Look/Book

"I joked when I was writing the book that I should call it Chicken and Dessert," New York Times food writer Amanda Hesser said at the Cooking Tent; the eventual title was the staid-sounding The Essential New York Times Cook Book: Classic Recipes for a New Century. Hesser combed through decades of recipes printed in the Times, from German toast to New England Spider Cake to Saratoga potato chips. One of the revelations of the project, she said, was the timeliness of what we consider to be new trends. "The whole idea that we learned about olive oil in, like, 1982? Not true."