Bonus Episode- 2019 Cookbook Year In Review | Becky Krystal Washington Post Lead Writer Voraciously
11 cookbooks that inspired us in 2019 according to The Washington Post.
Photo credit- Stacy Zarin Goldberg
Intro: Welcome to the number one cookbook podcast, Cookery by the Book with Suzy Chase. She's just a home cook in New York City, sitting at her dining room table, talking to cookbook authors.
Becky Krystal: I'm Becky Krystal. I'm the lead writer for Voraciously at Washington Post. Voraciously is a part of the Washington Post food section where we are aimed at beginner and intermediate cooks. We try to take the mystery out of cooking, teach a lot of basic recipes, interesting recipes, and really try to walk people through all kinds of ingredients and things we think are really helpful to know in the kitchen.
Suzy Chase: For more Cookery by the Book, you can follow me on Instagram. If you enjoy this podcast, please be sure to share it with a friend. I'm always looking for new people to enjoy Cookery by the Book. Now, on with the show.
So Becky, you're the lead writer for Voraciously at Washington Post Food. How long have you been with the newspaper?
Becky Krystal: I've actually been here for 12 years, not the whole time with food. I started out actually writing about TV, which was really fun, and I've kind of been food and food adjacent for the past 10 years, but Voraciously has been my full time gig for about the past two years.
I'm actually a home-taught, self-taught cook. I didn't go to culinary school. It's been the school of culinary hard knocks, if you want to call it that, but I've learned a lot and I think everyone else can teach themselves how to cook too.
Suzy Chase: I just read an article in Fortune Magazine yesterday that was all about discovering the allure of cookbooks. Why do you love cookbooks?
Becky Krystal: I love being inspired by cookbooks, obviously. Of course, making new dishes out of new cookbooks is a very obvious thing to do, but I also just like to read cookbooks, kind of like I do novels, looking at the photos and learning about new ingredients. I think a lot of, actually, my reading is kind of recreational, as opposed to, I'm going to make something out of every book, because I don't necessarily have that kind of time. I love looking at the photos, seeing what other people are doing in terms of art direction in photos because we do a lot of that here at Voraciously, and just learning about ingredients and dishes that I have not cooked before.
Suzy Chase: The article in the Washington Post is 11 Cookbooks That Inspired Us In 2019. Each of these 11 cookbooks are handpicked by a staff member. You can read the whole piece over on washingtonpost.com. Could you take us through the process of putting this article together? What was the criteria you had to work with, if any?
Becky Krystal: Yeah, it's a very scientific process. Actually it's pretty casual. We had a couple ... We have a weekly staff meeting, and so over the course of a couple then we sort of threw out ideas about what each of us are interested in. Obviously we want to make sure that we don't have a ton of overlap. Not everyone's cooking the same cuisine or not everyone's doing baking books. But really we just talked about books that inspired us, books that we cooked out of, books that we just saved on our desk. That's a major criteria, because we get so many that come and go, and if you have even just held onto a book, of probably hundreds we get a year, that's already a good sign. Yeah, we just all kind of picked one and it ended up working out well. We got a really good diversity of types of food and authors.
Suzy Chase: What are some cookbook trends you saw this year?
Becky Krystal: It's almost like there are too many trends to be any trends, because there are so many different types of books, and the common themes, there's been a lot of the specialty diets, keto, paleo, gluten-free, vegan, low sugar, stuff like that.
Obviously Instant Pot multi-cookers are still a huge powerhouse. I'm just looking at our closet right now and there's Mexican Instant Pot, Mediterranean Instant Pot. Basically any type of Instant Pot is going to be out there.
We saw a lot of deeper dives on global cuisines. We featured Island Kitchen, which was about cuisine from some of the Pacific islands, Mexico with Oaxaca, Sichuan food, a lot of immigrant-based cuisines, which are very timely with what's going on in our country. And then a lot of, there are people who are experimenting with more personal and casual approach to recipes and cookbooks, so people are kind of pushing the boundaries.
Suzy Chase: Let's go for a few of these cookbooks on the list. First, All About Dinner by Molly Stevens. One thing that makes this cookbook stand out for me is that you get Molly's teacherly voice on the page. It's easy to follow the directions and succeed with every recipe you make of hers.
