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Christopher Kimball has been around the culinary block more than a few times. His many food-inspired endeavors include founding Cook’s Magazine and Cook’s Illustrated, hosting PBS’ America’s Test Kitchen and authoring several cookbooks. A decade ago, he founded Christopher Kimball’s Milk Street in downtown Boston, which offers a TV show, podcast, cookbooks and classes “dedicated to changing the way we cook.”
All the recipes from the past 10 years of Milk Street are now available in one very sizable and comprehensive tome, The Milk Street Cookbook. A hefty 800 pages, it is an epicurean’s bible and excellent all-around cooking reference. As Kimball recalls in the introduction, he started Milk Street seeking “a new lease on cooking; fresh ideas, new ingredients and a renewed enthusiasm for the kitchen.” The resulting retrospective offers recipes and cooking techniques that are hugely diverse, hailing from all over the world and celebrating many cultures and foodways that have melded together over time. Kimball calls this collection of information the “New Home Cooking.”
Recipes are divided into 16 chapters, with sections ranging from eggs, salads, legumes and grains to seafood, pork, chicken and beef. Baked goods are also featured—both savory and sweet. Many recipes are borrowed from other chefs, such as the Senegalese avocado and mango salad with rof (a green sauce), which fuses a combination of sweet, sour, spicy and herbal flavors introduced to Kimball and the Milk Street team when they visited Dakar with California-based chef and restaurateur Pierre Thiam. Other recipes were created by Milk Street, such as Cantonese sweet-and-sour pork, inspired by combining the qualities of many authentic versions of this dish sampled in Hong Kong. Then there’s classics such as shrimp with feta cheese (garides saganaki), a delicious Greek dish that combines sweet peppadew peppers and tomatoes with salty feta cheese and olives for a pleasing umami punch; it comes together with minimal fuss yet tastes very decadent.
The huge variety of recipes featured in The Milk Street Cookbook means that there are plenty of options, making the book accessible to home cooks and also challenging enough for more experienced chefs. Gorgeous photographs accompany each recipe to provide a useful reference for the finished dish. This wide-ranging recipe collection would be a welcome addition to any kitchen.