The first time I browsed through Andrew Carmellini’s and Gwen Hyman’s new cookbook “Urban Italian”, I was quickly turned off by what I took to be a bit too much attitude. More »

My wife and I likely have over 500 cookbooks. They line the bookcase shelves in the kitchen, dining room, and den. Years ago, we had a carpenter build a kitchen–long shelf a foot and a half below the ceiling, and now it’s lined with the balance of 38 + years worth of acquisitions. More »

My wife Holly and I began amassing a sizable and comprehensive cookbook collection right after we were married in 1970 starting with a simple paperback, Italian Home Cooking. After many pleasurable meals on Hester Street on the lower east side of NYC, we brought home a modest book whose cover, in retrospect, looked like an outtake from “Goodfellas,” when Joe Pesci’s character comes over to his mother’s house at three in the morning with two associates after a particularly hard night’s whack. The photo shows Momma all too eager to load the table with pasta, sausages, peppers, a woven straw covered fiasco of Chianti, and good fresh bread. More »

Melding food and Fenders, authors Kay Bozich Owens and Lynn Owens share a collection of their favorite bands’ recipes in their book, Lost in the Supermarket, investigating what bands eat and why. The concept is irresistible to those who feel as passionate about food as they do about music. After all, touring bands are privy to a nomadic lifestyle that grants the opportunity to see and experience local cuisine in parts of the world that many of us never will. Unfortunately, though the book mimics a cookbook in format, it falls short by relying heavily on the prestige of featured bands instead of serving as a culinary guide. More »

There’s a cookbook I’ve had for years that I keep around almost solely for the last two chapters: one chapter is recipes that use extra egg yolks and the other is recipes that use extra egg whites. I hate throwing out perfectly good food, so I appreciate having options when a recipe I’m preparing leaves me with leftovers. More »

It turns out I like to dabble in Asian and gay porn. Food porn, that is.

In the last few weeks I’ve been slammed with a trove of advanced copies of cookbooks, mostly five-pound coffee-table versions filled with gauzy soft-focus shallow-depth-of-field photography of come-hither canapés and prosaic stories about learning to cook at the feet of mom, grandma or insert-favorite-dead-relative-who-in-reality-almost-killed-you-with-grayish-green-hard-boiled-eggs-and-leaden-fruitcake here. More »

I’ve finally been tapped to contribute to a cookbook. I feel a bit like the lonely relief pitcher stepping up to the mound to save the game.

But in this case there is no Steinbrenner sending a memo down from the luxury box and no Ozzie to give me the nod on my way out of the bullpen. A higher power called me to the stove. The call came down to the field like so:

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