A16 Food + Wine: Appleman + Lindgren

By JULIETTE ROSSANT There are photographs of fires throughout A16 Food + Wine by Nate Appleman + Shelley Lindgren with Kate Leahy (Ten Speed 2008). It is unlikely that most readers will have a wood burning oven at home – but the photos by Ed Anderson do conjure up memories of comfort food, pizzas, and roast meats cooked in a simple manner. This is Southern Italian-inspired, richly seasoned, rustic Californian food – a mouthful to contemplate. But the book does not start with food. Part One is about A16's Wine. The authors write large in the introduction: Serving these southern Italian wines, and many others, with our regional menu is our way of paying homage to the corner of the world that inspires us…. The wines simply belong with the gutsy country cooking of Campagnia. (p. 6) This is a restaurant committed to exploring the food and wine of Campagnia, as well as translating the cuisine to San Francisco. At A16 we translate rustic Campanian cooking to a San Francisco setting. Just as Italian cooks work with the best ingredients they can acquire, we source the finest local and seasonal produce we can find and treat it in an Italian manner. (p. 69) This is a big, beautiful book that is at once a profile of the chefs and their passion for cooking, and a workable book of recipes, albeit ones that demand great ingredients that are hard to come by. Sometimes its worth starting with the appetizers and small plates, and other times, when chilly weather is settling in, skipping to meat dishes makes a lot more sense. The glorious wood fire oven starts of the Poultry and Meat chapter, but it is the section called The Pig that really gets to the heart of why this is a fascinating cookbook. Buying a whole hog is a privilege that we don't take for granted. The rich source of flavor in much of our cooking can be traced back to the good pork we use in such dishes as our quickly grilled pork loin spiedino or our slowly braised pork shoulder served with green olives and chestnuts. I wish all cooks had pig's trotters in their freezer so they could use their amazing gelatinous properties to impart body to soups, braises and stocks. (p. 202) Ciccioli are traditionally pork cracklings packed in lard, but A16 they are transformed into something like pork rillette, with the addition of homemade mosto (p. 87), which is concentrated, aged grape must. There is a recipe for Coppa Di Testa, or headcheese, for which a whole hog head is used. The authors admit in the headnotes that it isn't easy finding a hog's head, or a pot the right size to cook it in. Easier in the sense that most people can actually find pork shoulder, beef chuck and prosciutto, is the recipe for Monday Meatballs (pp. 213-215). The meatballs are first baked then braised in a tomato sauce. The point is to use pork and pork fat, plus fresh bread crumbs to create less-dense, flavorful meatballs. Maybe it is a good idea to look for a pig, a wood burning oven, and some help in the kitchen? Previous articles: [Cookbook Reviews - complete] Technorati Tags: superchefblog, Juliette Rossant, super chef, celebrities, chefs, food, restaurants, cooking, branding, cuisine, blogging, food blogging --> back to Super Chef