I love contemporary cookbooks. The food photography is outstanding, the tone is chatty and friendly, the colors are soothing and have 'appetite appeal'. Many books are more coffee-table ready than kitchen-ready.
Although I only just received it, I'm liking Tom Kime's new cookbook, Street Food - exploring the world's most authentic tastes. Two clues in the title make it instantly more interesting to me than other cookbooks: 1) It is about street food, so the recipes will be easy to execute at home and 2) it is about authentic recipes, so they won't be dumbed down to satisfy lowest common denominator tastes.
Thank god for 'authenticity' - as irritating and overused as it is to describe everything, from experience to business to food, having 'authenticity' in recipes is a sea change from cookbooks of the past, which were all about adaptation to the American (or British, or whatever) kitchen and palate. As an example, I remember one of the first 'westernized' Japanese cookbooks I bought in the '80s - Elizabeth Andoh's American Taste of Japan. It was made American-Supermarket friendly and wasn't appealing to my trained-in-Japan palate. Flash forward 20 years later. Elizabeth Andoh's Washoku is one of my favorite cookbooks and I'd recommend it to anyone looking to cook 'real' Japanese cuisine in their home.
Back to Tom Kime. Oh he's a looker...and of course there are pictures, his face partially obscured, of him indulging in various dishes during his travels around the world. The cookbook is organized by country or region, and has a managable number of recipes for each area - and all are fairly simple and easy recipes. Another feature I like is that the contents are broken down into 'world tour' and the menus - covering India and Sri Lanka, Southeast Asia, Latin America and the Caribbean, Southern Europe and the Middle East and North Africa - and a Recipe Navigator, which lists out the recipes by category. In the back there's a glossary (thank you, Tom) and an alphabetical index.
This isn't an epic cookbook - its no HOT SOUR SALTY SWEET, which isn't a bad thing for newcomers to world cuisine and for those who do not have or want absurd cookbook collections.
Attractiveness of Chef Tom Kime: **** Hubba Hubba
Simplicity of Recipes: ***** My mom could make them
Ease of indexing in my cookbook collection: * world cuisine doesn't categorize well for me
Quality of photos: *** they show what each recipe should look like, although not all had appetite appeal
Paleness of his 'models': ***** this does not include his world photos, just his 'Saveur'-type pix
Celebrity Name Dropping in About Chef: ***** seriously, I don't care that you cooked for Kirstin Dunst - when I start taking dining cues from celebrities, I'll let you know
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