Milk Street: Tuesday Nights
by Christopher Kimball
Little, Brown and Company


"...for those raised on classic American cookery, heavily influenced by the cuisines of northern Europe, this is a watershed moment."

After never having published a cookbook before last year—surprising in its own right—Milk Street stuns us again within a second offering in a year. This time the Kimball gang in Boston focuses on flavorful, modern, and quick recipes for the working class. Except for the perhaps top 1%, we’re all working class, and we’re all hungry after work.

Cleverly organized by fast (45 minutes max), faster (30 minutes max), and fastest (twenty minutes or less), the cookbook is further bolstered by how we think about regular meals: salad plates, one pot meals, and of course dessert. Other sections offers “easy” additions, pizzas, and “roasts and simmer,” which breakdown larger dinner concepts into more approachable efforts.

Kimball hasn’t turned his back on European cooking. He’s taken a tactical approach to preserve the ingredients and recipes that satisfy the weekday requirement for speed and ease, and added a boatload of what was once considered foreign ingredients that probably or should occupy your cabinet. For example, Frittata and Carbonara hit the mark, while Lemon Grass-Coconut Tofu and Turkish Scrambled Eggs join the daily meal ranks. He’s dotting the globe for dinner, sometimes mentioning the person or place that inspired the dish. Who can wait to try the Benne Seed Cookies, featuring black and white sesame seeds and upscale sugar?

Kimball’s motto—there is no such thing as ethnic cooking, just a meal served somewhere else in the world—stands tall within these pages. The range of spices and ingredients span continents, but can be locally found and assembled without much trouble. Often the recipes feature a small handful of ingredients or even just one primary. The ease and simplicity of these meals almost demand that we expand our palates. And if someone doesn’t have great ingredients nearby—a notion to be seriously doubted—an internet connection leads to everything desirable.

To keep us out of the restaurants and takeout joints from Monday to Thursday, cooking during the week needs to be flavorful and simplified for time’s sake. This will depend on a home stocked with contemporary equipment and global spices, oils, etc. It doesn’t take much effort to accomplish this. Kimball’s previous cookbook will help get your kitchen in order, while this latest will satisfy your taste buds every day of the week.

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