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Summary
Summary
For this stunning collection, the editors of Gourmet delved deep into their archives and selected the most delicious cookie for each year of the magazine's sixty-eight-year existence. After marathon testing sessions and winnowing from thousands of recipes--many sent in by readers--they chose an amazing array, from the almond-scented French-style Cajun Macaroons, from the magazine's beginnings in 1941, through Mocha Toffee Bars (1971), to the contemporary Glittering Lemon Sandwich Cookies. The enticing assortment includes Cookies of every type and description , from the homey (Aunt Sis's Strawberry Tart Cookies) to the exotic (Grand Marnier-Glazed Pain d'Epice Cookies), including balls, bars, refrigerator cookies, drop cookies, even deep-fried cookie confections. Cookies from around the world : from Dutch Jan Hagels to Irish oatmeal sandwich cookies filled with cream and Irish whiskey, to Scandinavian Rosettes. Dozens of Christmas cookies: Old-Fashioned Christmas Butter Cookies, star-shaped Moravian White Cookies, Chocolate Peppermint Bar Cookies. Printed exactly as they originally appeared in the magazine, with abundant tips and recipe notes from Gourmet 's test kitchen, and with headnotes describing their cultural context, the recipes present a fascinating bite-by-bite history of how our appetites evolved.
Author Notes
Over the course of almost seventy years, Gourmet 's editors won three coveted National Magazine Awards, sixteen James Beard Awards, and an Emmy Award.
Reviews (2)
New York Review of Books Review
WHAT confusing times these are. And I'm talking just about new cookbook offerings. Fall's usual glut of chef-y titles, primed for the giving, are notably absent. The food we're being offered is much simpler, much faster and removed from the realm of fantasy - unless we're talking about "Modernist Cuisine: The Art and Science of Cooking," the Microsoft executive turned cooking whiz Nathan Myhrvold's $625 tome on 21st-century techniques (which you can preorder in advance of its March 2011 publication). The one big restaurant book is from a chef in Denmark who plucks his ingredients from rocks, beaches, logs, even cracks in the sidewalk. In short, we're looking closer to home. When the going gets iffy, the iffy get baking. This season there are excellent books on offer for those warming up for a cookie swap, trying to perfect the baguette or looking to commit murder by butter (four sticks should do it). Speaking of untimely death, THE GOURMET COOKIE BOOK (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, $18) features one recipe for every year Gourmet magazine was in business, making for 69 gems in this beautifully designed keepsake. The recipes are grouped by decade, from the ration-era pluck of the 1940s (honey refrigerator cookies and Scotch oat crunchies), when the magazine was published out of a penthouse in the Plaza Hotel, to the twisted classics of the oughts (cranberry turtle bars and glittering lemon sandwich cookies). The wistful headnotes offer historical insight into our past tastes and aspirations. In 1953, we're informed, "the recipe list for the October issue included wild duck, young partridge with grapes, poached marrow, couscous, neck of lamb Grecque, feijoada, goose liver pies and petites bouchées." Why, I wonder, am I drawn to the sweets of the 1940s through the 1960s - pretty brownbutter cookies, brandy snaps and Moravian whjte Christmas cookies? Perhaps each generation finds comfort in its grandmother's repertoire. Alice Medrich has moved the ball of dough forward with CHEWY GOOEY CRISPY CRUNCHY MELT-IN-YOUR-MOUTH COOKIES (Artisan, paper, $25.95), rethinking everything she baked, rebooting classics and modernizing techniques. You can almost picture the flour-covered spreadsheets and flow charts. Many recipes, from bittersweet decadence cookies to salted peanut toffee cookies, offer the competitive baker creative "upgrades": you can ratchet up the decadence by folding in candied orange peel and increasing the amount of nuts, or transform salted peanut toffee cookies with white chocolate or Thai curry cashews. Medrich's interest in bringing new or unusual ingredients into play - spelt flour in a buttery sablé, cacao nibs in rugelach, cardamom caramel in a palmier - stimulates thought while triggering favorable gut reactions. And the wheat-averse will rejoice at her gluten-free adaptations, including