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SQUASH: A COUNTRY GARDEN COOKBOOK
Introduction

I came late to the squash fan club. Although my childhood was spent in the Southwest, where some of these versatile vegetables originated, I don’t remember eating more than pumpkin on a regular basis. My mother did her vegetable gardening in the canned goods aisle at the local grocery, and pumpkin was a staple only because all our neighbors were Mexicans who didn’t wait around for Thanksgiving to eat it. They baked it into sweet empanadas all year. They savored the seeds, roasted and salted, as pepitas. And they even taught us to eat the blossoms off the vine, battered and deep-fried.

But it was not until I ripened into a professional eater in New York City that my own appetite for squash truly bloomed. Partly it was piqued by exposure, since so many restaurants — ethnic and American — showcase squash in everything from soup to tarts, from risotto to enchiladas. But it was also stimulated by availability. Any produce stand now routinely stocks a minimum of six to eight varieties, in every shape and color.

When I went off a decade ago to train as a chef, I had never tasted even a squash as mundane as a butternut. My addiction started during class when Stephanie, the one student more interested in restaurant management than cooking, produced what she justifiably boasted was the best of the day. It was nothing more than a simple puree of butternut with a bit on honey, a little butter and fresh thyme, but it was simply spectacular.

The lesson from then on has been that great squash has little to do with the cook and everything to do with the ingredient. No expertise is needed to cut a delicata in half and bake it. The flavor stands alone.

Squash also comes in so many varieties that a cook can shine for weeks producing different dishes using essentially the same ingredient. Most varieties are sold year-round, but this remains one vegetable guaranteed to keep us aware of the seasons. Summer is high time for cooking crooknecks and sunbursts and cymlings, not to mention squash blossoms and baby squash. In fall, when the zucchini are swelling to blimp size, the first winter varieties roll off the vines: pumpkin and turban, buttercup and Hokkaido. And even in darkest winter, when potatoes and onions are the staples, there is always some kind of squash available to brighten up both markets and menus.

The population explosion in the squash cornucopia is partly due to a new realization that this varied vegetable doesn’t just taste good, it is also one of the best choices a health-conscious eater can make. Winter squash in particular are extremely high in beta-carotene, the antioxidant that has been credited with reducing the risk of everything from common ailments to cancer. All squash are also low in calories, high in other vitamins and minerals and full of fiber. And at a time when nutritionists are advocating eating five portions of fruits and vegetables daily, there’s a squash for each serving, from muffins to main dishes.

Squash has been a vital ingredient in North American kitchens for literally centuries. Along with beans and corn, it formed the holy trinity of the native diet long before Columbus set sail. When the conquistadors arrived in the Southwest in the early 1500s, they were taught by Native Americans to cook with every part of the squash, including the seeds and the flesh, which they dried on stakes in the sun to ensure provisions for the winter.

The name squash actually comes from the Narragansett Indian word askutasquash, meaning “a green thing eaten raw,” which sounds like the worst way to consume it. Once the Pilgrims came along, they adapted squash to their diets and squash found a place on the fire.

Thanks to this New World bounty, cuisines all over the world, from Italy to India, have been enriched. Because of my background, I’m most inclined to give squash a Mexican accent. But since I now live in New York City, the ultimate melting pot, the recipes in this book showcase more universal flavors.

And all of them reflect my late-blooming fondness for squash. My consort often seems baffled when he hears me gushing over a newfound variety, savoring it the way some people do truffles or foie gras and insisting he agree on its wonders. “I like squash fine,” he’ll say, “but you love it.” Converts are always the most devoted, especially when it comes to squash.

(Forgive me: this was written in 1993.)

SUNBURST SQUASH STUFFED WITH SPINACH AND GRUYERE

These colorful stuffed squash are meant as a side dish, but they can also be served as a brunch or lunch main course. Try the same filling in zucchini or yellow squash.

