Some cookbooks meet you at the door, sit you right down, and start cooking. Other send the fatuous butler to explain how lucky you are to be there and to express his hope that you might be able to appreciate even a fraction of the grandeur you are about to experience.
Weighing in at 6 pounds and nearly a foot square in size, this new book from the founder/chef of New York’s famed le Bernardin just dares you to try to use it. And when you do, the prose poems inserted like lardons by co-author Ruhlman don’t help at all: I don’t care about the musical quality of a vinaigrette; I don’t want to be “fully involved” with a lamb tangine. But when you finally manage to locate the recipes among Ruhlman’s rhapsodies and the gorgeous but entirely irrelevant photos of Ripert (pretty gorgeous himself, I must admit) cooking away in half a dozen picturesque locations, they are . . . ethereal: simple, direct, casual yet exquisitely contrived. Crab salad with chilled gazpacho sauce, grappa-marinated peaches and basil, fennel-scented panna cotta, that chicken and lamb tangine. And when I’ve died and gone to heaven, the crayfish ravioli with mushrooms and truffle butter sauce using fois gras fat instead of the optional canola oil to sauté the chanterelles and black trumpet mushrooms. A great cookbook, in short. If we could only just manage to avoid the butler every timerisking a wrenched backthat we open it. LUCILLA