one for caramel cheesecake bars. Above all, Medrich is determined to make us better bakers. In her first chapter, called the "User's Guide," she insists (among other things) that we check our oven temperatures, spoon flour into a measuring cup rather than scoop and follow her recipe instructions to the letter. With her constant nudging, you'll never overmix or beat chilled egg whites again. And your cookies will be the better for it. They might look like another pair of fresh-faced Brooklynites (retro tie and mustache? check), but Matt Lewis and Renato Poliafito, the owners of the Baked sweet shops in Brooklyn and Charleston, are media-savvy butter fiends. Their second book, BAKED EXPLORATIONS: Classic American Desserts Reinvented (Stewart, Tabori & Chang, $29.95), promises twists on classic and kitschy recipes. Although its twee typographical styling will look dated in about 10 minutes, the text will make it seem entirely rational to want to bake chocolate whoopie pies, Boston cream pie cake, Almond Joy tart or monkey bubble bread. I was thrilled to discover that Lewis, who shares my obsession with Biscoffs, Delta Air Lines' take on the traditional Dutch speculaas cookie, spent a long time tryng to recreate them. They're better than an upgrade. And those whoopie pies? Four sticks of buttery fun. Oh to be young, decadent and baked in Brooklyn. Chad Robertson is young and cool, but of the West Coast variety: a scruffy-cute surfer dad with a serious bread obsession. His earnest and lovely TARTINE BREAD (Chronicle Books, $40) shares secrets of the naturally fermented kind. A co-owner of the beloved Tartine Bakery in San Francisco's Mission District (I've almost missed flights standing in line for croque monsieur and bread pudding), Robertson shares a recipe for basic country bread that's worth attempting. And his 37 pages of detailed instructions and clear photographs are proof he really wants you to succeed. (Further, urn, proof: he gave his recipe to two novice bakers, and includes their notes.) Robertson's basic method incorporates some elements of the wildly popular no-knead method - you bake the dough in a cast-iron casserole to create a mini-oven - except that you have to take much more care than noknead's dump-and-stir approach. To be honest (and it kind of kills me to say this), the no-knead method works better for my impatient East Coast life, but Robertson did increase my understanding of the mysteries of bread, without taxing my brain like Peter Reinhart's books can. There are plenty of variations: pizza dough, walnut bread and the seductive brioche lardon, which incorporates bacon, hazelnuts, thyme and orange zest. Especially great is the chapter on what to do with days-old bread. The recipes for panade (don't ask, just try), eggplant involtini and meatball sandwiches will keep you from finishing the loaf, no matter what method you used to bake it. René Redzepi, of Noma in Copenhagen, is officially the best chef in the world - this year at least. (He won that honor at the 2010 S. Pellegrino World's 50 Best Restaurants awards, displacing Ferran Adrià of Spain's El Bulli.) Redzepi's 12-table restaurant celebrates Scandinavian ingredients with a dedication to seasonally and locale that would make most cooks flee for the equator come March. Musk ox, bulrushes, sea buckthorn, spruce shoots - they're all on the dinner menu, and they're exquisite in Redzepi's hands, turned into artful creations like sweetbreads and seaweed with bleak roe and seashore herbs, or pork belly and pork scratchings with ramson leaves, shoots, stems and flowers. So why would you want to buy a book you'll never be able to cook from? Because NOMA: Time and Place in Nordic Cuisine (Phaidon, $49.95) is a beautiful portrait of an important moment in food, with exquisite photographs by Ditte Isager, and because it will inspire you to slow down and look down and around. Is that wood sorrel growing in the sidewalk? Is that fruit tree that stains my driveway a mulberry? You might not be able to reproduce a dessert of over-ripe pears and mall oil, skyr and wild chervil, but you can use the recipe as a template to make your own backyard dessert. (If all else fails, Redzepi's chocolate-covered potato crisps with anise and fennel seeds are divine.) Just don't eat alone. Hidden on the book's last page is the warning: "Exercise caution when foraging for ingredients. Any foraged ingredients should be eaten only if an expert has