4 medium sunburst squash, each 3 1/2 to 4 inches in diameter
2 tablespoons unsalted butter
1 tablespoon extra virgin olive oil
6 shiitake or button mushrooms, stemmed and finely chopped
2 shallots, finely chopped
1 clove garlic, minced
1 teaspoon soy sauce
1 large bunch fresh spinach leaves, carefully washed and finely chopped
1/8 teaspoon freshly grated nutmeg
Dash of cayenne pepper
Salt and freshly ground black pepper to taste
1 large egg, lightly beaten
3/4 cup grated Gruyere or Swiss cheese
Preheat oven to 375 degrees F.

Fill a large pot three-fourths full of water and bring to a rolling boil. Drop the squash in and boil 5 minutes. Drain well and let cool.

Cut a thin slice off the bottom of each squash, removing just enough so that it will stand upright. Then slice off the tops (approximately 1/2 inch thick) and hollow out the centers, leaving a thin shell. Set aside. (Reserve the nominal amount of flesh removed from the centers for another use, or discard.)

In a skillet over medium heat, melt the butter with oil. Add mushrooms, shallots and garlic and sauté approximately 10 minutes, or until soft. Stir in the soy sauce and add the spinach. Raise the heat to medium-high. Sauté about 5 minutes, or until spinach is tender and most of the liquid has evaporated. Transfer to a bowl and let cool slightly, then season with the nutmeg, cayenne, salt and black pepper. Stir in the egg and 1/2 cup of the Gruyere and mix well.

Mound the mixture into the hollowed-out squash. Arrange in a single layer in a baking dish just large enough to hold all the squash upright. Sprinkle the remaining 1/4 cup cheese over the tops. Pour hot water into the pan to a depth of 1/2 inch.

Bake approximately 30 minutes, or until the filling is set and the squash is tender. Serve immediately.
Serves 4.

SAVORY ZUCCHINI AND CHEESE MADELEINES

A French madeleine mold converts a quiche-like filling into a savory hors d’oeuvre with a crunchy crust and moist center. If you don’t have a madeleine pan, use miniature muffin tins and bake about 15 minutes.

2 large eggs
2 tablespoons heavy cream
2 teaspoons Creole or Pommery coarse-grain mustard
2 tablespoons unsalted butter, melted
3 cloves garlic, minced
1 1/2 teaspoons dried basil, crumbled
1 teaspoon salt
1/4 teaspoon freshly ground black pepper
Dash of cayenne pepper
1 cup flour
1/2 teaspoon baking powder
1/4 cup coarse-grind yellow cornmeal
2 cups firmly packed, coarsely grated zucchini (about 3 medium squash)
1 small onion, finely diced
1 small red bell pepper, cored, seeded and finely diced
1 cup grated Gruyere, Jarlsberg (or other) cheese

Preheat oven to 425 degrees. Oil 3 madeleine molds and set aside. (If you only have one, work in batches, letting the mold cool before refilling.)

In a large bowl, combine the eggs, cream, mustard, melted butter, garlic, basil, salt and black and cayenne pepper. Mix well. Stir in the flour, baking powder and cornmeal and mix well. Add the zucchini, onion, red pepper and cheese and mix thoroughly. Spoon into the prepared molds.

Bake 20 minutes, or until puffed and golden brown (the centers will still be moist). Turn out of the molds and serve warm, or let cool on wire racks to room temperature.
Makes about 3 dozen.

KABOCHA, CRANBERRY AND GINGER TART

Squash is normally pureed for desserts, but it has a superb texture when simply grated and added raw to a tart filling. Butternut or buttercup squash can be used instead of Kabocha.

2 cups coarsely grated Kabocha squash
1/4 cup finely diced crystallized ginger
1/2 cup sun-dried cranberries
3 eggs
1/2 cup honey
1/2 cup heavy cream
4 tablespoons (1/2 stick) unsalted butter, melted
1/4 teaspoon salt
1 9-inch tart shell, partially baked

Preheat oven to 350 degrees.

