Photo: Amazon.com

'A Great American Cook:
Recipes from the Home Kitchen of One of Our Most Influential Cooks'
Jonathan Waxman with Tom Steele
Photographs by John Kernick
Houghton Mifflin -- 2007
Buy it on Amazon

It's rather hilarious when a chef's cookbook matches his real-life persona.

We interviewed Jonathan Waxman -- of recent "Top Chef Masters" fame -- a year or two ago about how to properly cut open an artichoke. He was confident that we'd be able to briskly pick up the trick (which could cause an untrained cook to handily slice off a digit) without much practice.

It shouldn't have been a surprise that the man who trained Bobby Flay in the kitchen some 20 years ago is a pretty darn good teacher, and we were happily producing pretty decent artichoke specimens within minutes.

That same confident, coaxing voice is present throughout Waxman's cookbook, a hodgepodge of his culinary experiences. From the red-pepper pancakes with corn and caviar he introduced at Alice Waters' Chez Panisse to a potato gratin he picked up while training in France, this is a fine compilation from a man who has trained many of the American greats -- and who used to hobnob with the likes of James Beard and Julia Child.

What we tested and whether the book's worth buying, after the jump.

Takeaway tips: Waxman's confident, casual voice is encouraging but can occasionally be a little lacking in detail. He thinks you have basic culinary instincts, and will tell readers to salt and pepper four uncooked eggplants "to taste," with no specifics about how much salt. (This is different than salting a finished recipe, so we assumed a heavy hand was called for. Happily, we guessed right.) And he doesn't explain why, in his eggplant recipe, he doesn't like to salt and then wipe clean the eggplant. He simply dictates, "This step isn't necessary." (We've heard both sides of this one.)

Quality of pictures: Lovely. Kernick is a well-known food photographer, and we adore his work. Per usual, we'd have loved to see more.

We tested: Shrimp BLTs and Broiled Eggplant

These shrimp BLTs are ridiculous: Shrimp sautéed in bacon fat and then added to a hefty, camera-ready BLT, hitting that wonderful seafood/pork note so many of us love (bacon-wrapped scallops, anyone?) with a welcome acid note in a smooth homemade lemon aioli. Though we wouldn't have minded a more olive oil-y base to the mayo (corn proved just a bit too slick), it was a fine match to the shrimp, and stacked on sourdough we just might have toasted on the skillet in the bacon fat -- OK, we did -- with a sliced heirloom tomato, it was heavenly.

Eggplant is in season, so we doused some pretty white numbers with a simple salt-pepper-EVOO rub and gave them a brief spin under the broiler. A flurry of Parmesan did the trick to make this a fine side dish -- although this time, we missed an acid note, and would have loved to know what Waxman would have matched it with. A tomato sauce-based pasta? A bit of lemon juice on top? (We opted for the latter, but it was still missing something -- just barely.)

Worth the investment: Yes, absolutely. There are surprising classics in here that we'll make again and again, and Barbuto's breadth of experience makes us trust the recipes.