deemed them safe to eat." Rozanne Gold won't have you looking under rocks for dinner. The author of the "1-2-3" series wants your meal to be as effortless as possible. And yet she has more in common with René Redzepi than with Rachael Ray, favoring fresh produce and sophisticated flavors in dishes that just happen to be doable in as little as five minutes. Her RADICALLY SIMPLE: Brilliant Flavors With Breathtaking Ease (Rodale, $35) is perfectly titled. A flavorful lunch of smoked trout on frisée with warm bacon-maple vinaigrette was on the table in 15 minutes. A pretty impressive dinner of onion soup with apple and thyme, pork loin with a tomato cream sauce spiked with gin and sage, and bay-smoked potatoes was ready in about an hour, though I pretended it took longer. (The dessert pages, howeverdidn't inspire dog-earing.) The usual complaint with quick-and-pretty cookbooks is that a small number of ingredients rarely add up to a great meal. But Gold's global palate and talent for distilling a dish's essentials put her in a minimal(ist) league of her own. For those who truly need their meals to be quick, easy and capable of pleasing the pint-size Sam Sifton at the table, TIME FOR DINNER: Strategies, Inspiration and Recipes for Family Meals Every Night of the Week (Chronicle, $24.95) is here to help. Written by Pilar Guzmán, Jenny Rosenstrach and Alanna Stang - editors at Cookie, the glossy parenting magazine from Condé Nast that folded the same day as Gourmet - the workbook offers solutions for parents who want to make good food that won't set off a highchair revolt. It's not all maple-glazed plank salmon with coconut rice. There are recipes for homemade chicken fingers, and one chapter gives you permission to consider a sandwich dinner, especially if it involves prosciutto and fried eggs. I gave a copy to a busy mom who loves to cook. She liked it less for the recipes ("interesting enough for adults, too") than for the smart up-front sections and the organizing help - essentials for pantry, fridge and freezer, and suggestions for things you can make on Sunday to incorporate into dishes all week. She was already a fan of Cookie's "So You Have . . ." feature, an ingredient-to-table flow chart. (So you have a rotisserie chicken. If you also have a box of chicken broth, you can make tortilla soup. If you have bacon, you can make a country-club chicken salad, and so on.) The lack of preciousness was a plus. So were all the pictures, since, my friend said, "you usually have half a minute to think about what to cook at 6:30 while your kid is crying and it's really already too late to start cooking dinner, but you feel bad that you're serving pasta with butter the fifth day in a row." She shouldn't worry. As the editors write, "If there's food on the table and everyone is eating it, call it dinner." Now say grace. The community cookbook and its broader sibling, the regional recipe book, feel especially right today, as Americans celebrate and explore their home cuisine. If you think West Coast cooking is all fish tacos and plates of figs, THE SUNSET COOKBOOK (Oxmoor House, $34.95) will be a delightful introduction to what's coming out of the kitchens of California, Colorado, Oregon, Arizona and thereabouts. (Luckily there are no photos of the outdoor cooking spaces regularly featured in monthly issues of Sunset - envy dulls the appetite.) The magazine's food editor, Margo True, pulled more than 1,000 recipes from the 110-year-old publication, setting a delicious table of Western cuisine, both modern and historical. Yes, there are date shakes, guacamole, cioppino, San Francisco-style burritos and California rolls, all retested and brought up to date. But recent contributions, especially from home cooks, have an appealing combination of brightness, lightness and ingenuity, as well as a casual flair for including fresh produce and exploring Mexican, Asian and hippie cuisines. Try the hazelnut hummus; melon and shrimp salad with ginger, kaffir lime leaves and Vietnamese fish sauce; guajillo-tamarind turkey with roasted poblano gravy; grilled rib-eye steaks with miso butter and sweet onions; or broccoli rabe roasted with radicchio and lemon slices. Sunset's recipes are often more original and honest than what's coming out of the East Coast food magazines, and they aren't difficult in the least. Meanwhile, in Brooklyn a new cuisine has been born. During the last decade, scrappy chefs, either unable to afford