May Days, and Two Great Cookbooks

Forget about April in Paris and give me May. This is my favorite time of the year, when there are fava beans, asparagus, early cherries and tomatoes and bunches of garden peonies for sale in my Saturday morning market on the boulevard des Batignolles. The lushness of late Spring in France never ceases to delight, and there’s no time of the year when it’s so easy to do bona-fide market cooking, like the delicious salad of wheat berries, fava beans, chopped tomato, fresh coriander, tiny cubes of Corsican ham, and cumin-seed-flecked Gouda with a lemon juice and olive oil vinaigrette that I made for lunch last Saturday.

Just looking at all of these beautiful vegetables tells you exactly what to cook, and it’s in this frame of mind that I’ve been enjoying two cookbooks (I’m a collector) that I brought home from my recent trip to the United States—the delightful Blue Eggs and Yellow Tomatoes by Jeanne Kelley, which was just published by the Running Press, and Lari Robling’s charming Endangered Recipes by Stewart, Tabori and Chang.

Jeanne Kelly has worked for Bon Appetit for over twenty years and lives in a surprisingly rural setting in Los Angeles. She went to La Varenne Ecole de Cuisine in Paris, but her sensibility as a cook is wonderfully Californian, which means a brilliant mixture of spontaneity and technicity. Among the many terrific recipes in this book, I especially loved hers for an “Egg Salad Tartine,” maybe because she puts capers into her egg salad like I do, and “Grilled Tuna Steaks with Shallot and Lime Leaf Sambal.”

Leafing through Lari Robling’s Endangered Recipes brought back the food that I ate as a child growing up in Connecticut, or that wonderful mixture of old-fashioned American recipes and ethnic dishes (My favorite reading when I was in 1st grade was the weekly school menu published in the Westport News, our local paper, since the cooks at Greens Farms Elementary school made astonishingly delicious spaghetti and meat balls, kielbasa with sauerkraut, and fabulous vegetable soups) you find in the Northeast. The subheads in Robling’s table of contents tell the whole homey, friendly, generous story of her book, which is a joyous celebration of the fact that America has one of the most diverse kitchens in the world—Sunday Suppers, From the Garden, Rainy Days, Messy Food, Back Porch Pleasures, etc. Robling introduces each recipe with a delightful stand-first that explains where it came from and why it’s so good. Intriguingly, these recipes hail from all over the United States, and the world for that matter, but many of the best ones are pure products of the American Middle West (Robling grew up in Ohio) and the mid-Atlantic states (she now lives in Pennsylvania). I can’t wait to try her Quince-and-Apple pie recipe and also the one for Koenigsberger Klopse, or veal meat balls in anchovy and caper sauce, one of my favorite dishes in the whole world when I used to eat them at the now vanished Cafe Geiger on New York’s East 86th Street before my mother and I visited the Metropolitan Museum. Robling’s Ancho Chile Corn Fritters with Pueblo Salsa sound pretty terrific, too. And from my perch in Paris on this rainy night, the moral of the story is that American food has never been so brilliantly varied and delicious.