In a small bowl, stir together the squash, ginger and cranberries. In another small bowl, lightly beat the eggs with the honey, cream and butter. Add to the squash mixture along with the salt. Mix until fully combined. Pour into the prebaked crust. Bake 45 to 50 minutes, or until set. Let cool completely before serving.

Makes 1 tart, 8 to 10 servings.

I bought a copy and we immediately started eating better, especially in the less American-traveled corners of the city. Every trip since I have headed straight to FNAC for an upgrade, trying to try as many of Pudlo’s prize places as possible and reveling in the overlap between my picks and those in the so-savvy glossies. It was as if Pat Wells’ masterwork were being updated and expanded by a local who had no idea the great unwashed over in Freedomfryland would ever find it.

Now “Le Pudlo Paris” has been translated into English, sans article and, I can discern, not brilliantly. And it should make the Michelin as irrelevant as Bill O’Reilly. No half-literate American ever has to spend hours hunched on a hotel bed trying to decipher by plate-and-fork symbols alone which restaurant in which arrondisement is most worth the journey. The bad thing is that the descriptions in English deprive you of the chance to bone up for the actual menu and, worse, of the temptation to try something fascinating. Certainly I would not have trekked to L’Epi Dupin if I had understood the chef’s obsession with putting fruit in all the wrong places, but I would have missed out on a very quirky dinner.

Overall our tastes and Pudlo’s jibe, although we have to part company on Helene Darroze, whom he has yeared so often that I half-wonder if ads are all he takes. We’re still stinging from the merdey treatment when we arrived on time for our last lunch reservation and the kitchen was chefless, I guess because the princess was still asleep on her pea. Otherwise, Pudlo will make you feel like an insider eating in Paris (or Alsace, where we also used his guide).

Pudlo (Gilles Pudlowski, if you want to be all formal about it) also lists wine bars, chocolate shops, bakeries, charcuteries and shops. Every entry includes hours, Metro stop, closing days, prices and, that all-important detail as the ice caps vanish, whether or not AC is on offer. The book is smaller and thus lighter than the original, which makes it easier to toss into your bag when you set off for arrondisements unknown. But you might want to outfit it with what I saw a Frenchwoman on the 6 train using on her Eyewitness Guide to New York the other day: a sleek leather jacket that covers the cover so that no one knows you’re lost and led in a strange city. Especially if you’re a “journalist” filing a hot news story on the best eats in Paris. This is the age of cellphone witnesses.

In a food culture that seems to worship celebrity above creativity, it says everything that their book is a knockout on every level, not least because a vicarious eater will get as much out of it as a dedicated cook can. Unlike the average perfunctory compilation of restaurant recipes, what the two partners have produced with a co-writer, another chef named Mike Wille, is one of the most appealing Mexican cookbooks ever published, and one of the best in any category all year.

You can instantly conjure the melon salad seasoned with chile powder, kosher salt and fresh mint and drizzled with pungent crema, the Mexican answer to creme fraiche, but you have to taste it to believe it. Ditto the very simple, sublimely silky corn pudding, or the queso fundido, translated into Californian with goat cheese and blanketed with a classically complex sauce of pumpkin seeds and tomatillos with three herbs.

The subtitle of “Dona Tomas: Discovering Authentic Mexican Cooking,” from Ten Speed Press, does not cover the whole enchilada. This is authentic California Mexican cooking. Schnetz says he takes what he tastes in Mexico City and Oaxaca and Guadalajara on his yearly trips and translates it using local ingredients and twists, always with the goal of elevating an undervalued cuisine. “We try to be a step beyond what’s out there,” he said, and he thinks Mexican food in the Bay Area is improving overall as a result.

The book’s dreamily meandering foreword is by the very lyrical Mexican-American writer Richard Rodriguez, who happens to be Schnetz’s uncle, and it speaks volumes.

“Dona Tomas is Cal-Mex of a sort we have never tasted. It rejects the blandness of California Mexican cooking, but also the greasy bathos of it. Dona Tomas belongs to the nouvelle California initiative for the pure and the good.” The inspiration for the queso fundido, after all, was the Alice Waters signature at Chez Panisse, warm goat cheese, Schnetz says.

