For chefs, cookbooks paved path to culinary enlightenment

“I think you’re first drawn to a cookbook because it’s like food porn,” says Matthias Merges, the chef who ran Charlie Trotter’s kitchen for 14 years. “Most cookbooks — you can see the way that Ten Speed Press does theirs and now [visual art and design publisher] Phaidon is in the cookbook arena — it’s all tabletop-beautiful.”

In other words, cookbooks look better every year. They are great lookbooks. But does anyone actually learn anything from cookbooks? Some of the city’s most celebrated chefs say they have.

Merges credits the Time-Life “Foods of the World” series, which he first read when he was about 8 years old.

“When you’re young, you never know the breadth of the food world,” says Merges, who plans to open his first restaurant, a Japanese yakitori-inspired restaurant called Yusho in Logan Square, in late July or early August. “When my brother and I discovered those Time-Life books, it opened up the whole world to us. It was like, what was that show? Wild Kingdom. Or Jacques Cousteau.”

One night, on their parents’ anniversary, the Merges boys decided to make an ambitious dinner, sukiyaki, or Japanese hot pot, combining beef and vegetables in a single pot. Before he started flipping through the Time-Life series, young Matthias had no idea such a dish even existed, let alone how to make it.

Later, in other volumes, he learned how to cure meats and fish. The Indian book taught him that curry was so much more than just a spice in a bottle labeled “curry.” It is a mix of spices, for one, and it also is a stew, and it differs from country to country. All of this, a boy who would one day become a professional chef, learned from spiral-bound cookbooks.

Some professional chefs learned from cookbooks even after the age of 10.

Jason Hammel and his wife Amalea Tshilds own and operate Lula Cafe in Logan Square and Nightwood in Pilsen. Hammel worked as a chain restaurant line cook in graduate school and is basically self-taught. For years he devoured cookbooks, walking around with one particular volume, The French Laundry Cookbook by Thomas Keller, under his arm.

Now, more than 10 years later, he still consults his tattered copy of that seminal book, which introduced him to big-pot blanching.

“The idea is, if you’re going to blanch a green vegetable it’ll be greener and brighter if you use a big pot with a lot of hot water,” he says.

The visual beauty of cookbooks is proof that we eat with our eyes first, and brilliantly green vegetables are much more appealing than vegetables the color of Army pants. But sometimes, even now, Hammel’s cooks crowd their veggies.

“There’s been a million times when I’ve come in and instead of explaining it to them, I just slap down the book with the page open and I say, ‘You need to read this,’ ” Hammel says.

From The Zuni Cafe Cookbook by Judy Rodgers, Hammel learned about the importance of pre-seasoning.

“Salting ahead of time is one of her major concepts and one part of her book that I love,” he says.

Hammel, who calls Rodgers’ book “probably the best-written cookbook that exists,” often gives the book to his cooks to read.

“One cook didn’t give it back,” he says.

A lesson in layering

A cookbook changed Jimmy Bannos’ life.

Actually it was a meeting in New Orleans that changed his life, but the book came first. Fresh out of cooking school in 1980, Bannos was a young man cooking standard fare at the coffee shop that he, his brother and their parents were running on the seventh floor of an office building in the Loop.

One day four years later, Bannos switched things up.

“I got Paul Prudhomme’s cookbook [ Chef Paul Prudhomme’s Louisiana Kitchen ] when it first came out and I made a few things from it and people went crazy,” says Bannos, a third-generation restaurateur.

Bannos phoned Prudhomme out of the blue and the star chef returned the call within a day. He invited Bannos down to New Orleans for a visit.

“It changed my life,” Bannos says. “I had a two-hour meeting with him and hung out in the kitchen. That started my journey.” From that meeting, from that book, the legendary Chicago restaurant Heaven on Seven was born.

What Prudhomme’s book taught Bannos was how to layer spices, how to caramelize onions and peppers and how all of those flavors work together.

“Everybody thinks of New Orleans food as hot and spicy,” Bannos says. “Well, it’s not. It’s food with a lot of flavor. So that layering of flavors is what I learned from that book.”

From Bobby Flay’s first cookbook, Bold American Food, Bannos learned about balance — tempering heat with sweetness.

“You put a little bit of honey or brown sugar in the mix and it’s subtle and sweet and then you get the heat at the back of your palate,” Bannos says. “That’s what I like — the little sneaky-sneaky. You don’t want to have that ‘hot’ hitting you right in the mouth right off the bat.”

Bannos also credits James Beard’s New Fish Cookery, originally published in 1954.

“It taught me not to overcook fish,” Bannos says. “It’s better to cook fish less than to overcook it because it’s still going to cook a little on its way to the table. And if it’s overcooked, it’s dry.”

Bannos recently moved his cookbook collection, which numbers close to 2,000, into his bedroom. The books surround his bed and hopefully, he says wryly, their great ideas enter his brain while he sleeps.

“Even my daughter comes in and goes, ‘I feel smarter when I leave this room,’” he says.

Giuseppe Tentori, who recently opened GT Fish & Oyster in River North, grew up in Italy. But it was a cookbook that showed him how to take a classic Italian staple — gnocchi — and turn it into something completely different.

The dish in Wild Sweets: Exotic Dessert & Wine Pairings by Dominique and Cindy Duby is called Red Curry Squash Flan with Gnocchi and Coconut Curry Foam.

“First of all, I had never heard of that type of squash at the time, so that was something new to me,” Tentori says. “And then, with the gnocchi, they fried it and tossed it in cinnamon and sugar and it looked like little doughnuts. It was pretty cool. We don’t have it like that in Italy.”

Lasting impact

Paul Virant will soon take over the kitchen at Perennial in Lincoln Park. He is working on a cookbook of his own — 75 canning recipes for everything from pickles to jams — due out next spring (no title yet but Ten Speed Press is the publisher).

One cookbook lesson from years ago still resounds with Virant. In Chez Panisse Cooking by Paul Bertolli and Alice Waters, he was introduced to spring garlic. Virant, in his 20s at the time and a student at the Culinary Institute of America, thought garlic was garlic.

“I knew about garlic, but I didn’t know about the stages of garlic,” he says. “It doesn’t seem to me that there were a lot of chefs that embraced that at the time. I’d rather work with spring garlic and the fresh cloves when they’re big and fat and wet than the stuff I use in the fall.”

Virant would have learned about spring garlic eventually. But it was a cookbook that first introduced him to an ingredient that he could not imagine cooking without today.

“I feel like I’m from the generation that had to learn from cookbooks, you know?” Virant says. “Now you can learn almost anything from the Internet.”

Still, he acknowledges that the Internet has not completely taken over. He took time out of his day recently to load a portion of his cookbook collection into his new restaurant kitchen.

Merges appreciates as well as anyone the importance of a cookbook’s visual beauty. He oversaw many of the Charlie Trotter’s cookbooks and even snapped photographs for a few of them.

“The Internet is so fragmented,” Merges says. “A book is a piece of art, it’s a work, from cover to cover. It’s a complete thought.”

Pieces of that thought often linger, and sometimes change lives. Today, Merges has a collection of about 500 cookbooks. And yes, he still has those Time-Life books.