Becky Krystal: Yeah. Molly, I've interviewed Molly a few times for stories and looked over some of her cookbooks, and like you said, she's a great teacher, and not intimidating. She's not going to give you imposter syndrome. She really wants to teach you, and that's what we liked a lot about this cookbook. She has lots of these sidebars where she pulls things out on the side of the page, or she throws in a few pages on perfecting pilaf for example, or boiling rice, or the difference between red and green curry paste. She doesn't want to just throw things at you, she wants you to understand either the ingredients or the methodology.
The food in there is really approachable. It's not necessarily overly complicated. It skews a little bit towards comfort, but interesting. There's a pork loin with a miso glaze on there. And my colleague Emily Heil who chose this book, the book got her really into sumac, which is one of my favorite flavors. So you can learn a lot but also make very approachable dinners that you'll probably just keep making over and over again.
Suzy Chase: Now to Vietnamese Food Any Day by Andrea Nguyen. I like that Andrea focuses on ingredients that are easily accessible. You don't need to go to the Asian market.
Becky Krystal: Yeah, a lot like Molly, Andrea is someone else I've talked to and she also is a really great teacher and, like you said, the accessibility of the ingredients in this book is awesome. Her family came from Vietnam, and when they ended up in California, they obviously didn't have access to the types of ingredients they had where they came from. And so it was this combination of couple hours trip for one big shop, and then we're going to deal with whatever our local grocery store has. Obviously stores have come a long way since Andrea was young, so you walk into Trader Joe's, Safeway, Harris Teeter or whatever your local grocery store, and you're actually going to find probably a lot of Asian ingredients that she would not have been able to find at stores.
But even then, she makes some fun and interesting substitutes. She uses French's fried onions, which we all know from that green bean casserole at Thanksgiving instead of fried shallots, which is a popular Asian ingredient, and it's a brilliant swap. She wants to streamline her recipes but not dumb them down, so that obviously get the spirit of Vietnamese food without having to go to a specialty store.
Suzy Chase: Milk and Cardamom by Hetal, Hetal? How do you pronounce her name?
Becky Krystal: Hetal Vasavada. I haven't actually heard her say it, but.
Suzy Chase: Okay, we're going to stick with that one. Now, this was your personal pick. I had never heard of this cookbook before. Why did you pick this one?
Becky Krystal: I love to bake. It's really my forte and my passion, and it's just if I have free time, that's really what I want to do. I also absolutely adore Indian food and Indian cuisines, so Indian desserts naturally are of interest to me. Indian desserts are not, you can't just go to the supermarket, so I think they're kind of underappreciated in America still, and people aren't familiar with them, so immediately I was intrigued by that. What I also like about this book is that she gives you both quote-unquote, "Traditional Indian desserts." But she often combines them in interesting ways with American ingredients, or American foods, so it's this cool mashup.
She does this peanut ladoo, which an Indian dessert, but she sort of rifts on buckeyes, which are a, Ohio, Midwest staple. So she combines those, she puts pomegranate curd in the brownies. She uses more common Indian spices jaggery in her monkey bread. I just wanted to make everything out of the book, and to me that's always the sign of a book that got my attention.
My favorite recipe, and the one that I ended up featuring in the story was a gulab jamun Bundt cake. Gulab jamun is, they're basically fried dough balls, so they're a little bit like donuts, they're smaller than golf balls and they're soaked in this rose and cardamom, this saffron, very aromatic syrup, and formed them into a very classic American Bundt cake. Phenomenal flavor, it's beautiful. It's way more interesting than your typical Bundt cake and people here really went bonkers for it.
Suzy Chase: Now, moving onto one of my faves this year, Ruffage by Abra Berens. I call this the vegetable bible. This is the book you need if you have a membership to a CSA or just if you're strolling through your grocery store.
Becky Krystal: One of the reasons Matt Brooks, who's the Voraciously editor who picked this book, was he has been a long time CSA member, and of course with CSA it's a little bit like, "We're letting you get what you get and you have to figure out what to do with it." So what's nice, she includes buying information and fridge information, and she really lets the vegetables shine rather than burying them under other ingredients.
