Culinary through spring? Jonah Freud recommends 10 cookbooks for this season

Charcuterie – pâtés, terrines, savory pies

Ferrandi Paris

In fact, we don’t do it enough: making charcuterie at home. While it comes down to the same thing as baking a cake. In fact, I would like a savory whole-Holland-baked charcuterie because I don’t really have a sweet tooth. The beautiful book Charcuterie from the prestigious culinary training institute Ferrandi in Paris makes it accessible to everyone to get started at home. Pâté en croûte, rillettes, boudins: it’s suddenly all within reach. Because it is a contemporary book, various vegetable terrines are also included, such as a terrine of aubergines and miso that radiates to me from the photo. The vegetarian sausages also look very tasty. But the main part of the recipes contains meat, fish and poultry. In the Netherlands it is difficult to find tasty charcuterie that you can find in every French supermarket or butcher’s shop. All the more reason to make it yourself.
Flammarion€35 (English)

The Mama’s Fridge Cookbook

Aaliyah Bochhah and Pay-Uun Hiu

Mama’s refrigerator is a very friendly company in the Tweede Goudsbloemdwarsstraat. The idea behind this catering company is that mothers from different cultures in our country make dishes that you will miss when the mother is no longer there. In the company, each culture has a refrigerator containing the corresponding dishes. Since the end of last year, the Mama’s Fridge cookbook has been available in which ten mothers tell their life stories and share personal recipes. They all have the dream of running a professional catering company. Thanks to Mama’s refrigerator, they can do that together. You can walk into the shop (you can also order) and then think: do I fancy Chinese, Turkish or Mozambican tonight?
Mama’s Fridge BV€34.95

Flavor

Sabrina Ghayour

Sabrina Ghayour clearly meets a need. Her Middle Eastern recipe is less complicated than the recipes of, for example, Yotam Ottolenghi. She uses fewer ingredients and her explanations are more concise and more adapted to kitchen princes and princesses who want to have a meal on the table quickly. She writes in her foreword that she adheres to her position of less is more. She wants to show in the most minimalist way how to give as much flavor as possible to dishes. That is a good starting point and often a solution, especially for weekday dishes. Flavor is already the seventh book by this English cooking school teacher whose roots lie in Iran.
Good Cook€27.50

The pastry

Roger van Damme and Claudia Allemeersch

The Dutch Roger van Damme is making waves in Belgium. He is one of the rare people who is at the top as a chef and pastry chef. He trained at the Ter Groene Poorte vocational school in Bruges. He has a lunch restaurant in Antwerp with a Michelin star and presents cooking programs on the fun Flemish cooking channel Njam!. Together with Claudia Allemeersch (once named the best hobby chef in Flanders), Van Damme has now created the book The pastry. Allemeersch is mainly responsible for the more classic recipes, Roger provides more university pastries such as yoghurt prawn crackers; you better come up with it! A beautifully published book with occasional step-by-step photos for the intricacies.
Lannoo€40

Easy noodles

Pippa Middlehurst

The enormous amount of different types of noodles in the store can still cause a lot of confusion. We’ll probably get used to it one day, because in essence it’s nothing more than the difference between tagliatelle and spaghetti. About fifty years ago we didn’t even know they existed. Let alone that they are different. Noodles are all the rage and, like pasta, are made from flour, water and salt. Sometimes there is egg in it. Different types of wheat are used for different types of noodles. Buckwheat, for example, is also used for soba noodles. This book by Pippa Middlehurst contains sixty recipes with ready-made (dried) noodles. Who knows, maybe one day we will see all the pasta and noodles together on the supermarket shelf. They are often interchangeable.
Quadrille Publishing Ltd€22

Chez Bijdendijk

Joris Bijdendijk

There it is: the new cookbook by Joris Bijdendijk. This time about French cuisine, one that is very close to him. Not only did he work in France for a long time to learn the trade, he also has a French wife and therefore half-French children. After an introduction and an explanation of kitchen utensils, the first recipe follows: a baguette, or actually three baguettes if I understand the recipe correctly. This is followed by chapters with recipes from hors d’oeuvres to patisserie. Simple recipes such as oeuf mayo and coq au vin to more complicated ones such as lièvre à la royale and canard pressé à l’orange. The dishes are beautifully depicted and the book also contains atmospheric photos of Paris; you want to leave immediately. French cuisine still remains an important basis for good cooking, although it receives less attention than a few years ago.
Nijgh & van Ditmar€35

By73

Marcelo Ballardin and Eric Ivanidis

Door73 is the new restaurant of Marcelo Ballardin and his partner Eric Ivanidis. Ballardin already had restaurant Oak in Ghent, where Ivanidis was his sous chef. There was increasing conflict between chef Ballardin and his sous chef about the content of the menu and the elaboration of the dishes. Both felt that their collegiality had taken on familial forms. They opened a second business so Ivanidis could be chef there. Door73 (also in Ghent) is a shared-dining restaurant where chef Ivanidis seamlessly combines his Greek roots with influences from Asia and South America. Chicken tikka masala kadaifi is a good example of this. A classic Indian dish with a crust of Greek kadaifi. Or the shells (vongole) à la Taiwan; super simple but completely different due to the use of soy sauce and Thai basil.
Lannoo€35

Chocolate

The Silver Spoon

Almost everyone who cooks themselves knows the book The Silver Spoon well, which can be found in almost every Italian household and has also been sold more than 250,000 times in the Netherlands. The successful book has been the basis for so-called spin-offs for a number of years. Now in this series is the book The Silver Spoon – Chocolate appeared. A book containing a hundred recipes with chocolate in the leading role. The step-by-step techniques are followed by the recipes. The true chocolate adept will get his or her money’s worth with a tarte tatin of pear and chocolate and a truffle cake with wasabi. Most recipes go a step further than a simple chocolate cake. The challenge is to reinvent chocolate in all kinds of possible variations.
Spectrum€50

Crazy about vegetables!

Eveline Versluys

The book Crazy about vegetables! was published in November 2023, but only ended up on my desk later. The book was written by the Flemish Eveline Versluys who operates under the name Vegamuze. This ‘vegamuze’ has a plant-based catering company where, as she says, she puts vegetables in the spotlight and makes Oscar-worthy dishes with them. In the book she discusses twenty types of vegetables. She certainly does not lack creativity. She makes, among other things, a beetroot muhammarah, a chickpea chocolate spread and a hot dog with miso eggplant and sweet and sour pineapple relish. I wouldn’t call it the ultimate cookbook for vegetable lovers (as it says on the cover), but it is certainly a welcome addition to new, trendy dishes for the vegan kitchen.
Sterck & de Vreese€29.90

Asparagus

Eric Swaghoven

The friendly Eric Swaghoven has been cooking top-notch dishes in the Valuas hotel-restaurant in Venlo for years. And preferably with his absolute favorite ingredient, asparagus. Besides being a chef, Swaghoven has another great hobby: collecting cookbooks from colleagues. He has a huge collection at home. Now he thought it was time to add a book of his own. One in which all his knowledge and his love for asparagus had to be reflected. A culinary handbook containing the basic recipes and also many very exquisite dishes starring the white gold of the earth. I’m not going to advertise any further, but Valuas is one of the addresses where I really like to stay, especially during asparagus season. You can also buy the best asparagus for home around the corner.
Buro Food€55