Deb Perelman isn’t a professional chef or cookery writer, and yet her book, The Smitten Kitchen Cookbook, has been on The New York Times best seller list since it launched in the USA last October. Photographs of the queues for her book signings have made the news. And her Smitten Kitchen blog, which she started six years ago, about cooking in her tiny New York kitchen, has nearly 10 million readers (it’s a very good blog). The woman’s a phenomenon! We’re so not surprised. Perelman is pedantic, funny, and completely obsessive about her cooking. She seems to enjoy nothing more than tweaking a recipe over and over until it’s the very best version of itself that it can ever be. Plus, she includes all the most valuable lessons she’s learned from other cookbooks in perfectly pithy form. That’s so the person whose recipes we want to get hold of! And they’re all there, up on the blog or now in the book (the recipes on the blog and in the book rarely overlap), perfectly introduced and meticulously explained, with detailed photographs by Pereleman herself.
We’ve been using the book ever since we got it and love it. Perelman writes intimately and well, and her explanations about both why and how to cook things are really enlivening. And her recipes work almost uncannily well, as you might expect when written by an obsessive-compulsive perfectionist. We’ve made the rhubarb triangles on the cover three times no less. They are that good. Her flat roasted chicken with tiny potatoes is wonderful and quick to do. Her Japanese inspired avocado and cucumber tartine is our new lunch time favourite. And her red velvet cake is coloured and flavoured with red wine. And chocolate. Enough said. Get this book.
