"cookbooks" news and stories

Passover begins tonight, and before heading out to your first Seder, you might check out this article in the New Jersey Star-Ledger to get into the spirit of things (and to remind yourself of the rich traditions of Jewish cooking, way beyond matzo).

The Jewish festival, of course, commemorates the release of the ancient Israelites from slavery in Egypt. Everything that's served at a traditional Seder is steeped in symbolism -- which doesn't always make for the type of dish that you might dream about eating all year (celery with vinegar, anyone?).

But what about creamy noodle kugels, piquant cold borscht or the perfect marriage of warm potato dumplings topped with brisket? These and a host of other recipes culled from the memories of Holocaust survivors have been collected by June Feiss Hersh in a soon-to-be-released cookbook, Recipes Remembered: A Celebration of Survival.

The Star-Ledger profiled the work of Hersh and talked to some of the survivors she features in her book, which apparently also showcases some surprising recipes, like a tres leches cake and gnocchi alla romana, collected from Jews who fled the Nazis for places like the Dominican Republic or Italy.

When chef Jonathan Waxman throws open the glass garage doors at his restaurant Barbuto (in Manhattan's West Village) on a warm spring afternoon on the far side of lunch hour, and you've just eaten a forkful of pillowy gnocchi with spinach and almonds, you'd be inhuman if you didn't turn to your mates and say, "Ah, life is good." Waxman's wood-fired oven is throwing flames, and the silver-haired chef (and former "Top Chef Masters" contestant) might himself be delivering one of his signature roast chickens with salsa verde to another bunch of customers, all of whom seem to be smiling. Barbuto just does that to you.

Jonathan Waxman has always done things his way at Barbuto -- simple, delicious, playful, and very Italian. That he isn't Italian doesn't mean a thing. He cooks like a Roman grandmother, says his business partner Fabrizio Ferri. And in his new cookbook, Italian, My Way, he shows us how to play with the classic dishes he loves (such as linguine with wild mushrooms or pizza with pancetta, tomatoes, burrata, and scallions), and amp up others, spun from a good forage or a good day at the fish market (warm dandelion greens with scrambled eggs and chives; strozzapreti with octopus, red wine, and onions).

If you ever get the chance to cook with Eva Longoria, you should probably bring a lemon.

The television actress recently released a cookbook, titled Eva's Kitchen: Cooking with Love for Family and Friends, and, as she told the AP, "I put lemon in everything, on everything." And she means everything: "It's really great for sauces, for dressings, for fish, for meat. I love lemon."

The cookbook is a homey collection of family recipes and dishes she's made over the years. The 36-year-old actress plays a former model on the ABC series "Desperate Housewives," but says her home life is a far cry from the stylized life of her character. Longoria says she cooks daily, although she tends to play fast and loose with ingredients. She told the AP that it was tough to translate her "a little of this and that" dishes into hard-and-fast recipes.

"I'm a natural cooker, and I cook by instinct, so if I want salt I'll put salt and if I don't I don't, so I felt really bad telling people to put, you know, a quarter-cup of cheese if they didn't want it," she told the AP. "You know, I'm like, `Or not! You don't have to!'"

Read the whole story at The Huffington Post.

• Pssst! Cookbooks make great holiday gifts.
• So does wine, for that matter.
• Interested in going vegan, but intimidated by the cooking? Time to go back to school.
• The Obika Mozzarella Bar offers a kind of fast food -- with a strong Italian accent.

Cookbooks from high-profile cooks and celebrity chefs -- including Giada De Laurentiis, Bobby Flay, Mark Bittman, David Chang, Martha Stewart and Alice Waters -- have gone digital.

Popular cookbook publishers Clarkson Potter and Ten Speed Press released 88 cookbooks as full-color e-books, optimized for color e-readers like the iPad and Nookcolor.

The titles will also be digitally available in black-and-white for Amazon's Kindle and other non-color digital readers. More than 2,600 e-cookbooks are available in Amazon.com's Kindle store. Barnes & Noble's Nook bookstore has more than 1,700 digital titles available.

While some, like Flay's Throwdown!, are from the fall 2010 list, 81 of the titles (such as Waters's The Art of Simple Food) are from the backlist.