Schnetz, who is half-Mexican and grew up eating his Guadalaran grandmother’s tortillas and refried beans, met Savitsky while both were cooking at Square One in San Francisco. They opened Dona Tomas in 1999 after she had been the chef at Cafe Marimba and he had started a cafe in Sacramento with his brother, among other stops on their resumes. Savitsky now runs the front of the house and contributed the cocktails to the book, including a cucumber daiquiri and a lime colada. (They also own a taqueria in Berkeley called Tacubaya and are opening a third place.)

Schnetz credits two non-Mexicans, cookbook author Diana Kennedy and Chicago chef Rick Bayless, with inspiring him to head up the chile trail. “Her book, ‘The Art of Mexican Cooking,’ got me excited about it,” he said. “It was so comprehensive it brought that cuisine to life, made me realize how underutilized it was. And Rick Bayless, what he did with his restaurant, he brought it to America.”

The recipes in “Dona Tomas” are more accessible than either Bayless’ or Kennedy’s, though. The writing is compelling; Wille, the collaborator, is a chef and writer in Los Gatos who has a gift for communicating the sights, sounds and smells of cooking that are essential cues in a recipe. The graphic design also helps — the lavish and gorgeous photos seem to yell, “try me,” while headnotes are also printed above the bold titles, which has the curious effect of making each dish almost speak for itself. You jump straight to the ingredients and before you know it have made seared tuna with a spicy pumpkin seed-sesame seed sauce and pickled red onions.

An excellent glossary at the start of the book demystifies the more exotic ingredients, but then most can be found at a decent supermarket; even crema is available in a can. A blender is key for many of the sauces, but anything more complicated is rarely needed.

Schnetz says he Californa-ized his food partly by developing side dishes that would not be served in Mexico, which makes it supremely easy to put a full meal together from his book. Everything seems not just to fit but to almost fall into a menu. That amazing corn pudding goes with the tuna, which goes with the richly flavored achiote rice; the queso fundido can start a dinner party and a sweet and crusty zucchini cake dusted with canela, the Mexican cinnamon, can finish it. Verdolagas — purslane sauteed with garlic and tomatoes — could accompany anything, with vibrantly rounded flavor from so few ingredients. A cookbook that entices you to try a vegetable you have been ignoring at the farmers’ market for 20 years is not to be mis-underestimated.

But then the book is crammed with enticing ideas: salt cod and potato tamales; pozole with crab, or with duck; a salad of wilted cabbage, toasted pecans, chicharrones and cilantro with baked goat cheese; pumpkin seed brittle; salmon tacos with mango salsa; roasted chiles rellenos, filled with potato or zucchini and crab. Another simple recipe can become an addiction: pumpkin seeds toasted in a skillet with whole cloves of garlic and chile de arbol.

Tasting any of them makes it easy to see how “Dona Tomas” came into being. Schnetz said the owner of Ten Speed Press, which is based in Berkeley, is a regular customer who loved the cafe’s food and wanted to get it into print. Now the same publisher has just come out with another book from a much more famous restaurant, Cafe Pasqual’s in Santa Fe, N.M. You can guess how good that one is.

Anyone who suspects most food writing is done by software these days will feel vindicated by this reprint of very pithy pieces from The Times of London, originally run off the presses in 1922. Agnes Jekyll, “an artist-housekeeper” who lived from 1860 to 1937, clearly had no access to FoodPerfect6, and the 35 short essays in this collection almost sing with originality.

My copy, a Christmas gift, has yellow Postits on every third page. A few flag recipes that sound either surprisingly contemporary, like polenta au gratin, or profoundly lyrical, like the sole a la Dorothea served with a “suspicion” of tomato sauce and “a certainty” of mushrooms.

But many more are marked just for Jekyll’s trenchant observations:

“Marriage feasts resemble the institution they celebrate, of which Montaigne observed that those within its confines want to get out, whilst those without endeavour to get in.”