Manhattan rents or tired of the whole high-metabolism restaurant scene, have found cheap spaces in off-the-radar neighborhoods and set about cooking the food ihey love. (Of course, now their tables are filled with Manhattanites.) THE NEW BROOKLYN COOKBOOK: Recipes and Stories From 31 Restaurants That Put Brooklyn on the Culinary Map (Morrow/HarperCollins, $40), by Melissa and Brendan Vughan, collects dishes from a select bunch of pioneers who will be familiar to readers of New York magazine, and introduces a few of the borough's artisans (brewers, cheesemakers, chocolatiers, rooftop farmers). It's a cool scrapbook of an exciting time in New York food, with the restaurants presented in chronological order, from one of the first, Al Di Là in Park Slope, where they're still lining up for pasta, to the Vanderbilt, opened last year in Prospect Heights by the former chef of another favorite, Saul, in Boerum Hill. The recipes are restaurant-y (they assume you're willing to make your own pasta and have boar bacon on hand), but they're Brooklyn restaurant-y, so they're not that hard. And with recipes like Buttermilk Channel's duck meat loaf with creamed spinach, onion ring and duck jus, or beef sauerbraten (marinated for four days) with red cabbage and pretzel dumplings from Prime Meats in Carroll Gardens, you'll be inspired to go the distance. I did a skillet chicken cook-off, trying recipes from two favorites, Marlow & Sons and Vinegar Hill House. They were both so good I may never take the L or F train again. Brooklyn is having a serious fried chicken and Southern-food moment, which the food writer Josh Ozersky recently labeled "lardcore." Maybe these city hams should get a copy of the SOUTHERN FOODWAYS ALLIANCE COMMUNITY COOKBOOK (University of Georgia, $24.95), edited by Sara Roahen and John T. Edge. The folks at the S.F.A., which works to preserve the region's foodways, called on their friends - chefs, historians, civil rights activists and ham curers, to name a few - to help assemble a modern community cookbook. And what friends they have. The noted Alabama chef Frank Stitt contributes a hearty collard green and white bean gratin. Donald Link, one of the culinary heroes of post-Katrina New Orleans, shares his recipe for boudin blanc. John Currence sent in pimento cheese hush puppies from Oxford, Miss. And Matt and Ted Lee, of Charleston, S.C., by way of New York, contributed boiled peanut and sorghum swirl ice cream. The chapter titles pay homage to crucial Southern food groups and preoccupations: "Gravy," "Garden Goods," "Roots," "Greens," "Rice," "Grist," "Yardbird," "Pig," "The Hook," "The Hunt," "Put Up" and "Cane." The classics - dirty rice, country captain, pickled okra, fried squirrel with gravy, as well as biscuits, biscuits and more biscuits - are here, all with a personal stamp. (Martha Foose makes her chess pie with sweet tea.) The only thing that could make this book more Southern would be a complimentary bottle of bourbon. PUNCH: The Delights (and Dangers) of the Flowing Bowl (Perigee, $23.95), by the cocktail historian David Wondrich - author of "Imbibe!" - should come with a bottle each of VSOP cognac, bourbon and Jamaican-style rum, topped with three bottles of Champagne. That's what goes into a Chatham artillery punch, which is to be served in a horse bucket with an "oleo-saccharum" made from the peel of 12 lemons and two cups of sugar to which is added a pint of lemon juice. I'm sharing this recipe because it could be the key to your holiday party success, the best example of why punch is such an enduring happy-maker: you can get a lot of people not a little drunk with a single bowl. Plus, most punches have fascinating back stories - at least they do when Wondrich is in charge. In fact, for him it's almost all back story. This is a book for the serious cocktail aficionado, with Wondrich bending ears as much as he bends elbows. The first 100 pages are pure history, with a run-through on ingredients, tools and the "four pillars of punch." Each recipe is three parts history and one part original formula, with a dash of suggested procedure and notes. James Ashley's potion, served at the London Coffee-House and Punch-House in the 1700s, was favored by Hogarth. And James Boswell stopped in one night, Wondrich reports, for "three threepenny bowls" of the Seville orange "sherbett" mixed with brandy, rum and batavia arrack "in between bouts with six-penny whore
Library Journal Review
