THERE ARE ALMOST as many kinds of cookbooks as there are kinds of books: coffee-table cookbooks, travelogue cookbooks, feel-good cookbooks, celebrity cookbooks, special- interest cookbooks, cookbooks that, for all intents and purposes, are works of fiction masquerading as fact. The rarest kind of all, as kitchen veterans know to their cost, is the useful cookbook—one that inspires, teaches, and delights, delivering recipe after reliable recipe year after year, every page accumulating grease spots and food flecks as evidence of faithful service.
Rick Dahms
Cookbook conqueror: The Herbfarm's Jerry Traunfeld.
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The Herbfarm Cookbook
by Jerry Traunfeld (Scribner, $40)
Despite its glossy look—lots of white space in the margins, gorgeous color photographs and drawings—Jerry Traunfeld's The Herbfarm Cookbook (published in May by Scribner) is one of the most useful cookbooks to come along in years. There are no wasted words, no obligatory filler; every recipe is a little marvel of concision and clarity, with no unnecessary ingredients or preparatory froufrou. There's no single culinary style among its offerings, only a concentration on how intelligent and imaginative use of fresh herbs can turn an ordinary dish (roast chicken, for example) into something extraordinary, and an extraordinary one (steamed mussels in garlic-scented sabayon sauce) into a dinner-table milestone.
The Herbfarm Cookbook would probably be on a lot more Northwest kitchen shelves already if the Herbfarm Restaurant, where Traunfeld rules the kitchen, were a little more approachable to the average diner-out. But a $125-per-person-plus-compulsory-gratuity prix fixe is not everyone's idea of a relaxed eating experience, particularly when it entails booking up to two months in advance, driving to deepest Issaquah, and sitting elbow to elbow with other food-compulsives at refectory-style tables in a dark banquet room.
Given the temple-of-the-gustatory-muses tone of the restaurant, the most startling thing about Traunfeld's recipes is how utterly easygoing they are. A substantial part of their impact is the contrast between simplicity of means and elegance of effect. Take his first-course preparation of mussels in an herb-and-garlic-scented sabayon: The dish takes all of 10 minutes to assemble, but the very look of it—dark mussels gleaming in a robe of creamy lemon yellow—would add a touch of class to the fanciest meal. Or the roast chicken mentioned above: The sight of the whole bird prior to carving, whole bay leaves shining dimly beneath the crisp skin like the pattern of a faded tapestry, gives a kind of visual foretaste of the sumptuous flavor in store.
Traunfeld is utterly serious about the importance of fresh herbs in fine cooking—a hundred pages of his book are devoted to their care, feeding, and use—but he's not a monomaniac. Herbs are just one aspect of the key to his cooking, which employs fresh seasonal ingredients, in general, the kind that make culinary lily-gilding unnecessary.
Traunfeld attended the California Culinary Academy and served his professional apprenticeship in the Bay Area when the gospel of freshness according to Alice Waters was at its purest, but he'd been cooking since childhood, which probably saved him from the kind of ideological rigidity and fussiness that often afflicts gifted young chefs. His first job was at the quintessentially glorified steak house Ernie's, but he had no difficulty adapting to a different m鴩er when he moved as pastry chef to Jeremiah Tower's legendary Stars. The frequent changes of direction he experienced while working at Seattle's Alexis Hotel tested his adaptability even further.
Founder Ron Zimmerman had established the Herbfarm style by the time Traunfeld took over as executive chef there in 1990, but once again, he embraced an existing policy and made it his own. He makes no claims to originality in his cooking, but there's a Traunfeld spin on nearly every dish in The Herbfarm Cookbook. Yes, traditional French soup chefs have made a thousand variations on the pureed leek-and-something-green formula, but I'm willing to bet you've never tasted anything quite like Traunfeld's version, made with romaine lettuce and a handful of fresh tarragon. The recipe allows an optional dash of cream to finish the dish. The amazing thing is you'd swear there's already cream there, so smooth and luscious is the mixture.
Even more amazing is Traunfeld's signature dish of seared scallops in a piquant sauce of fiery red-orange hue. Your guests would have to be mind readers to divine that the stuff is nothing but ordinary carrot juice, reduced, blended with butter, and infused with plenty of marjoram. Even more astonishing is his summer salad of arugula and watercress topped with charcoal-grilled peaches—peaches marinated in ginger, basil, lime juice, and chopped jalape� You can see all the ingredients right there on the plate in front of you. But how did Traunfeld ever come up with a combination so odd, unlikely, and heavenly tasting?
Traunfeld has plenty of suggestions for bakers (and would-be bakers), as well: a marvelous quick-fix focaccia loaded with fragrant herbs, crispy shortbread cookies with a hint of lavender fragrance, and a transfiguration of that autumnal dessert standby, pumpkin pie. And if you're frightened by the very word "souffl鬢 you'll get over it after trying his utterly simple and virtually foolproof recipe featuring fresh crab and flavored with lemon thyme.
