Watermelon, blue cheese, extra-virgin olive oil, flaky salt, fresh ground black pepper. Five ingredients, one ferocious overturning of how you think about a favorite fruit.
Jean-Georges Vongerichten, the prolific New York City-based chef and restaurateur, operates more than 45 restaurants around the world and has written five cookbooks. All of his books capture the remarkable way he merges simplicity and elucidative flavor combinations, as with that cheery watermelon salad. His fourth book, 2011’s “Home Cooking with Jean-Georges ($40),” does so in particularly utilitarian fashion.
Cooking with eyes wide open
Let’s dig further into the wonder of this watermelon salad. The rich funk of the blue cheese and resonant twang of the black pepper convince the watermelon to let its sweetness glow. The fruit’s juicy core tangoes with the olive oil’s grassy unctuousness. Pop, pop goes the flaky salt.
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In the recipe’s intro, Vongerichten off-handedly notes the salad “tastes even better when the watermelon is cold and the cheese is room temperature and soft.” Truth. Now texture steps into the spotlight and turns a sublime recipe all the grander. Vongerichten tosses this intel at the reader as an aside. He cannot help himself. Wisdom plops out of him like ice in a sleet storm.
Such is how “Home Cooking with Jean-Georges” flows. This is a book in which the tricks, the takeaways, the techniques are embedded in the recipes themselves. Parmesan chicken teaches you that breadcrumbs are extraneous when you grate Parmesan on both large and small holes on a grater, coat chicken breasts with it, bake, and whammo: savory, textural contrast without the filler.
You might in no other cookbook see someone add a stick and a half of butter to boiling water in order to cook mustard greens. Then you eat those greens, all silky, their jagged acerbity mellowed after four minutes of boiling, and you shake your head in confounded appreciation.
Famous chef, best-in-class writer
A chef creating a cookbook is only as reliable as their writer. For “Home Cooking,” Vongerichten enlisted one of the finest recipe writer-developers in the game, Genevieve Ko, who is currently an editor at The New York Times.
Ko ensured the recipe’s instructions in this book were as pristine and legible as Vongerichten’s cooking is nimble and gleaming. A watermelon salad can say so much, teach so readily, if its quiddities are conveyed with precision. Effortlessness, in “Home Cooking with Jean-Georges,” has perhaps never been presented with such rigor.
