If you don’t know your Granny Smith from your Westfield Seek-No-Further, than look no further than the recently published “The Apple Lover’s Cookbook” (Norton, $29.95).
Written by Brookline’s Amy Traverso, the book is vibrantly photographed with mostly simple recipes (read: not too many steps or hard-to-find ingredients). It’s a cookbook that plays to a lot of culinary skill levels.
“I don’t come from a restaurant background. I come from a home-cooking background. Most of them are recipes where I thought, ‘I totally feel like I can do this,’” Traverso said.
Traverso, the lifestyle editor at Yankee magazine, wrote the cookbook because she has a long affection for apples that took root in a childhood spent living in Connecticut, surrounded by “some of the prettiest orchards around.”
“The apple orchard in the fall is one of the most beautiful things. ... Then I got into food writing and I was always assigned apple recipe stories in the fall,” said Traverso. She was food editor at Boston magazine and an associate food editor at Sunset magazine. A labor of love, the book took her five years to complete. During that time she gave birth to her son, who is now 3 and an apple lover.
Chapters in the cookbook include a not-dull history of apples. Then it moves onto a primer on 59 (yup, she’s tasted them all) apple varieties – from the “crisp and moderately juicy” Arkansas Black to the Pink Pearl, which tastes “like lemon custard topped with raspberries.”“If you can imagine a wine tasting with apples, that’s what it was like,” Traverso said. “Tasting them all happened over a long period of time. I would go through five or six apples at a time.”Traverso also compiled a cheat sheet chart for which apples work best for each recipe. Golden Delicious don’t brown quickly when sliced, so they’re good for salads. Firm-tart apples, like a Granny Smith, are best for richer baked desserts.
Not only focusing on desserts and sweets, the cookbook features more than 100 recipes, including Apple Risotto, Sweet Potato-Apple Latkes, Apple and Chestnut-Stuffed Pork Loin with Cider Sauce. You’ll find the common apple crisp, muffins, pancakes and a Deep Dish Apple Pie, but Traverso also ups the apple ante with recipes such as: Vermont Apple Cider Donuts, and old-fashioned buckles and betties inspired by her grandmother’s baking. It’s an apple-alooza. The book includes pretty much anything you can do with an apple – even grilled cheese sandwiches and cocktails.
“I thought it was going to be a modest little book and it led me into this wider universe,” Traverso said. “There was enough there that I could have done another book.”Traverso can’t single out one go-to recipe of the 100 in her book. To her, that’s like a parent picking out a favorite child. Instead, she recommends three – a sweet, a savory and a guilty pleasure – that you just gotta try:
Pork and Apple Pie with Cheddar-Sage Crust – “This is the perfect savory apple recipe. It has every complementary flavor in it. I’ve made it for parties, and people go crazy over it.”Free-Form Apple Pear Cranberry Tart – “This is so sweet and rich. It’s a great centerpiece dessert.”Apple-Pear Cobbler with Lemon-Cornmeal Biscuits – “I couldn’t stop eating this while doing this book. The flavors in that are so great. Apples and pears are underutilized pairings.”Traverso will be a judge for the New England Food Festival’s cooking contest Nov. 19 in Plymouth. The event is part of Plymouth’s annual Thanksgiving celebration.