Gourmet magazine, from its first issue in 1941 until its last in 2009, reflected changes in American tastes, such as the reign of coconut (1960s), pistachios (1980s), and espresso (1990s). The introduction includes tips for ingredients, measuring, equipment, and techniques. The concise recipe instructions are written for the experienced baker. This amazing collection features such cookies as Brandy Snaps, Fig Cookies, Mocha Cookies, Scandinavian Rosettes, and Mini Black and White Cookies. It represents a snapshot of American cookery-an incredible seven decades' worth of cookies complete with mouthwatering photographs. [Three-city tour with former Gourmet executive chef Sara Moulton.] (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Excerpts
Excerpts
INTRODUCTION Buy a cookie, and it's just a bite of sugar, something sweet to get you through the day. Bake a cookie, on the other hand, and you send an instant message from the moment you measure out the flour. Long before they're done, the cookies become a promise, their endlessly soothing scent offering both reassurance and solace. And even the tiniest bite is powerful, bringing with it the flavor of home. For anyone who is comfortable in a kitchen, a warm cookie is the easiest way to say I love you. Somewhere in the back of our minds, we all know this. It is the reason we bake cookies at Christmas, why we exchange them as gifts. Not for nothing do we pack up our cookies and send them off to our far-flung families. Like little ambassadors of good will, these morsels stand in for us. There are few people who don't understand, at least subconsciously, how much a cookie can mean. But until we began work on this book, it had never occurred to us to look at history through a cookie prism. When we decided to select the best cookie from each of Gourmet's sixty-eight years, we knew we would end up with an awesome array of treats. But we did not realize that we would also discover a way of charting the changes in the way that we eat. Our cookie cravings, it turns out, offer a fascinating window on history, a portrait of our country that reveals the way our appetites have evolved. We were so captivated by the language of cookies that we have printed the recipes exactly as they originally appeared. In the early years, they are remarkably casual, a kind of mysterious shorthand that assumes that each reader is an accomplished cook who needs very little in the way of guidance. "Bake in a moderate oven until crisp," is a classic instruction. So is "Add flour until the dough is stiff." It's interesting to watch as numbers creep into the recipes in the form of degrees, minutes, and cups. And it's startling to observe the recipes growing longer and longer as they become increasingly precise. Although we have left the language of the recipes unchanged, we have removed the guesswork; when we retested, we added notes, so that you'll know exactly how hot your oven should be, and how many cups of flour it takes to stiffen that dough. Cookies turn out to be an excellent indicator of what we have been eating. The instinct to bake them is essentially conservative, which means that cookies are rarely the first place that new ingredients appear. An ingredient must have a solid place at America's table before it makes its way into the cookie cupboard. So when pistachios start showing up in cookies in the eighties, you know that the luxurious nut has finally become part of the American food landscape. And when, in the early nineties, espresso stops making the occasional appearance and turns into a standard ingredient, it is no accident; this is just when venti became part of our vocabulary, a sign that America's drinking habits had undergone a serious revolution. Looking at cookies in this way is a fascinating exercise. It is also a great predictor of future trends. Work your way through this book and you'll be in a very good position to know what cookies we'll be baking next year, and the year after that. But while new cookies keep being invented, old cookies never die. They just get better and better. We like to think that you'll be baking the ones in this book for many years to come. --The Editors 1941 - Cajun Macaroons America's first epicurean magazine had very ambitious plans. Although war was imminent, you wouldn't have known it from turning the pages. In this, the second issue, Gourmet's chef, Louis P. DeGouy ("de goo-ey"), taught his readers how to cook a duck. They