Ottolenghi: Comfort

By Yotam Ottolenghi with Helen Goh, Verena Lochmuller, and Tara Wigley Appetite by Random House $45

What is comfort food to you? Is it nostalgia and the recipes you grew up eating at home? Or the comforting food you eat in front of the fire when it’s freezing outside?

In his eleventh cookbook, Yotam Ottolenghi, along with his three co-authors, cover a lot of the globe that they’ve trodden themselves. They’ve all moved around, absorbing the culture and cuisine of the new country while preserving that of the place they left, and this book is about their journeys and those recipes: the ones they have adapted and made their own from Italy, Germany, China, Jerusalem, Malaysia, Melbourne, Scotland, and New York, to their common ground of London, England. Perhaps my favourite line in the introduction is, “When done with awareness, acknowledgement, relish, and respect, this, for us, is cultural appreciation, not appropriation.”

The ten chapters are broken into types of dish, some by ingredients and some by cooking method, so you’ll find chicken recipes in the first chapter, “Eggs, Crêpes, Pancakes” (Cheesy Curry Crêpes (p.42) sound delicious – and how kind of them to give us Crêpes 3 Ways: breakfast, lunch, and dessert!) as well as Summer Chicken Cacciatore (p.132) in chapter five, “Roasted Chicken and Sheet Pan Dishes”.

And you’ll find a Salmon Fishcake recipe (p.80) in chapter three, “Fritters and Other Fried Things”, and Potato, Fennel, and Smoked Salmon Bake (p.232) in chapter eight, “Pasta, Polenta and Potatoes”. Every recipe is accompanied by one of Jonathan Lovekin’s mouthwatering photos, and sometimes you’ll see step by step photographs of the dishes being made too, and as part of a lavish spread. Do note that there are two covers – the photographic cover shown here and an alternative bright, graphic cover sold in some markets.

I counted 104 recipes in this book, and I want to make most of them. All chapter two’s “Soups, dips, spreads” to chapter nine’s “Pies, pastry, bread”. Honestly, just open a page and make the dish –and mark it with one of the magenta or orange ribbons provided. You simply can’t go wrong.