Stir’s curated list of artful BC cookbooks to gift the food lover in your life
From mind-blowing pies to plant-based plates, these 2021 titles showcase the best of local culinary arts
Jessica Leigh Clark-Bojin’s Mandala Pie from Pies Are Awesome. Photo by Jessica Leigh Clark-Bojin via @ThePieous
Pies Are Awesome author Jessica Leigh Clark-Bojin with her La Catrina Pie. Photo by Jessica Leigh Clark-Bojin via @thepieous
CHANCES ARE YOU know someone who adores cookbooks. Beautiful photos, captivating text, and useful tips and tricks: A good cookbook has all the ingredients to make a food lover want to linger on every page. Here’s a handful of local titles from 2021 to inspire the person in your life who’s obsessed with getting creative in the kitchen.
Pies Are Awesome—The Definitive Pie Art Book: Step-by-Step Designs for Every Occasion (Quarto Knows) by Jessica Leigh Clark-Bojin
Whether you’re an aspiring baker or not, this book will blow your mind. Vancouver’s Jessica Leigh Clark-Bojin didn’t even know how to crack an egg prior to 2016, when the former comic-book illustrator and indie-film producer, who once led a business department at Vancouver Film School, set out to teach herself how to make pies. She’s gone on to become the world’s reigning queen of pie art, appearing in such primo TV spots as the TODAY Show and releasing videos that have been viewed by millions.
If you’ve never managed to successfully roll out dough for a basic double-crust pie, do not try this at home: Clark-Bojin’s recipes are extraordinarily complex. One of her techniques is to sculpt pie dough like polymer clay, allowing her to move past mere two-dimensional layers of dough stacked atop each other to sophisticated 3D designs. Also known as ThePieous, she works with art deco, typographic, folk art, and other stencils. Her pie trims range from baroque and fancy to slick and modern. And her pie(ce) de resistance is her Piescraper—“the challenger to cake’s claim on wedding-dessert supremacy”. Her book includes a tutorial for a two-tier Piescraper, but she has made three-tier versions complete with top ornamentation in the past that are practically earthquake-proof.
We can’t take our eyes off Clark-Bojin’s dazzling Mandala Pie (pictured at top), which she made in honour of Diwali, while her La Catrina Pie, in homage to its namesake grand dame of Mexico’s Día de los Muertos, re-creates the holiday’s ubiquitous sugar skulls in flaky crust form. Lantern Festival Pie has intricate Chinese characters as decoration alongside cherry blossoms; Paris Skyline Pie shows the Eiffel Tower under twinkling stars; and the Pi Pie (made for Pi Day, held annually on March 14, or 3/14) has the prettiest of teeny crust flowers nestled within the mathematical symbol.
Clark-Bojin’s masterpieces bring truth to the cliché “too pretty to eat”; you could frame these works of art. But we wouldn’t say no if she offered us a slice.
Whitewater Cooks: Together Again (Sandhill Book Marketing) by Shelley Adams
Tomato and Olive Tarte Tatin from Whitewater Cooks: Together Again. Photo by David R. Gluns
Chef-author Shelley Adams was a caterer in the Vancouver’s film industry before moving to Nelson, where she and her husband started Fresh Tracks Café at nearby Whitewater Ski Resort. Her six-title cookbook series has sold more than 250,000 copies—mostly via word-of-mouth. Ironically, Adams had picked the title for her latest offering before the onset of COVID-19, the pandemic giving greater resonance to the very idea of being together again. A silver lining of life in lockdown was her son Conner’s return from New York City; from April to August last year, the two invented and tested recipes and cooked and ate together. Her daughter Ali contributed as well, the book featuring 80 new recipes, a mix of Korean- and Moroccan-influenced dishes alongside Adams’s characteristic West Coast- and Mediterranean-inspired cuisine.
A few of our favourites: Tomato and Olive Tarte Tatin, with crumbled goat cheese; Crab Summer Rolls with Curry Peanut and Nuoc Cham Sauce; Yuzu Summer Bowl with prawns and Persian cucumbers; and Sweet Steelhead garnished with slices of blood orange.
