Everything about Melissa Hamilton and Christopher Hirsheimer delivers the same message: We won the lottery. We get to live authentic lives and cook real food and write books that are both creative and simple.
The thing is, you don't need an addiction to real Italian cooking to lose yourself in these pages. You can read it as a travel book. As an adventure story. As a sensual experience that yields deep pleasure for the authors --- and the reader.
Dining is a ritual, a spiritual act. And that luxury -- that lure and irritant -- reminds us of the rich variety of experience available to us, in the kitchen and so many other rooms.
Melissa Hamilton and Christopher Hirsheimer are "salt-and-pepper" cooks. They buy fresh food, they focus on presenting the essence of its flavors, and they use seasonings as little as possible.
Canal House Cooking, Volume No. 3 is a hymn to Spring. We're just starting to cook our way through it, already it feels like the best edition so far. The photographs leap off the page; if you squeezed a shot of an orange, you'd get juice.
Canal House Cooking, Volume No. 3 arrived the other day, and we greeted it like a visit from an old friend who shows up just as you're starting to miss her.
I don't need to say that the photographs will make you want to start cooking. Or that the writing is as warm and welcome as a just-made cheese puff. Or that No. 2 is the second reason these women are the hottest news in cookbooks.