“…Apples are proverbially so health-giving that no doctors can be expected to do anything but eat them themselves and discourage that practice in others….”

“God made the first Christmas, and man has ever since been busy spoiling it.”

This is one of the best reads outside Elizabeth David.

Nabhan took the idea even further, restricting himself to the wild, the weird and the completely daunting (squashed venison off the highway). What he proves is that it ain’t easy, but cooking and eating what comes locally is so much better for the soul.

From the first page Nabhan makes it abundantly clear why he won a MacArthur grant. One of his missions is saving indigenous plants, particularly of the food-bearing variety, and he has a unique perspective on the American food supply. His idea of a feast includes prickly pear margaritas, pickled cholla buds and rattlesnake fritters. It only makes you think about how many other ingredients never make it to market, and about how truly strange it is that soy milk has taken hold.

In the course of cooking his way through the seasons, Nabhan gracefully tackles issues like diabetes, industrial agriculture, fast food, processed food, genetically altered food and other usual suspects. His observations are spiritual and lyrical, though, not the outraged cant of the food police. He travels and talks and tastes and thinks before he writes. As the jacket promises, he knows how to meld “politics and pleasures.”

What makes the point best is that he is so earnest that he raises his own turkeys, but he also steps off lightly by quoting Oscar Wilde: “Nature is a damp place over which large numbers of ducks fly, uncooked.”

“Coming Home to Eat” was overlooked by the food covens who at their yearly circle jerks tend to praise members’ halt “Pleasures of Slow Food” and lame “From Hardtack to Homefries” (the weakest, most disorganized book I slogged through in 2002). And that may be the ultimate validation.

If you think a high-profile restaurant critic should know how to cook, know how to eat, know how to articulate with some wit what makes a dish good and a restaurant worth trying, you’ll be sorry when you read “Eating Crow.” Nothing makes all those points more clearly than this sharply written, quite funny and immensely entertaining novel by a reviewer from the highest caste in the profession: British. And knowing such a character exists makes the absence here more obvious.

“Eating Crow’s” plot unravels even as it’s being knitted, but the basic idea is solid enough: A restaurant review is so nasty the chef kills himself and the reviewer starts apologizing and can’t stop until he’s gone professional. Every chapter has great descriptions of food, great insights on the people drawn to it and great lines just tossed off — on the signals napkin-folding gives off about cooking, on women who think they can cook, on newspapers and the fat guys who eat and ascend at them. Unlike so many critics these days, Rayner seems to have a life beyond the table but would never see food as beneath him.

His fake reviews are rather weak, but then there’s probably no way they could compete with the real prose. Referring to the doomed chef, he writes: “But what really broke me up about Hestridge was that he couldn’t cook. By his choice of profession he ensured that animals died in vain. He destroyed fish. His sauces were too thick or too thin or just tasteless. His starters were too heavy, his desserts flimsy and insubstantial.”

Rayner is also that rarity, a food writer who can describe the act of cooking without making the reader want to look away in embarrassment (or, worse yet, boredom). He has fresh ways of hitting ethnic cliches, as when he refers to a kebab place in one of London’s outer suburbs “where the meat festered rather than cooked.” And he has a sure hand in mixing real and imagined dishes, especially those wacked out with chocolate.

Maybe Rayner’s greatest revelation is the most obvious: “A good review was a drudge, a desperate struggle for diverting hyperbole. A reliable column needs a strong narrative, and nice experiences in good restaurants don’t make for good stories. . . Terrible places, and the suffering they cause their customers, make for good stories, and so I had begun to seek them out.” Or, to put it the way another character does: “You’re so funny when you hate.”

“The Breakaway Japanese Kitchen” (Kodansha, $27) is by Eric Gower, a self-trained San Francisco cook who lived in Japan for 15 years and whose first cookbook was written in Japanese. Like a photographer who knows his technique so well he will shoot out of focus for greater effect, Gower takes Japanese ingredients and concepts into territory undoubtedly never explored in Tokyo. Or California.

