Boulevard: The Cookbook
by Nancy Oakes, Pamela Mazzola, Lisa Weiss
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Book Summary Information
Author: Lisa Weiss, Nancy Oakes, Pamela MazzolaEdition: Hardcover
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 2005-10-01
ISBN: 1580085539
Number of pages: 256
Publisher: Ten Speed Press
Book Reviews of Boulevard: The Cookbook
Book Review: 4 and a half, really. Very good foodie book. Good reading.
Summary: 4 Stars
`Boulevard, The Cookbook' is the product of co-chefs, Nancy Oakes and Pamela Mazzola plus professional culinary writer, Lisa Weiss. The restaurant, Boulevard is in the San Francisco Bay area and the second of two restaurants headed up by Oakes and Mazzola. The overall impression I get of the ambiance and the recipes is that Boulevard is a brasserie with a `haute cuisine' attitude and an underpinning of a love of bacon. The love of bacon is entirely understandable, as Nancy Oakes is the wife of the American Pork writer in chief, Bruce Aidells, with whom she has co-authored several books on pork cookery and charcuterie.
When I encounter an oversized cookbook volume with an oversized price (listed at $50), I immediately demote the book's overall score to four stars, unless I find within a truly marvelous source of culinary wisdom. As I write this, I am teetering on the boundary of four and five stars, so we will investigate together how to rate this volume.
To start, I give points for the fact that the table of contents lists the name and page number of every single recipe. Of course, since the book has only 48 recipes, this is no great feat, covering no more than three of the oversized pages. To be fair, the 15 main dish recipes and the soups actually contain recipes for major garnishes or veggie side dishes. If you broke out all the secondary recipes, you may have as many as 60 different dishes. There are also 27 recipes in the `Blvd Basics' chapter, but as these are mostly for things such as stocks, sauces, condiments, and stock garnishes, these hardly count. I don't discount them entirely because I am in love with the idea from Deborah Madison that stocks and other utility recipes should be crafted to fit the dishes in which they are used, so it is important for us to know exactly how it is that Boulevard makes their duck confit to say with accuracy that you are making a `Boulevard recipe' which uses duck confit. It may also be worth noting that some of these recipes are actually served at the authors' other restaurant, L'Avenue and some are actually things they really cook at home.
The main chapters are:
Salads, 6 recipes
Soups, 6 recipes
Starters, 13 recipes
Fish, 7 recipes
Meat, 8 recipes
Desserts, 8 recipes
Since four of the six soups, the white corn coup, the ratatouille soup, the chestnut soup, and the Provencal fish soup (Bouillabaisse) are simply fancy versions of very old standards, we can ask ourselves why should we want to make these versions, when we may have three recipes for corn soup, a dozen recipes for ratatouille, at least three recipes for a chestnut soup, and 20 recipes for a Bouillabaisse (and still no source for Racasse!)? Especially since most of the recipes are really very long. While my favorite Mark Bittman corn soup recipe takes about a half page column in `How to Cook Everything', this white corn soup with `little crab cake `souffles' takes two oversized pages, with four different recipes coming together to make one dish. Similarly, my favorite David Boulud chestnut soup with apples takes but one page, this braised chestnut soup with apple cream and crispy duck confit takes another two pages. And, while chestnuts and duck confit are a natural pairing in southwest France, they are less natural denizens of Napa valley or Santa Clara valley.
To be fair, a considerable amount of space in each of these recipes goes to a rhapsodic headnote about the origins of the dish plus `Kitchen and Shopping Notes' which go into where the restaurant buys and preps its chestnuts, seafood, artichokes and mayonnaise. We learn, for example, that artichokes come packaged like shrimp, with a count per unit carton packaging. And, we learn that the restaurant is perfectly happy using Hellmans / Best Foods mayonnaise off the shelf rather than making it themselves.
It should be obvious that this cookbook is a lot more like Thomas Keller (The French Laundry) and Judy Rodgers' (Zuni Café) efforts than the much more straightforward fish restaurant books by Eric Ripert (Le Bernardin) and Thomas Kinkead (Kinkead's) books. Thus, it is to be read more as a source of inspiration and ideas and maybe a dish for some very special entertaining occasion than as a workaday cookbook. Of course, this is also the kind of book that a patron of Boulevard would be very happy to have.
When compared to books by Keller and Rodgers, this book fares well, but it is probably not better than these two exemplars of the `great restaurant' book. But, if you buy this kind of book, this is definitely one you will want. If you buy `great restaurant' books for cooking tips and insights, this book is good, but not great. I encountered a lot of things I already knew and no major new insight. So, the fewer books of this type you have, the more valuable this one will be. If you have a big cookbook library, the margin of value will be small.
Since the book makes excellent use of some distinctly west coast seafood such as Dungeness crab, California white sea bass, and king salmon, the marginal value is also higher for west coasters than us Yankees or even our Johnny Reb cousins on the east coast.
Of course, all the recipes are very well detailed, look great in sumptuous pics, and, I'm sure, taste great. There are even a few, such as the scallop and squid recipes, which may just be simple enough for you to improvise into your own repertoire.
All in all, this is a very good, but not a great foodie book.
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