Gifts for Cooks: ‘Salt to Taste’

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Marco Canora had me at Eggs with Tomatoes on Toast. The first dish in his “Salt to Taste” is full of the kinds of things I look for in good recipe writing. Besides making food that simply sounds delicious, there are tips (start frying the garlic for this dish in a cold pan so it cooks before it begins to brown); there’s a well-considered appreciation of cooking economy (let’s see: tomatoes, eggs, toasted bread); and maybe most important, there’s a great visceral sense of cooking (to puree the tomatoes, he has you crush them in your hand, letting the juice run into the skillet).

Canora, an up-and-coming New York chef (Hearth, Insieme) out of the Colicchio bloodline, has a great appreciation for rusticity (even beyond crushing tomatoes with his hands), but he’s not afraid to embrace new techniques when they apply. For just one example, I can’t wait for next summer to try cooking eggplant in a plastic bag (semi sous-vide) the way he does.

Throughout the book he adroitly walks a tightrope between simplicity and flavor. Granted, there are few dishes that make you think “wow, that’s new!”, but in this case that is a strength rather than a weakness. Reading his recipes, every ingredient makes a kind of intrinsic sense – you know instinctively that it belongs. There doesn’t seem to be a thoughtless or merely ornamental gesture in the entire book.

“Salt to Taste,” by Marco Canora, Rodale, $35.

--Russ Parsons

Cover photo by John Kernick