Last night, bartenders and imbibers from around Boston gathered at Drink to celebrate renowned cocktail maker Dale DeGroff’s latest book, The Essential Cocktail. Small samples of Manhattans (made with rye whiskey or bourbon) and Cosmopolitans flowed freely as DeGroff worked the room.

Before we sampled one to many of his libations, we talked to DeGroff about what he recommends you serve guests this holiday season.

(more…)

The latest recipe collections from cooking-technique juggernaut America’s Test Kitchen—headed by Boston’s own Christopher Kimball—arrived in the mail with a thud this week. Heavy as my sad attempts at Christmas fruit bread but far more digestible, The Cook’s Country Cookbook and The America’s Test Kitchen Family Baking Book come packed with a collective 1,200 recipes guaranteed to keep spatula fiends busy for years.

Which may be alarming for those still working their way through any of the 50-odd books listed on the America’s Test Kitchen website: America’s Best Lost Recipes, Behind the Scenes with America’s Test Kitchen, Best of America’s Test Kitchen 2008, plus books devoted to casseroles, side dishes, American classics, Italian classics, restaurant favorites, and so on. For those who prefer taking a micro, rather than macro, approach, there’s How to Cook Chicken Breasts and How to Cook Simple Fruit Desserts. (more…)

Full of tasty recipes with New England flair and abundant color photos of island life—with not a single Black Dog to be spotted—the new cookbook from Edgartown’s Carol McManus, Table Talk (Vineyard Stories, $22.95, 114 pages), is about as gift-basket ready as it gets. Due out in mid-August, the vibrant paperback is just the sort of thing a host can send home with summering out-of-towners, with no fear of perpetuating Bay State tourist kitsch.

McManus, longtime owner of Espresso Love Cafe, teamed up with island-based Vineyard Stories, which boasts an impressive pedigree for a small custom publisher: Husband-and-wife team Jan Pogue and John Walter are veteran journalists with a combined resume that includes the Philadelphia Inquirer, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, and USA Today.

They also have strong ties to the Vineyard, with Walter having served as editor and publisher of the Vineyard Gazette. Table Talk is their eighth book, and their second cookbook (the first being the charming Delish!, a collection of recipes inspired by local author Philip R. Craig’s fictional Vineyard detective, J. W. Jackson).

No surprise, then, that Table Talk comes off as warmly authentic. (more…)

Three things found while Googling Charlie Ayers, author of the new cookbook Food 2.0: Secrets from the Chef Who Fed Google (DK, $25):

*An interview with the Scotsman in which Ayers describes a 10-course tasting menu at Ken Oringer’s Clio as the best meal of his life: “It included a liquid Parmesan ravioli, which was like eating Parmesan-scented air. It was out of this world.”

*A blog entry by a slightly dotty amateur chef that uses 25 photographs, including a picture of what two tablespoons of Worcestershire sauce looks like, to show how to make Ayers’s Google Hot Sauce.

(more…)

No surprise that local pit-master Chris Schlesinger’s latest release, Grill It! (DK Publishing, 352 pages, $25), is a big slab of a book, packed with juicy photos and recipes: It’s like a Texas T-bone with a table of contents. What is surprising is that Schlesinger, co-owner of Cambridge’s East Coast Grill, still has a lot to say about the art of grilling. After all, he and collaborator John “Doc” Willoughby, executive editor of Gourmet magazine, have already been on a veritable hot streak with License to Grill, The Thrill of the Grill, Let the Flames Begin, and How to Cook Meat.

What makes Grill It! stand out, though, is first the tiptop photography: Publisher Dorling Kindersley is known for lavishly illustrated titles (it puts out the superb Eyewitness Travel guides, for instance), and that gives Grill It! extra appeal. (more…)

Italian food, for me, is a bit like the visiting the MFA: I have a sense of its vastness, its variety, but—time after time—I trundle along the same route, past the big-name American and European masters, and end up standing in front of Isabella and the Pot of Basil. Again. Like most people, I need someone to show me what I’m missing. In short, I need a guide.

For those looking to explore Italian cuisine beyond seafood fra diavolo and pasta puttanesca (and, let’s be honest, fettucine alfredo), there is an excellent guide in the form of Boston’s own G. Franco Romagnoli, who with his wife, Gwen, has just published Italy, the Romagnoli Way (The Lyons Press, 368 pages, $24.95).

More-mature foodies will remember him from his 1970s PBS series, The Romagnolis’ Table, or from his restaurants of the same name in the Boston area. Romagnoli has since gone on to publish numerous cookbooks and food and travel articles, experience he draws on for this sumptuous culinary guidebook. (more…)

There was a time when I considered driving tours little more than field trips for grownups—who, presumably, should have worthier, more-grownup things to do. That outlook was bred from my growing up in the heart of Kentucky’s bluegrass country: Blessed with both legendary horse farms and notorious bourbon distilleries, its back roads play host to an ant-line of tourists who keep slowing down to either ogle a few million dollars on the hoof or simply let the boozy vapors of the car’s occupants dissipate a bit, or both. It’s hard to grasp the allure of such pilgrimages when you’ve been jaded by grade-school outings to Wild Turkey and Maker’s Mark. (Possibly the racetrack, too.)

As an adult, though, and especially as an adult living in New England, I find I’m as big a sucker as anyone for these things. Pub crawls, wine loops, diner treks, even (gah!) foliage tours—I’ve done them all. And now along comes The Vermont Cheese Book by Ellen Ecker Ogden (The Countryman Press, $19.95), and I discover a whole new reason to get out the map and gas up the car. (more…)

There’s a new book for food lovers in stores this month, and one well worth finding. Rebecca Gray’s American Artisanal (Rizzoli, $26.95, 258 pages) is a modest-looking thing: a small hardback with a dun-colored, matte cover of recycled paper, ornamented with a woodcut-style image of an apple. Like the food it honors, it’s light on packaging and fillers, and big on satisfying content.

Each well-reported, engagingly told chapter profiles one of the country’s best food artisans, punctuated by a recipe or two inspired by that maker’s work. No surprise that New England—where you seemingly can’t swing a wheel of hand-ladled, ash-ripened goat cheese without hitting a regional food artist—is amply represented here. (more…)

To the despair of friends who feel it’s uncivilized to take Sunday brunch before 2 p.m., I have in recent years become a die-hard morning person. So when a new pocket-sized guide to Boston breakfast spots came across my desk this week, I was on it like date butter on banana-stuffed French toast.

Written by Acton’s Barbara Brown Smith, Rise & Dine: Breakfast in Boston is about as light and fluffy as food writing gets: 50-plus profiles of “the most interesting” destinations for a.m. eats, written in a simple, cheery tone and mixing each restaurant’s history with a bit of atmosphere and some menu highlights.

(more…)