Suzy Chase: Whole Food Cooking Every Day by Amy Chaplin was another cookbook that I wasn't familiar with this year. What's her take on vegetarian cuisine?
Becky Krystal: Joe Yonan, who's a food editor just absolutely raved about this book, and she obviously wants you to focus on eating seasonally. She is really great about offering base recipes that you can riff on, depending on the event, or your taste, or whatever you happen to have on hand. Again, it's gluten-free, it's low refined sugar, but she is not preachy about it. She kind of makes everything feel off the cuff and it's relaxed and she's not making you feel guilty. She just wants you to learn how to cook like this, and make dishes that appeal to you, and that are as close to the original state of the ingredients as possible, so it's kind of refreshing in that way.
Suzy Chase: This next cookbook moved me. It's one of my personal favorites this year. I was so happy to see it on the list. It's Midnight Chicken by Ella Risbridger, from the watercolor illustrations in the book, to Ella's stories surrounding despair and mental health, to the homey recipes, it sounds odd just saying it like that, but there's something oddly brilliant about this cookbook. I just loved it.
Becky Krystal: Yeah, it's a really good combination of cookbook and memoir. Like I mentioned earlier, it's sort of this less traditional approach to cookbooks and recipes. You mentioned the watercolor paintings, there are no photos, which is really different from a lot of cookbooks you seen now. It really lets you focus on the words and she's very lyrical in her recipe writing. There's a lot of kind of short, almost poetic sentences, and then there's these longer stretches where she's talking about kneading bread and you see the sunshine, and it's beautiful, and it's casual, without being cutesy. It's going to let people feel free to cook and relax and admit that there's a lot of connection between feelings and cooking too.
Suzy Chase: What cookbooks are you excited about coming out in 2020?
Becky Krystal: Well, I would not be a good employee if I didn't mention Cool Beans by Joe Yonan, the food editor, but I'm actually genuinely excited. I cook a ton of beans, especially now that I have an Instant Pot. I cook beans every week, I love that.
I'm really looking forward to Rose's Ice Cream Bliss by Rose Levy Berandbaum, whose books are, I mean they're airtight, so many great recipes and I actually talked to Rose for a story I did on ice cream earlier this year, so I know that she's got some amazing flavors that are going to be in there.
Also really excited about Erin McDowell's High book, that's coming out next year. You can see there's a common theme here, I like baking a lot. Erin's an awesome teacher, so smart.
One other one I'm really looking forward to is Healthy Indian. If you're a Great British Baking Show fan, you probably remember Chetna who was on the first season it aired in the US. I love her, I think she's so fun, and really nice to see her doing things well beyond baking. And like I said earlier, Indian is one of my favorite cuisines, and I really like eating a lot of vegetarian food, so I think this is one to look out for.
Suzy Chase: What can we look forward to with Voraciously in the new year?
Becky Krystal: That's a good question. I think maybe we're going to try to do maybe a couple more slightly more involved recipes, not too much. We're in year three and we want to keep giving people the fundamentals of cooking and basic recipes. But I just got an email from a reader who said, "I am on the hunt for the perfect baguette recipe. That could be fun." Give people something that's a little more projecty, but it's still kind of this approachable dish. And yeah, I think I'm going to try to do more of my own recipe development. And it's going to be an unexpected mix I hope.
Suzy Chase: Now to my segment called My Favorite Cookbook. What is your all-time favorite cookbook and why?
Becky Krystal: You're going to make me choose. That's really hard as someone who collects cookbooks. If I had to, had to, had to pick, I would probably say The Gourmet Cookbook. Actually one of the first cookbooks I owned. It's just a nice all around book, and I think especially for people who haven't cooked a lot, it will encourage you to go a little bit outside of your comfort zone.
Suzy Chase: Where can we find you on the web and social media?
Becky Krystal: I am at voraciously.com. On Facebook I'm @BeckyKrystal, all one word. And on Instagram I'm @becky.krystal.
Suzy Chase: Wonderful. Well thanks Becky for coming on Cookery by the Book Podcast.
Becky Krystal: All right, thanks Suzy.
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