Gold’s book, _B_Recipes 1-2-3 b(304 pages. Viking. $22.95), is a lively and sophisticated collection by the consulting chef at New York’s glamorous Rainbow Room. Her taste runs to the snazzy–Parmesan Lace Galettes, Tuna Nicoise, Chianti Granita–but in fact most of these dishes are simple at heart. It’s not that they’re quick and easy–on the contrary, the shopping is all that’s streamlined in many of these recipes, which may require a bit of skill and an hour or more to prepare. But Gold has a real food lover’s knowledge of honest ingredients–ripe fruits and vegetables, heavy cream, fresh herbs, Parmigiano-Reggiano cheese–and with these as your building blocks, it’s hard to miss. Sometimes she just stands back and lets the ingredients speak for themselves; nothing could be more straightforward than her gentle soup of carrots, cream and fresh ginger. Other recipes start with far less obvious elements: walnuts, graham crackers and condensed milk? But you toast the walnuts, crush the graham crackers, mix them with the milk and shove the whole gloppy mess into the oven. Half an hour later you have a pan of scrumptious bar cookies, rich and nutty.
Schloss’s approach is to cut back everywhere-even flavor may be jettisoned. A cooking teacher whose previous books include “One-Pot Cakes,” he puts a premium on speed and convenience. His _B_Cooking With Three Ingredients b(224 pages. HarperCollins. $17) is so happily wedded to packaged foods that some of the recipes might have sprung from the test kitchens at Kraft or Campbell. That’s not necessarily a signal to abandon ship; even the most militant devotees of cooking from scratch usually have a few beloved exceptions on file–recipes in which there’s absolutely no substitute for ketchup or Ritz crackers or a can of soup. But unlike fresh ingredients, the stuff in cans and bottles is hard to temper. What you dump into the mixing bow] is pretty much what you get, including MSG, corn sweeteners and cheap flavorings. “You’d never guess this soup came out of cans,” writes Schloss about his Caribbean Ginger Tomato Soup. Wrong. The flavor of Campbell’s tomato soup is a trumpet blast unmoderated by canned coconut milk.
These authors do venture onto each other’s turf. Schloss, for instance, sautes broccoli rabe with garlic and olive oil, and mashes potatoes with celeriac and cream. And Gold may use packaged products, though they tend to be specialty items like pesto or chutney. Her single venture downmarket is a rather gelatinous pudding made with corn starch, cocoa and Hershey’s chocolate milk. (As a 7-year-old who loved it remarked, “This tastes exactly like store-bought.”)
But for the most part, these cooks champion the food they like best, and their loyalties underscore two of the dueling passions behind American cuisine at century’s end: the need for speed, and a longing for the sensual. For a food lover who managed to reconcile those passions–and in one-ingredient cooking, no less–we have to go back to M.F.K. Fisher, writing half a century ago about the ultimate in down-sized dining. She reserved for special occasions the quickest and most luxurious meal she could think of: a glass of sherry and a hot bath.
1-Cinnamon-raisin bread Toast slices 2-Sugar Mix with frech, raw cherries 3-Cherries Cook with sugar; pour over toast
