicken" doesn't mean much in itself 🤷
But it comes back to the notion of identity and personal history that I hold dear in cookbooks. I found in The Cookbook and Jerusalem a kind of affection and joyful pride in their heritage, a desire to pass on a part of themselves that moved me. These two books are much more than the recipes that make them up. They also tell the story of two men whose friendship seemed forged by fate, and their shared love for their childhood’s food. You can feel that on every page, especially in Jerusalem.
That's one thing. There is also the fact that the recipes in The Cookbook and Jerusalem correspond to a way of cooking that I deeply enjoy: lots of spices, often lots of ingredients, and recipes that require time.
Of course, a book like Polpo amazed me with its recipes that can be done in three steps with two ingredients - my review will be sent in a few weeks ;-) But I love to spend time in the kitchen and the attention cooking asks for. So the quite long recipes in The Cookbook and in Jerusalem appealed to me a lot because of that.
Of course, my friends with babies will shrug as they listen to me talk about my spoiled life - meaning, I have more than 15 minutes of free time a day and sleeps 7 hours a night 😄 And they're not the only ones, as Simple was a response to readers who complained that the recipes in the first titles were too complicated and the ingredient lists too long. But if, like me, your way of relaxation is cooking and watching things simmer for a long time in a pan, these books are for you.
The books’s other qualities
The incredible precision and accuracy of the recipes as I said at the beginning, where every 1.5 tbsp of something is precisely right, no more, no less, and what you achieve is usually very close to the picture. No expectations vs. reality! And you can follow their instructions without thinking, it will work.
The simplicity of following the recipes, even if they seem long. I understand that some readers might have been afraid when they see all the text in The Cookbook, not well spaced out and written in small letters. But there’s a lot of text because the instructions are very detailed. And I do prefer cookbooks that are long and clear, rather than cookbooks that have little text and remain vague.
Note that I'm not talking about the general design of the two books, because apart from the pretty pictures illustrating life in Jerusalem, both books are pretty plain in terms of pictures of the dishes and layout. And don't even get me started on the red cover of the new version of The Cookbook, which I find awful! But we'll say that the quality of everything else is enough to compensate :)
What if you were to buy only one, which one to choose between the Cookbook and Jerusalem?
Even if I have some affection for The Cookbook, as it is the first Ottolenghi's book that I discovered, I still have a preference for Jerusalem, if only for the intention of the book, which was to highlight the culinary heritage of the childhood city of the two authors. In contrast, The Cookbook was more of an introduction to their cooking style following the success of their first London restaurant.
Jerusalem is packed with explanations of products and dishes that are very interesting to read. The introductions to the recipes are also more in-depth, and allow you to get a precise history of each dish.
Moreover, Jerusalem is more focused on dishes, whereas there were a lot of desserts, rather of English inspiration, in The Cookbook.
Finally, one can feel when reading the books of the two authors that The Cookbook was a first gallop. Jerusalem was published afterwards and was already more accomplished. As Food52, who had published a guide to Ottolenghi's books, says:
Flipping through Ottolenghi is like rereading Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone after you've finished Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: You can delight in the fact that the book once delighted you while understanding its nascency in the context of what's to come. You can't unlearn what you've learned, after all.
What is black garlic? A quick look at the ingredients
Let's talk about one of the things that has been most criticized in Ottolenghi’s books: the difficulty in finding certain ingredients, such as black garlic or rose harissa.
I admit that if you live in the place where you can only access a regular supermarket, it might be a little complicated for some recipes. But honestly, a lot of the dishes are still feasible with supermarket ingredients.
Otherwise, for people who live in the Paris region like me, it's really easy. There is the Sabbah grocery store for Levantine products or dried fruits - they even set up an Ottolenghi corner as customers were always asking for certain ingredients! You can also go to Indian grocery stores in Gare du Nord (like this one) for spices, it’s really cheap.
Note that I still haven't bought black garlic and rose harissa, and that didn't stop me from testing at least 15 recipes so far 😄
And what about the recipes?
Where are the tested recipes, would you say? Well, you’ll read that in the 3rd part sent in 2 weeks :-)
And if you're wondering what kind of charcuterie shop I’d like to create, see you in the 4th part for the conclusion!
Enjoy your cooking, thanks again for reading, and see you next week for another cookbook’s review!
Marjorie
Before you leave, hopefully to cook an Ottolenghi’s recipe…
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