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A Cookbook to Love
By Deborah Keegan | October 9, 2009
I get immense pleasure from cookbooks. Great cookbooks impart not only the mechanics of cooking but if they’re really good can take the reader on a journey that is philosophical and spiritual as well as intellectual. A Platter of Figs and Other Recipes but author and Chef, David Tanis fills this bill. Tanis simply and elequently illustrates how easy it is to cook seasonaly, simple dishes with ease. If you love to eat this book is for you. It is all about the pleasure of eating simply and choosing the best ingredients available locally and sustainably.
David Tanis is a lucky man. For half of the year he is the chef at Chez Panisse, the renowned California restaurant founded by Alice Waters and a group of friends in 1971. For the remainder of the year Tanis can found in Paris. Yes Paris! Here he spends his time cooking at home for a small group of friends dining club known as Aux Chien Lunatiques. In this diminutive centuries old apartment with an ill equipped galley kitchen, David proves that attention to detail and respect for food enables anyone to cook with even the barest essentials.
A Platter of Figs is divided into four seasons comprised of 24 menus – six for each season and illustrated with photographs that remind me of home. And that’s exactly where Tanis wants you to be. No fussy food here. Imagine the luxury of lingering over a fabulous meal with no waiters moving you along to accommodate a second seating. Where you start with the clean crispness of raw fennel and olive oil; followed by a steaming plate of spaghetti alio e olio with a just ripe pear and Parmigiano Reggiano for dessert. A simply perfect autumn meal.
Tanis will transport you to the exact moment and location of inspiration. Each of his menus are prefaced with a story about the ingredients, who he ate with or why he was there or how he found it. Menu fourteen: in Catalonia. First time eating anchovy sandwiches alone in a bar in Barcelona after sitting in the rafters for a performance of the Maurice Bejart Ballet. In Menu twenty two Feeling Italian part III tells us how his stylish great Aunt Sally, a sophisticate from Cleveland who “gloried in an elegance many women in our town of Dayton lacked” was renowned for her spaghetti soirees. Aunt Sally would invite hoards of guests who had to wait while she cooked one pound of pasta at a time in one pot. Tanis promised her he would never cook more than one pound of pasta at a time and he proclaims that he never did. “Though Aunt Sally gave me a cooking lesson I never forgot, I cannot remember her cooking for me” concludes Tanis!
A Platter of Figs and Other Recipes is charming and disarming in its simplicity but don’t be fooled. This is the work of an artist. Don’t be tempted to elaborate but do emulate. Take your time. Learn about the food you cook and eat. Cook with simply charming inspiration. You and those you cook for will be deliciously delighted.
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