I'll have some rye porridge, please, and a beet kvass

In case you’re just joining me, I’ve been comparing cookbooks in advance of the Piglet. I'm currently weighing the relative merits of David Lebovitz’s amiable My Paris Kitchen and the daunting Bar Tartine. It’s been fascinating to me, this exercise. Everyone who loves cookbooks should try it.

Bar Tartine is a famous restaurant in San Francisco and until Santa Claus brought me the Bar Tartine cookbook for Christmas, I’d assumed from the name that it was French or even just vaguely French. It’s not. At all. In the pages of Bar Tartine I see Japanese, Danish, Italian, Hungarian, Russian, and hippie influences, but no French. A lot of paprika here, a lot of dense rye bread, root vegetables, carob, honey, sprouts, kefir, and kvass. Does all that sound good to you? To me, not so much. But it’s definitely interesting.

The Bar Tartine cookbook couldn’t be more different from Sean Brock’s Heritage, but it has the same problem: The barriers to entry for the home cook are extremely high. Not insurmountable, but you have to be really motivated to crack this book. Motivated enough to track down kefir grains and make your own kefir cream, kefir butter, and kefir buttermilk, which figure in many, if not most, of the recipes. You’ll want to set aside a few weeks to ferment honey and age a quart of pear vinegar. Be prepared to char some bread then pop it in your dehydrator for eight hours before grinding it into “burnt bread powder” that you can use in the recipe for slow-roasted carrots -- which also calls for homemade charred green onion powder and carrot top oil.

Some people will find this all exhilarating, others will find it exhausting. I fall into the latter category. I’m just not at a place in my life where I see a recipe for “pine oil” and start scheming to get my hands on “young fir tips.”  There was a day when I would have. I think I wrote a book about it.

I counted four dishes in Bar Tartine that I could make with supermarket ingredients and equipment already in our house. The easiest was the cauliflower and chickpea salad. I know! Eerie. I just had to go with it. I thought this would probably be the first and last dish I cooked from Bar Tartine because it really didn’t sound that promising.

But it was inspired, unusual, and utterly delicious, a melange of crisp vegetables and soft, earthy chickpeas in a honey-spiked yogurt dressing augmented with lots of fresh dill and tarragon. Thinly sliced serrano peppers supplied bite, toasted sunflower seeds, crunch. I loved it, Isabel ate quite a bit, Owen ate a milligram, and Mark said, “You should just make that cole slaw you made on Sunday every night.” 

The recipe is here. I omitted the mushrooms.

I can’t draw conclusions about Bar Tartine from a single recipe, but the lovely salad motivated me to persist with this challenging book. Yesterday, I thought I was going to have to vote for My Paris Kitchen. Today, I’d put money on Bar Tartine. 

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