Things Cooks Love Featured in Chicago Tribune

Things Cooks Love: Implements. Ingredients. Recipes. by Sur La Table and Marie Simmons and an interview with Marie are featured in Chicago Tribune:

By Emily Nunn | Tribune reporter
June 4, 2008

Thirty years ago, Marie Simmons never could have written anything like her new book, "Things Cooks Love: Implements. Ingredients. Recipes"(Andrews McNeel, $35). Of course, nobody else could have either.

Back when Simmons was starting her career in the food business—she's now a popular teacher, award-winning cookbook author (she has written more than 20), syndicated newspaper columnist and monthly columnist for Bon Appetit magazine—American cooks just weren't all that curious about how to use such multi-culti equipment as a cataplana or a chitarra.

Those are just two of the 100-odd "things" that Simmons' large and lushly attractive book—the first in a series coming from cookware retailer Sur La Table—teaches readers to use in making her companion recipes, all of which reflect an expanding interest in global cuisine.

"The concept was very astute of Sur La Table," said Simmons recently, over pizza at Osteria Via Stato, while in town to promote the book. "It's based on the fact their customers kept coming up and asking how to use things available in the stores. They just said, 'Hey, we've got to get this in a book.'"

Which could lead you to believe that Simmons has simply written a gorgeous kitchenware catalog for Sur La Table—if it weren't for the fact that no brands are mentioned in the book's three major sections ("Essential Cookware and Tools," "Cooking with Kitchen Essentials," and "Globe Trotting Kitchen Essentials"); none of the equipment, which ranges from the humble whisk to the lovely Indian karahi (a cast-iron skillet with high, rounded sides and large loop handles) is sold exclusively at the store; the recipes do, as she intended, "sound luscious"; and Simmons always recommends an alternative to a piece of equipment. A really good pommes Anna pan is "a $475 pan, but I say you can use an iron skillet," she said with a laugh.

Even as a veteran, Simmons said, writing the book—which is intended both for beginners and advanced cooks—opened her up to new cooking experiences.

"It was inspiring. . . I learned so much," she said. "I'd never used the chitarra," she added, referring to the Italian stringed tool (the name translates as "guitar") for cutting pasta. She now uses it "all the time" to make the book's rosemary whole-wheat breadsticks.

"I'd never used a cataplana, that's the Portuguese domed pan—the stew is fabulous," she said. But using a large granite mortar and pestle instead of a blender to make pesto, she said, was the most fun. "There was a huge difference with the flavor," she said, citing the "unscientific" theory that steel blender blades dull the flavor "You start with garlic, salt, pine nuts, then add the basil, little by little, and you smash smash smash, then slowly drizzle the oil in. ... It smells so different.

"I think it's more tactile and because it's more tactile, it tastes better," she added.

Which goes to her idea that good cookware should make you "more intimately involved with the food."

And it may explain why what a person chooses to cook with can be as personal as what he or she buys to wear.

"It's sort of like shopping for shoes," Simmons said. "You have your practical flats you wear all of the time, and then there's the little pair of strapless backless heels you just have to have. You won't wear them as much, but you're going to love them.

"That's the way I feel about the cataplana or the tagine," she said. (A tagine is a shallow, glazed terra-cotta, stainless-clad, or cast-iron vessel with a high conical lid.) "You won't necessarily use them every day. You're going to use it, though, and you're going to love it; and when you're not using it, it's going to be sitting there for you to admire. That's the kind of love affair that cooks have with their cookware."

http://www.chicagotribune.com/features/food/chi-marie-simmons-cookbook-4jun04,0,997214.story