Gower clearly is so comfortable with the flavors and traditions of his second home that he can take a mad-scientist approach to them and make every recipe work in a few steps and very little time. Tofu baked with a pistachio-mint pesto is a combination that would never occur to me, but it’s one of the most amazing things ever to come out of my oven.

This is not “Japanese Cooking for Dummies,” although a kitchen virgin would have no trouble mastering any of the 45 recipes, each gorgeously photographed by Fumihiko Watanabe. One of the few typical Japanese dishes is a twist on tonkatsu in which the breaded pork cutlets are baked rather than fried. More often Gower borrows concepts and tastes to produce Western food with just enough Eastern exoticism.

His lively interpretation of coleslaw is dressed with ginger and brown rice vinegar and garnished with roasted peanuts. His beet salad is a wonderment with smoked trout, ginger and walnuts; his pot roast is braised with soy sauce and orange (and a hint of very un-Asian chipotle chile). The tofu recipes would convert a carnivore. Even his rice is a hemisphere away from Uncle Ben’s: He seasons it with bay leaves and Dijon mustard and substitutes carrot juice for water. With all those, you can forgive him for including the requisite miso-glazed fish.

Gower has a thing for pesto, but he takes one of the most clichéd concepts into another universe. His version made with ground dried shiitakes and roasted almonds borders on brilliant. Like the other reinterpretations, one with edamame and another with pistachios, it was just as great as a sauce for steamed green beans and a spread for bruschetta as it was on pasta.

“Breakaway” lives up to its title in other ways. It includes no appetizers or desserts, and it makes a persuasive case for taking as much care with the choice of serving bowls as with the food in them. (A list of sources is included.) None of the recipes calls for anything more exotic than shiso leaves, miso or brown rice vinegar, all easily located in an Asian grocery. But the vinegar alone was worth the detour: It’s as smooth and deep as balsamic but tarter and not as syrupy.

Not every one of Gower’s creations is a winner — potatoes with sake were soggy, for instance — and yields are sometimes off. But those are quibbles. After I cooked four dishes for a dinner party, one guest went out the next morning to buy his own copy of the book.

At a time when originality seems to be the missing ingredient in far too many cookbooks, “Breakaway” is a good cure for the comfort-food blues.

Until I read Greg Critser’s scarifying “Fat Land,” I thought I had pegged all the vices behind the Macy’s ballooning of America, from fast-food gluttony to TV-remote sloth. Who knew I was part of the problem, as one of those food writers in the Eighties and Nineties who caved to magazine editors who were caving to their fat-free advertisers? Critser lets no one off the hook in this relentlessly reported, entertainingly written expose of “how Americans became the fattest people in the world.” The subtitle is about the only exaggeration in the book, which proceeds like a combination murder mystery and diet guide. He names names — Ray Kroc, sure, but also Earl Butz and Robert Atkins — and suggests solutions (one school got porked-out kids to slim down with videos powered by exercise bicycles).

“Fat Land’s” focus on high-fructose corn syrup is enough to make you break out a crucifix when confronted with a Coke again. The cheap sweetener now used in half the food on sale everywhere is processed differently from sugar by the body, which is one reason why iced tea and Snackwells alike have been bad for backsides heading for airline seats next to me. And why drug companies are almost gleefully preparing for the diabetes epidemic building in a country where one in five people would look roundly at home in a sideshow. But Critser points fingers at other villains, from rap promoters who literally fatten up their big stars to school districts budgeting no money for PE to cynical Krispy Kreme bosses who target low-income neighborhoods where families are “bigger.” He looks at supersizing not just of burger meals but also of clothing and restaurant chairs. Americans, he concludes, are literally paying a heavy price for “have it your way” indulgence. We’re growing into human dinosaurs.