could also read about "Famous Chefs of Today"; peruse the first installment of "Clementine in the Kitchen," the story of a French cook (the series eventually became a beloved book); and shop vicariously at a store that specialized in dates (it sold Deglet Noors, Golden Saidys, and black Hyanas). Turning to the menus, they found a rather elaborate celebration of Mardi Gras in New Orleans, complete with oysters rockefeller, Creole soup, papaya balls, pompano fillets, pigeon pie, poinsettia salad (canned pineapple, pimiento strips, cream cheese moistened with French dressing, and paprika), creamed peas, and sugared yams. But the best thing about the menu was the finale: crisp, chewy little cookies with a subtle almond scent. Although the recipe required a lot of work, readers would beg for it again and again over the years. Happily, the food processor has taken most of the labor out of these French-style macaroons, and today they are a breeze to make. Makes about 4 dozen 1 1/2-inch cookies These should be baked a few days in advance. They will keep several months when kept in a closed tin in a cool, dry place. Work 1/2 pound almond paste with a wooden spoon until it is smooth. Add 3 slightly beaten egg whites and blend thoroughly. Add 1/2 cup sifted pastry flour, resifted with 1/2 cup fine granulated sugar and 1/2 cup powdered sugar. Cover a cooky sheet or sheets with bond paper. The cooky mixture may be dropped from the tip of a teaspoon and shaped on the paper, or may be pressed through a cooky press, or shaped with a pastry bag and tube. Bake in a slow oven (300° F) about 30 minutes. The cakes may be removed from the paper by means of a spatula while still warm. Variations: Finely chopped or ground candied fruits may be added to the mixture before baking. Or the tops of the macaroons may be decorated before baking by placing in the center of each a nut half, a raisin (seedless, black or white), or a bit of candied fruit--such as a bit of angelica--cut fancifully, or by sprinkling with finely chopped nut meats. The cakes may be decorated after baking by dainty frosting designs formed with the help of a cake decorator or a pastry tube. Recipe Notes 1. The almond paste should be at room temperature. 2. Rather than working the almond paste with a wooden spoon, use a food processor. 3. Use White Lily flour (see Sources, page 154) or cake flour (not self-rising) in place of the pastry flour. 4. Use regular granulated sugar in place of fine granulated sugar. 5. In place of the bond paper that the recipe calls for, use parchment paper. 6. The cookies should be pale golden. 1971 - Speculaas (Saint Nicholas Cookies) A former minister of foreign affairs in Holland offended many cooks when he informed the world that the speculaas was Europe's best cookie. That is a matter of opinion, but it is a matter of fact that they are among the oldest cookies on record, for speculaas have been baked in the Netherlands for centuries. They began life as gifts to the gods, left in the fields as offerings to ensure a good harvest. But humans are equally enamored of this cross between a spice cookie and a shortbread because of their comfortingly robust and old-fashioned flavor. Makes about 4 dozen cookies Into a bowl, sift together 3 cups flour, 4 teaspoons baking powder, 1 tablespoon cinnamon, 1 teaspoon each of cloves and nutmeg, and 1/2 teaspoon each of ground aniseed, salt, and ginger or white pepper. In a bowl of an electric mixer, beat 2 sticks, or 1 cup, butter, softened, with 1 1/2 cups firmly packed dark brown sugar until the mixture is light and fluffy. Stir in 3 tablespoons milk, dark rum, or brandy. Gradually add the flour mixture, stirring until it is well combined, and form the dough into a ball. Knead the dough on a board sprinkled with about 1/4 cup flour and roll it out into a rectangle 1/4 inch thick. With a sharp knife or cutter, cut the dough into rectangles 2 1/2 inches by 1 1/2 inches. Put the rectangles on a buttered cookie sheet, decorate them with blanched almonds, halved or slivered, and brush them with lightly beaten egg white. Bake the cookies in a moderately hot oven (375°F) for 12 to 15 minutes, or until they are browned and firm. Recipe Note Gently push the nuts into the dough before brushing the cookies with egg white Excerpted from The Gourmet Cookie Book: The Single Best Recipe from Each Year 1941-2009 by Gourmet Magazine Editors All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.
