New York Times Book Review for "Baker's Dozen Cookbook",
December 2, 2001; "Cookbooks"
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It took even longer (than ten years) to produce The Baker's Dozen Cookbook (Morrow, $40.00), which is like a community cookbook in which the town's best bakers happen to be nationally recognized authorities and teachers. The eponymous group, started by Marion Cunningham and 12 other writers and pastry chefs in the San Francisco Bay Area (since then, the membership has grown far beyond the founders), has been meeting since 1989 and sharing the results of its field trips--to say, yeast and sugar factories, and bakeries and dairies--and research-
themed bake-offs.
I can see why it took a baker's decade to coordinate the work of 13 successful pastry chefs and teachers, plus the many others on various committees who made sure that the blueberry muffin, for instance, was absolutely the blueberry muffin conjured by America's collective palate. The group enlisted the writer and teacher Rick Rodgers to edit the book, and he miraculously made it speak in one confidence-inspiring voice: the voice of experience. In the meantime, the prolific Rodgers wrote his own book, Kaffeehaus (Clarkson Potter, $37.50), which come February will gladden the hearts of those who long for the sort of kugelhopf and Linzertorte you can find in Vienna, Budapest, and Prague.
The notes on ingredients, techniques, and equipment in The Baker's Dozen Cookbook are almost blunt, so informed are they by years of practice and teaching. They have something of the brook-no-dispute flavor of The Joy of Cooking, and in fact several of the contributors also helped write the new edition of Joy. Here are signature cakes and breads from names in the baking hall of fame: sour cream pound cake and angel food cake from Flo Braker; pie crust from Marion Cunningham; quick puff pastry from Lindsey Shere, who used it at Chez Panisse; French baguettes from Craig Ponsford, who won an international baguette competition against French bakers (a fact the text modestly doesn't mention, perhaps because so many contributors won so many awards); Italian whole-wheat bread by Carol Field. Many of the definitive recipes are the product of the baker's experience, but many result from those bake-offs--for instance, the "scores" of angel-food cakes all made to the same recipe, none of which turned out alike. I hope it won't be 13 years before the next installment appears.
Corby Kummer