One of the most chilling points in “Fat Land” is that fat is a class issue. It’s no accident that the poor get fatter while the rich have health food stores and nutrition counselors, not to mention safe neighborhoods to jog through and personal trainers to buy. But Critser saw firsthand how income and education can turn a “fatso” into a svelte investigative reporter. And so he devotes the last half of his book to a polemic on how to reverse the trend, before the day comes when the obese will be ostracized like smokers, their bad habits too heavy for others to carry.

Everyone should read this book, but every food writer should study it, if only to break the chain of sloppy reporting and reliance on the latest nutrition “discovery” underwritten by the Dairymaids Butter Council or Intergalactic Institute of Dark Chocolate. Everything we were told in the Eighties and Nineties is turning upside down these days, starting with the government’s food pyramid itself. Fat in food is not the problem. Calories do count. And so does getting off your fanny every chance you can. Light mayonnaise and fat-free ice cream were never the answer.

As Critser puts it: “The modern media are nothing if not absolutely addicted to the latest health manifestos. If skepticism about them is not their lot, the media’s acceptance is largely based on ignorance and wishful thinking; to paraphrase Mr. Dooley, the newspaper bosses — they like to sit around and eat a Big Mac too.”

Anyone doubting that the Brits are different from you and me has only to flip open Julian Barnes’ foray into food, a collection of columns from the Guardian, the newspaper that has become the must-read for Americans stranded with an apparently enslaved press. Not only does the prolific novelist (and translator of “In the Land of Pain”) get away with words like prelapsarian and pertinacity, words editors here would dumb down for a Food Network audience. But he also has more ideas per chapter than any six Americans.

Barnes starts out annoyingly, seemingly very aware that he’s a literary light slumming under kitchen fluorescents. But I was hooked by page 30: “Remember that cookery writers are no different from other writers: many have only one book in them (and some shouldn’t have let it out in the first place). Consider this possibility when a new one is being puffed.’’

My tiny book, a Christmas gift recommended to my consort by Nach Waxman at Kitchen Arts & Letters, is flagged with a couple of dozen yellow Postems marking other Wustof-sharp observations. Barnes and I are in total agreement on shopping for meat or fish, which so often means being taken advantage of by “specialists”: “The unlovely success of supermarkets is due to many factors, but eliminating a potentially awkward social exchange is by no means a minimal one.” His definition of cooking is “the transformation of uncertainty (the recipe) into certainty (the dish) via fuss.” And his take on Heston Blumenthal will save you some hero worship: Admitting that he is “in awe” of the chef’s cooking at the Fat Duck, he then goes on to say: “If you gave him a human brain he might poach it lightly in a reduction of 1978 Cornas and top it with a mortarboard made of liquorice; but he might not understand all that had been going on inside it before he popped it into the pot.”

With anecdotes, insights and the obvious experience of a devoted-to-obsessed home cook, Barnes takes you places most authors can’t. He admits his prejudices but also names names (the tale of the River Cafe’s disastrous recipe for “Chocolate Nemesis” is worth four pounds of the best bittersweet). He teaches, he illuminates, he thinks. And just consider: he’s one among many in England.

This book is so fabulously snarky it would be easy to write it off as a one-gag wonder: retro recipes can be pretty scary. Read deeper and you realize it actually has surprising insight buried among the gruesome photographs and over-the-top copy (“I don’t know what this is,” the caption with barbecued apples in foil reads, “but pour enough liquor in a frat boy and he’d try to have sex with it”).

Lileks collected promotional cookbooks from the Fifties and Sixties, culled the most staggeringly hideous examples of Jell-O salads and mystery meats and turned his sinister imagination loose. Along with the jokes about “burned wieners in a drunken scrum” and “the Swamp Thing’s brain,” he illuminates an era when only men were chefs, women were housewives and children were captives to creative cooking as dictated by manufacturers of major manufactured foods, Spry shortening and 7-Up chief among them.

“Regrettable Cuisine” is a rather tasty answer to all the pretentious food books emerging from academia lately, now that American cooking has become the deep scholars’ answer to Madonna. Reading it, you realize it’s okay to acknowledge: Sometimes a congealed salad is just a congealed salad.