Island Eats: Signature Chefs’ Recipes from Vancouver Island and the Salish Sea (Figure 1 Publishing) by Dawn Postnikoff and Joanne Sasvari
From Victoria and Galiano Island to Parksville and Ucluelet, the farm- and tide-to-table movement has flourished over the last two decades on Vancouver Island and the Gulf Islands, the ancestral home of the Coast Salish peoples, including the Kwakwaka'wakw and Nuu-chah-nulth, and the regions to which this delicious book is dedicated. Some of the featured chefs moved from Vancouver to smaller locales, bringing their expertise and insistence on seasonal, local, and sustainable ingredients with them. Take Andrey Durbach, who trained at New York’s Culinary Institute of America, and worked at places like Bishop’s and Bacchus before opening his own establishments including Etoile, La Buca, and Sardine Can. Now, he calls Courtenay home and hones his craft in Italian food as chef-owner of Il Falcone. Here, he shares his recipes for an especially luxurious Osso Buco Milanese and Caramel Panna Cotta with crunchy hazelnut praline. Island Eats is a delight for readers who love staying up to date on chefs’ whereabouts and culinary journeys, as it (re)introduces folks like Jessyca Fulsom and Stephen Nason of Tofino’s relatively new Ouest Artisan Patisserie (who offer up their recipes for Blackberry-Earl Grey Jam and Paris Brest); Ian Riddick of Ucluelet’s Heartwood Kitchen Food Outfitter (Chanterelle Mushroom Pate, Seared Scallops with Vancouver Island Root Succotash and Corn Puree) and Warren Barr and Lily Verney-Downey of Pluvio Restaurant + Rooms, also in Ukee (Truffle Tuna Tartare, Gourmet Granola made with English Breakfast tea). We can’t wait to try making Saddle Lake Cree family member and chef Kirsten Wood’s signature spruce tip ice cream for the Bannock Ice Cream Sandwich she serves at Blue Spruce Ice Cream in downtown Courtenay.
What also makes this book a great gift (for someone else or yourself) is that although the dishes are from some of the country’s most accomplished chefs, the recipes, for the most part, are actually doable for home cooks.
The Acorn: Vegetables Re-Imagined—Seasonal Recipes From Root to Stem (Appetite by Random House, a division of Penguin Random House Canada Limited) by Shira Blustein and Brian Luptak
Being in a punk band was Shira Blustein’s ticket out of her Calgary hometown, and film school was her Vancouver calling card. A long-time vegetarian, she grew up in a beef-loving province and a meat-eating family, whose roots led to Jewish Persian, Indian, Iranian, Polish, and Russian influences in the kitchen. In 2012, longing for elevated plant-based cuisine on the West Coast, she opened the Acorn restaurant on Main Street. Its “vegetable forward” food fast drew a loyal following and long lineups, the 42-seat eatery going on to earn national acclaim. The Acorn has only grown in popularity and adventurousness since. Headed by chef Brian Luptak, the culinary team offers a purely organic menu made up of local, seasonal, foraged, wild-crafted, and unique ingredients. Blustein and Luptak call their cookbook their “giant art project”, and it is artistic indeed. While not everyone will be up for pickling oxeye daisy buds, concocting licorice fern-root vinegar, or making a plant-based bottarga (a briny preserved condiment that is the “umami flavor bomb enhancer of the ancient world”), the beautifully shot (by Gabriel Cabrera) book is divided by seasons and will encourage keen and capable home chefs to up their vegetarian game. Recipes like Rutabaga—which is subtitled “Caramelized Rutabaga, Quince Gastrique, Quince Coulis, Fermented Porcini Puree, Pickled Onions, Pickled Sitka Spruce Buds, Vegetable Bottarga”—or Brussels Sprouts (Pan-Roasted Brussels Sprouts, Shiitake XO Sauce, Black Garlic Mayo, Pickled Ginger, Crispy Shallots, Mizuna) come with plating instructions for the kind of eye-candy-like presentation that fine restaurants thrive on and excel at.
The Vegan Family Cookbook: Simple, Balanced Cooking for Real Life (Appetite by Random House, a division of Penguin Random House Canada Limited) by Anna Pippus
East Van culinary artist Anna Pippus is the force behind Easy Animal-Free, a multi-platform project dedicated to helping people eat more plants, which gave rise to her new book. She takes the drudgery out of making dinner every single night by cooking by theme: pasta on Mondays, bowls on Tuesdays, one-pot meals on Wednesdays, and stir-fries or other pan-Asian-inspired dishes on Thursdays, with nothing planned on weekends—maybe it’s leftovers, grazing on a snack board, or eating out. She goes over basics like flavour fundamentals, how to cook tofu, and the importance of texture, and from there you can be as creative as you want whether you follow her recipes closely or use them as a rough guide and “choose your own adventure”. Besides the health and environmental benefits of plant-based meals, there’s the abundance of colour in these pages that satisfies our tendency to eat with our eyes. Consider Chickpea Cauliflower Curry, topped with bright green cilantro ladled next to a baked sweet potato or rice-free Sunflower Carrot Nori Rolls with fillings like avocado and sweet bell pepper.
Related Articles
