Twelve Recipes
Author(s): Cal Peternell
Winner of the 2015 International Association of Culinary Professionals (IACP) Cookbook Award
Forewords by Alice Waters and Michael Pollan
In this dazzling, full color cookbook and kitchen manual filled with lush photographs and beautiful drawings, the chef of Alice Waters’ Chez Panisse offers basic techniques and essential recipes that will transform anyone into a confident home cook.
When his oldest son was leaving for college, Cal Peternell, the chef of San Francisco’s legendary Chez Panisse, realized that, although he regularly made dinners for his family, he’d never taught them the basics of cooking. Based on the life-altering course of instruction he prepared and honed through many phone calls with his son, Twelve Recipes is the ultimate introduction to the kitchen. Peternell focuses on the core foods and dishes that comprise a successful home cook’s arsenal, each building skill upon skill—from toast, eggs, and beans, to vinaigrettes, pasta with tomato, and rice, to vegetables, soup, meats, and cake.
Twelve Recipes will help home cooks develop a core repertoire of skills and increase their culinary confidence. Peternell tells you what basic ingredients and tools you need for a particular recipe, and then adds variations to expand your understanding. Each tip, instruction, and recipe connects with others to weave into a larger story that illuminates the connection between food and life. A deeply personal book, it was written by the chef alone and it glows with warmth and humor as he mulls over such mundane items as toast and rice to offer surprising new insights about foods that only seem exceedingly ordinary. It’s a book you’re as likely to keep by your bedside as your stovetop. With Peternell as your guide, the journey is pure pleasure and the destination is delicious.
Twelve Recipes features gorgeous color photos and inset illustrations by Peternell’s wife and sons (all artists), and forewords by celebrated chef Alice Waters and New York Times columnist and bestselling author Michael Pollan.
Review(s):
New York Times Bestseller
IACP Cookbook Award Winner
“The best beginner’s cookbook of the year, if not the decade. In addition to being warm, funny and smart, Twelve Recipes will actually teach you to cook… [Peternell] can nudge anyone, from novice to expert, to want to be a better cook… His wit and intelligence are apparent throughout.”
San Francisco Chronicle Bestseller
“Twelve Recipes” is the first book I recommend to people who tell me “I can’t cook.” If you’ve shopped for a stay-at-home order, you’ll find plenty of recipes for what you have on hand.
“Delightful and instructive. . . . Marked by Peternell’s zeal for good, simple food, this title takes a very different approach from cooking handbooks that emphasize science or technical precision.”
“[A] smart new cookbook…written for new cooks, for uncertain cooks, for good cooks looking for simple inspiration, for anyone wrestling with a New Year’s resolution to cook more and better…The recipes are narratives, written conversationally, like excellent emails from a friend explaining how to make béchamel.”
A Best Food Book of 2014… “Encouraging and discursive… Peternell [teaches] the oldest of his three sons how to cook… a skill he realized he’d neglected to pass along while he was growing up, even if Alice Waters in her foreword calls Peternell ‘one of the greatest teachers I know.”
“Warm, funny, and full of cool recipes. [Cal Peternell’s] decades of working at Chez Panisse are molded into solid, grounded advice for cooks who are just starting out.”
“Chef Peternell offers an informal crash course in the “big 12” recipes “at the heart of home cooking”… Essays have an inviting personal tone, and Peternell encourages cooks to use good sense, relax, and enjoy the unexpected pleasures that come with cooking for yourself and for others.”
IACP Cookbook Award
ISBN: 9780062270306