It hasn’t looked like it for a long time, but spring has finally arrived. And maybe the sun will shine again soon. Then the barbecue can go outside. The first barbecue books are already on their way. Julius Jaspers has another one (about burgers), but this time we light the briquettes with Susan Aretz. She is best known for the ‘Borreltijd’ books, in which a variety of dishes and snacks are served on the drinks board.
For her latest book BBQ time (Fontaine publishers, 29.99 euros) she developed – in her own words – ‘no-nonsense’ bbq recipes. In which tough men and large pieces of searing meat are exchanged for dishes that can also be eaten by the barbecue novice. And for which you don’t have to hunt yourself or have to wriggle around to find that one special one rub to come. That is why there is also simply Limburgish zoervlei is stewing on the fire (she has Limburg parents, hence) or fish packages with samphire – simply combine fish, lemon, onion, samphire and tomato in aluminum foil and place on the fire. Okay, for the Korean-inspired burgers you have to look for gochujang paste, but we also encounter that at our large grocers these days. Oh yes, also delicious: the whiskey spare ribs. add a glass, sl a inte .
An invigorating strawberry tomato soup
Let’s move straight to someone where the word ‘simplicity’ has been removed from the vocabulary. In addition to being a star chef, Heston Blumenthal is also a scientist, and that is how he often approaches food. With his heavy glasses and stern look, he frightens many who want to play in the kitchen, and his previous books full of laboratory experiments – cooking in liquid nitrogen instead of water – will contribute to this.
His goal was always to achieve perfection, in taste, texture and technique. Anyone who has eaten at his restaurant in Bray, England, knows what that can lead to. Surprise and bewilderment are the least emotions. But Blumenthal has in his latest publication Is this a cookbook – adventures in the kitchen (Fontaine publishers, 32.99 euros) embraced the imperfection. With dishes that seem fairly simple for him, but that never deny his creativity for a moment. Think of a smoothie with banana and parsley, kombucha of thyme and orange, an invigorating strawberry-tomato soup or popcorn chicken with real popcorn. But the book is – as the title suggests – more than a cookbook: it contains stories, musings and a variety of tips that make you look at your cooking skills in a different way. So that you are surprised about what you are actually doing and perhaps also culinary a bit out of the box going to think. That damn Heston got you again.
Homage to the silver bolt
Petra Possel sits on a bench on the IJsselmeerdijk near her hometown of Gaast, staring over the water. Her thoughts wander to a century ago, when the Zuiderzee still raged against the dikes here, seals and porpoises sought shelter to mate. And when huge schools of anchovies whirled through the water like silver clouds, prey for the Zuiderzee fishermen who earned gold with it. But with the Afsluitdijk, the anchovy also disappeared, one of the tastiest fish in our opinion. Only a loner in Bergen op Zoom still fishes for it. For Possel, culinary journalist and podcast maker, the fish has always been a symbol of the south of Europe, where it was served on a pizza Napoletana, a salad niçoise or on a skewer in a tapas bar. But the anchovy swims around almost all the world’s seas: the Atlantic Ocean, the Mediterranean Sea, the Black Sea, the Sea of Azov, the Pacific Ocean, the Pacific Ocean and the Indian Ocean. And so in the past also in our cold regions.
Possel wrote the book as a homage to the silver bolt Anchovies – small fish, big story (Podium, 22.99 euros). Actually a kind of culinary road trip along the coasts of Europe (she skips the other seas and oceans for practical reasons), where she wrote down stories and legends (and no, no recipes). In Collioure she joined the famous restaurant Les Templiers for an anchovy meal, just like Picasso, Matisse or Derain did a century ago. She chugged in her little blue car to the Basque Country, to the lovely harbor town of Getaria. In Malaga she skewered the fish on sticks by the fire, in Italy she tasted the contemporary version of the ancient Roman garum, the colatura di alici – literally ‘leaking anchovies’, or sauce made from fermented anchovies. The delicious culinary travelogue does not pretend to be a ‘biography’ of the anchovy. She herself writes: ‘This is emphatically not an anchovy encyclopaedia, it is far from complete and it is not scientifically justified. I have often tried to check the stories. However, some stories are too good to be true, in which case I have omitted research. Not everything has to be broken.’ And that’s why this book is so wonderful.
Report of the search through Lebanon
Merijn Tol formed a duo with Nadia and Zerouali for a series of cookbooks. Their series Arabia attracted us since the appearance of the first book of the same name in the culinary world around the Mediterranean. Together they still have the Souq spice line in the shops, but they now write their books separately. Tol has focused on ‘her’ second city, Beirut, where she lives part of the year. And with the curiosity that is her own, she has thoroughly explored the city and the surrounding country culinary.
In her latest book The Bible of Lebanese Cuisine (Carrera Culinair, 34.99 euros) she reports on the quest through Lebanon, which has been torn apart by civil war for years, but where the population finds comfort in one of the richest cuisines of the Arab and Middle Eastern cuisines. From the corners of the country, via the fertile Bekaa Valley to the mountain villages and bustling Beirut, via olive groves and vineyards, fishing ports and small farm fields, Tol collects the wealth of her country in more than 230 recipes. Classics such as kibbeh, tabbouleh and mujadara are alternated with the most delicious biscuits (fried biscuits in sugar syrup or anise biscuits with mahlep, to die for ).
Japanese cuisine and its origins
Finally, the book Yoko (Becht, 34.99 euros) in which the Japanese Yoko Inagaki and the Dutch Christel van Bree report from Osaka about Japanese cuisine and its origins and in which both visit soy breweries or koji farms (koji is a fungus, a fermentation kickstarter) and stroll through fish markets and sushi festivals. Infectious strung together tasty childhood memories, fun anecdotes and recipes make it a cheerful book, in which Japanese cuisine is shown to us in a simple way.